A study of law historical study of Agricultural Land Law

2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 15530013
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Fundamental law
• Research Institution: Hosei University
• Principal Investigator: KAWAGUCHI Yoshihiko Hosei University, Faculty of Law, 法学部, 教授 (30186077)
• Project Period (FY): 2003 – 2005
• Keywords: Land-ownership / A tenancy dispute / Tenant farming mediation / An official in charge of mediating a tenancy dispute / An agricultural association / A farming practice association

Research Abstract

This study hits landholding of a Japanese landowner with a focus in 1920's when transformation occurs in modern times and investigates what kind of change this brought for Japanese land-ownership structure. As such a consideration object, I narrowed down a focus to a village such as Yamada-gun, Gunma Morita village and analyzed an ideal method of control of landowner tenant farming relations here and a tenancy dispute.
Because I must sentence a position of Morita village in Gunma to a problem, it was necessary to put areas of Goudo village Ikushina village, Kizaki town in Nitta county which were around Morita village in a field of vision as well as Morita village, and included a field work in this study and investigated documents. There are Morita village, Goudo village in Oota city, Gunma area now, and there are Ikushina village, Kizaki town now in Nitta town area.
When I speak only documents of Morita village, documents of tenant farming mediation / tenancy dispute relations are posses sed enormously by Gunma prefectural archives. When a tenancy dispute and tenant farming mediation broke out in a prefecture through a prefecture official in charge of mediating a tenancy dispute (Kosakukan), by these documents, I can grasp the summary. Furthermore, I thought that I could grasp minute movement in Morita village by examining village government office documents. When Ota town outskirts municipalities of Morita village were merged as Oota city, this Morita village government office documents were saved after World War II in a municipal library, and the Oota city Board of Education possesses it now. In addition, Goudo village government office documents follow a similar process. Therefore I applied to the Oota city Board of Education for document reading and photography and collected an enormous government office documents about Morita village and Goudo village.
In addition, it was necessary to watch a tenant farming mediation documents in districts except Gunma to do characteristics of Morita village more clearly and examined documents in Akita, Kyoto, Kagawa, Yamaguchi Prefecture. I analyzed these four prefectures, and I had announced it as an article. So investigation was complemental. Morita village was extremely unusual nationwide because tenancy disputes happened over the whole village, and "the amount of assessment farm rent" was decided by agricultural association leadership on all tenant lands in a village as disputes resolution method.
While I investigated, I found the interesting fact that the tenant farming side refused that the village office did "assessment" at first by a farming practice association in every each ward as resolution of tenancy disputes and they insisted that assessment should be carried out by the agricultural association over the whole village. Tenant farming mediation has unique contents assuming this. I compared and analyzed it and compiled a study of these three years.