Japan’s agricultural land reform peacefully abolished the parasitic landlord system, allowing countless poor tenant farmers to own their own land. In an era where everything needed rebuilding and a food crisis urgently had to be solved, this policy was undoubtedly a shot in the arm. However, zooming out through the lens of history, this reform—centered around “equal distribution”—unwittingly wove a web for Japanese agriculture that is now hard to escape.

The core issue of this web lies in the “excessive fragmentation of agricultural land.”

To pursue fairness, the reform distributed land as equally as possible to all actual cultivators. As a result, every household became a landowner, but the area of land allocated to each was extremely small. In the 1940s, when farming relied on human and animal power, this smallholder model was not only sustainable but also highly efficient. But as the era entered a period of economic takeoff and agricultural technology advanced by leaps and bounds, the problem emerged.

Small plots of land became the biggest stumbling block to agricultural modernization. Modern agriculture relies heavily on “economies of scale”—only large-scale farming can effectively offset the purchasing costs of large agricultural machinery. However, Japanese owner-farmers, looking at their scattered, fragmented little plots, simply could not introduce large machinery and had to rely on small farm equipment or semi-manual operations. This caused the production costs of Japanese agriculture to remain stubbornly high, losing all competitiveness in the international market, and leaving it reliant on high tariffs and agricultural subsidies for protection.

So, why not recombine the land for large-scale commercial planting? This involves another constraint left by the reform of that year: the strict “Agricultural Land Act”.

To consolidate the hard-won achievements of the land reform and prevent the resurgence of the landlord class, the Japanese government enacted an extremely strict “Agricultural Land Act.” This set of laws placed heavy restrictions on the sale and leasing of farmland. Its original intention was to protect vulnerable owner-farmers and ensure that “farmland is used for farming.” But during the period of high economic growth, this conversely hindered the mobility and consolidation of land. Farmers who wanted to expand their scale could not buy land, and those who did not want to farm found it difficult to easily dispose of their land.

As Japan entered a highly industrialized and urbanized phase, the young population flocked to big cities, and the farmers left in the countryside gradually aged. Faced with meager agricultural incomes, many farming families could only transition to “part-time farming”—working in factories or urban areas during the week and only going to the fields on weekends as a side job. Today, with the older generation of farmers slowly passing away and the difficulties in land consolidation, a large amount of neglected “abandoned farmland” has appeared in the Japanese countryside.

Riding a train through Japan’s countryside, you will occasionally see those overgrown, abandoned fields. They are precisely the tears of an era left behind by that great reform.