Taming the Wilderness: The Lifestyle Improvement Movement in Rural Japan, 1925-1965

Abstract

U NTIL the middle of the twentieth century, the poverty and grinding toil of the peasant farmer appeared to be ineluctable facts of Japanese life. Western travelers to Japanese villages invariably commented on the long and backbreaking hours of labor needed to wring the maximum yield from tiny plots of land; on the dreary-monotony of the rural diet, in which large helpings of starch were the rule and meat or fresh fish were rarities; on the fact that even rice-growing farmers could only eat pure white rice a few times a year as a special treat; on the poor state of hygiene and the prevalence of lice and eye disease; and on the economy and frugality that bespoke a life of severe scarcity.1 Given the difficulties faced by Japanese farmers-who, in the prewar era, were faced with high rents and crippling debts in addition to the basic hardships of their environment-it is surely understandable that, over a period of several decades, the government and other concerned groups sought to improve Japanese rural lives. In part, these efforts were focused on the movement (seikatsu kaizen undo i iTEJ), an amorphous collection of government and private initiatives that persisted throughout much of the twentieth century. Japanese lifestyles (or daily life) have become a popular topic among English-language historians. Sheldon Garon has written about both improvement and the 1950s life movement in his important work Molding Japanese Minds and elsewhere. Andrew Gordon has also written on the new life movement, and Mariko Asano Tamanoi has touched on lifestyle in the context of prewar rural Japan.2 Each of these scholars has raised