Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The key to the Japanese “takeoff” rests, as it must, on the relationship between population growth and food supply.

Japan, whose population growth from 44 million in 1900 to 93 million in 1960 once made it a prime example of an “overpopulated” country, now has the demographic pattern of a Western industrial society. It has one of the world’s lowest birth and death rates and a life expectancy of sixty-five years for males and seventy for females, with an increasing percentage of older persons. The birthrate and death rate per 1,000 were both cut in half from 1946 to 1961, the former from 34.6 to 16.9 and the latter from 15.3 to 7.4. By 1963 Japan had the lowest death rate in the world (about 7 per 1,000). As a result of these factors, the population increase of Japan, which was once over 1,700,000 a year, is now about 900,000 yearly and in 1959 fell to 780,000. It is expected that Japan’s population may reach a peak of about 107 million by 1990 and then begin to decrease, falling below 100 million again by 2010.

This changing population picture in Japan owes nothing to the American military occupation and rests, very largely, on the strong, self-disciplined, “inscrutable” Japanese character. Of this we know very little. There have been a number of studies of the Japanese personality, the best known of which, by Ruth Benedict and Geoffrey Gorer, are based on no real personal knowledge and on impressionistic evidence. The truth is that the Japanese personality seems to have an “achieving” pattern, but at present we know very little about it. At any rate, the Japanese solution of their population explosion rests very largely on aspects of their personality structure. Abortion plays a much greater role in their population control than would be acceptable to many persons in our Western culture.

Unlike their population control, the recent Japanese success in producing food owes a great deal to the American occupation. This Japanese agrarian reform is one of the remarkable economic transformations of this century.

With 650 persons per square mile, compared to 50 in the United States and 25 in the Soviet Union, Japan has only two-tenths of an acre of arable land per person, and most farms are merely gardens of less than two acres. By 1940 about 70 percent of Japanese farmers were paying rent for land and almost 30 percent were landless. Rents were high, and agrarian discontent became one of the chief pressures behind Japanese aggression in the 1930’s. At that time, the land was extensively exploited in the Asiatic fashion, by applying larger amounts of hand labor to it. Much of it was terraced; more than half of it was irrigated; there was intensive application of fertilizers, including human waste, and the chief emphasis was on energy-yielding food, mostly rice.

The reorganization of Japanese agriculture was largely due to the American Military Occupation (SCAP), and was so successful that the index of agricultural production increased 40 percent in the decade 1951-1961. This revolution rested on two supports: the agrarian reform and technological advances.

The agrarian reform redistributed the ownership of land by the government taking all individual land holdings beyond 7.5 acres, all rented land over 2.5 acres, and the land of absentee owners. The former holders were paid for these lands with long-term bonds. In turn, peasants without land or with less than the maximum permitted amount of 7.5 acres were allowed to buy land from the state on a long-term, low-interest-rate basis. Cash rents for land were also lowered.

As a result of this program, Japan became a land of peasant owners, with about 90 percent of the cultivated soil worked by its owners. The peasants were helped in making the transfer because the early period of the Occupation was one of food shortages, inflation, and an active black market with high prices. These profits also helped finance the beginnings of the new revolution in agricultural technology.

This drastic change in farming methods in Japan was toward the American method of farm development, using less and less hand labor and greater amounts of capital, especially in farm machinery and fertilizers. Today all kinds of power and mechanical equipment, such as threshers, pumps, lifts, sprayers, and such, are common in Japan. Most spectacular has been the spreading of hand tractors or power cultivators of 3 to 7 horsepower, something like American rototillers. These have increased from 7,000 in use in 1947 to 85,000 in 1955, and to almost a million by 1962. These can be used with special attachments as plows, cultivators, pumps, sprayers, saws, and draft vehicles, and have helped to eliminate draft farm animals and to reduce heavy human labor. Since a farmer can do as much work, especially plowing, with this piece of equipment, in one day as used to require ten days’ work using animal power, he has a longer growing season, can extend the practice of double cropping, and has much more time for other work.

Two aspects of this agricultural revolution deserve special mention. Japan, like the United States, is now shifting its diet from energy foods, like rice, toward protective foods, like meat, milk, fruit, and green vegetables. And Japan, also like the United States, has now broken free from the older alternative of either high output per acre or high output per unit of labor, and has now reached the stage where both are rising together. In the ten years of this agricultural revolution (1951-1961) rice production went up 30 percent, but dairy cattle increased ten times, meat products about three times, fruit production almost doubled, and the number of persons engaged in farming has fallen rapidly, by better than 10 percent, or more than 1.5 million persons, in the five years 1956-1961. As a result, the percentage of the working population engaged in farming is now about 28 percent, and has a steadily increasing portion of older persons and of females, as the younger males stream steadily to the city, seeking jobs in industry.

Of course, this transformation in agriculture could never have occurred if there had not been taking place equally drastic changes in industry. These industrial changes, including a high rate of investment, rapid technological change, and excellent demand for industrial products, provided a plentiful supply of jobs and an increased demand for food and other agricultural products by city dwellers. These conditions acted like a magnet to attract a growing flood of farm products and energetic young peasants to the cities.

The contrast between the structure and distribution of Japan’s population and that of other Asiatic nations shows clearly that Japan is no longer a backward, underdeveloped, or colonial area from any point of view. The marks of such a backward society are usually a high birthrate and death rate, a largely young, rural population, with the great majority in agriculture, and mostly illiterate. In Japan, all of these characteristics are untrue. Birth and death rates are very low; the population is aging rapidly, is almost totally literate, has below 29 percent in agriculture, and has over 60 percent resident in areas classified as urban. Moreover, the revolution in Japanese industrial development has shifted the country out of its previous colonial orientation in economic organization and commerce.

Before the war, Japan lived by exporting labor, largely unskilled labor. It did this by importing raw materials, working them up by largely unskilled labor into products of light industry, chiefly textiles, and exporting these products for more raw materials and food. Today the Japanese need for imported food is decreasing and is shifting away from its previous food needs, notably rice, to foods of more protective character, such as proteins. At the same time, its raw material imports are slowly shifting from those used in light industry, such as raw cotton, to those used in highly skilled industrial lines, such as electronics, where few other nations can compete. This inevitably means that Japan’s trade has been shifting from Asia and other backward areas, where it exchanged cotton textiles for rice, to the United States and Europe where it exchanges cameras, radios, tape recorders, and optical supplies for metals, manufactured goods, or materials for advanced industry. Its needs for petroleum, iron ore, and other bulk raw materials are tending to shift to colonial areas, so that its petroleum now comes from the Persian Gulf instead of the United States, and its iron ore comes increasingly from India.