Shinohata, a Portrait of a Japanese Village

This book provides a picture of many facets of life in rural Japan during the Mid-Twentieth Century. The author made several stays of several months each in the village of Shinohata, in the Shano Plain not far from Tokyo, beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s. His first visit to Shinohata was to complete a socio-economic study for a land reform project. His later stays in the village were to visit friends from his earlier visits. Because he was able to return to the same area repeatedly, he is able to provide a unique diachronic description of this rural community. Although the book was not written strictly as an ethnology, it contains much information about the social structures of the village. Dore describes common occupations for men and women as well as the division of labor. He discusses schooling, courtship, marriage, and death. He provides information about village politics and the hierarchy of power, both from a historical viewpoint as well as the contemporary situation. Because of his work in land reform, Dore has a strong interest in houses, their designs, and their history, and he describes and diagrams the usual layout of houses. He also tells how this layout changed with the tremendous increase in income that occurred between the 1950s and 1970s. One of the book's most striking facts is the huge growth in wealth during this study period. In the 1950s, Shinohata, as an isolated rural community, was quite poor. Few families had motorized vehicles or running water, and none had electricity. Villagers worked very hard from dawn to dusk in order to put food on the table. But by the 1970s, most families owned cars as well as farm vehicles, and many had multiple TV sets. Dore states that the increase in wealth in the village was not necessarily a reflection of increases in efficiency by the villagers, but rather a result of governmental policies for spreading income gains across the entire populace, especially to the rural areas, through price supports and subsidies. Indeed, one Shinohata resident observes "You can say what you like about these politicians, but they certainly know how to run the country: they must be smart....Here I am, doing much the same as I was doing twenty years ago; don't get much bigger yield from the rice field....but our whole style of living is different; everything's mechanized, we don't have to work nearly as hard and we can afford things we'd never dream of a few years ago." Such a description provides an interesting perspective on Japanese agricultural policies, as well as the social changes these policies have brought about domestically.

Having read two books on Japan by British authors, I am always pleased by dry sense of humor they bring to their work. The nonchalance with which Dore described the practice of "nightcrawling" by salacious youths had me chuckling to myself for hours.However, this was an excellent book for seeing rural japanese life as it was and is. Of particular interest was the observerations the author made over twenty years as the country began its rapid industrial growth after the second world war. There are enough tidbits (or as Dore would say, "titbits") here to keep me entranced for a long time. I might revisit this book again sometime.