This study aims to elucidate the normative responsibility associated with possessing farmland, especially rice paddy, in creating a collective community spirit among farmland owners. In rural Japan, economic activities such as... [ view full abstract ]
This study aims to elucidate the normative responsibility associated with possessing farmland, especially rice paddy, in creating a collective community spirit among farmland owners. In rural Japan, economic activities such as producing rice are individually expressed but must also be subsumed into the framework of communal solidarity for maintaining harmonious agricultural communities. Even inactive farmers are required to help maintain common agricultural resources, like irrigation canals, reservoirs, or roads. While it is unsurprising that well-maintained infrastructure is indispensable to rice farming, the act of maintenance is also valued for its positive impacts on the broader multi-functionality of farming and on the local living conditions.
This high agrarian solidarity persists until today but is now facing structural constraints. In particular, an adequate population of farmland holders is essential for furnishing the labor force for maintaining agricultural assets. This ensures a fair distribution of collective effort and confers adequate forms of social and material reward to participants. With the continuing decline of farmers and rural population in Japan, even a motivated rural community may have inadequate human resources to accomplish basic maintenance, which subsequently leads to environmental degradation to both the farming and residential conditions. By extending the normative responsibility for collective maintenance to non-farmers, rural communities with growing populations of inactive farmland owners have sought to retain a sufficient community workforce.
A policy of recruiting more broadly in the local community has potential given that the percentage of inactive farmland owners is over 30% (in 2015), but doing so assumes that non-farmers will adopt the same sense of normative responsibility for community care. However, not all landowners have same sense of value arising from landownership. Especially, young generations of inactive landowners, who may often be absent from the community, are likely to view ownership as unfairly bothersome. Without social and environmental reminders of the high maintenance needs of rural communities, young people may take for granted the quality of life achieved by elder generations. This lack of transparency disinclines young generations from sacrificing in the maintenance of common agricultural assets.
When the benefits of collective maintenance become transparent through local engagement, the willingness to submit to normative responsibilities increase. This appears to be the case for many female farmers, mainly elderly women, who pursue food processing, retailing of agricultural products or running educational farms. This continued activity in community-level pursuits allows them to align their own self-fulfillment and the maintenance of the rural resources. The synergistic relationship between well-maintained agricultural assets and women’s agricultural activities can engender the particularly high solidarity necessary to overcome some of the structural limitations of the agrarian change.
Given the divergent value systems arising around rural community maintenance, this study evaluates the scope and orientation of these shifts and their potential influence on collective action. Firstly, the emotional resonance of farmland ownership (positive and negative elements) are analyzed. Secondly, opinions toward participation in communal maintenance (inclination and disinclination) is examined. Thirdly, the potential for normative responsibility in the context of farmland ownership is determined.
