Aki Aneha: Nōkajosei no sengoshi: nihon nōgyōshinbun “onna no kaidan” no gojyūnen (The History of Rural Women in Postwar Japan)Joak Kwon-Hein

ASIEN – Nr. 149 (2018) pp. 151–52

農家女性の戦後 史:日本農業新聞「女の階段」の五十年
Tokyo: Kobushi shobō, 2018. 295 pp., 2,376 JPY, ISBN 9784875593416

In scholarly discussion of postwar Japan, agriculture has received little attention. In particular, the voice of female farmers, who constituted the actual main labor force of Japanese agriculture following the exodus of the young male rural population during industrialization, has hitherto not been heard. This newly published volume in 2018, Nōka josei no sengoshi (‘The History of Rural Women in Postwar Japan’), written by a Japanese economist Aki Aneha, sheds light on this marginalized pair of issues in Japan’s postwar history — “agriculture” and “rural women”. First of all, the author depicts the process of the collapse of the Japanese agriculture through an industrialization-centered national economy policy as well as from the global threat of liberalization of the agricultural industry and market. Second, this book enables readers to hear the voice of rural women by analyzing the column “women’s doorstep (josei no kaidan)” of the Japan Agricultural News, the representative daily newspaper for the rural population in Japan. This column has played a significant role as a major forum to articulate and broadcast rural women’s opinions on the agricultural policy and rural life since 1967. Therefore, this book is an analysis of 50 years of history with regard not only to the country’s agriculture policy, but also to the lived experiences and history of rural women in postwar Japan…