Agriculture and Natural Resources

Between the ever present mountains and the sprawling cit­ies, less than 12 percent of Japan's land area is under cultivation. The soils of Japan, moreover, are on the whole not very fertile (плодородный). Nonetheless, a relatively long growing season, plentiful rainfall, unlimited hard work, and high agricultural skills have made it a very productive country despite its narrow geographic base.

Agriculture reached Japan quite late—only two or three centuries be­fore the time of Christ. By the second century a.d. it was practiced in Japan in its essentially modern form in small dike (сточная канава, ров) -surrounded, water-filled plots of land, fed by an intricate man-made system of small waterways. Seedlings normally are grown in special seedbeds and later transplanted to the main fields; in earlier times transplanting was performed by hand, but today it is normally done by machine.

The productivity of the land has been further increased by double cropping wherever possible, usually between summer rice and various winter grains or vegetables. This sort of double cropping can be practiced in the half of Japan southwest of a line running from a little north of Tokyo to the west coast of Honshu north of Kyoto.

As a result of intensive wet-field rice cultivation and double cropping, Japan, like the rest of East Asia, has supported since antiquity much heavier concentrations of population than the drier or colder lands of West Asia and Europe.

Japanese agricultural methods, involving as they once did an immense amount of labor, were relatively primitive when compared with the large-scale, highly mechanized agriculture of the United States. Even with the aid of modern machines, it is still not very productive per man-hour, but it is extremely productive per ‘acre (0,5 гектара) —perhaps the most produc­tive in the world.

Japanese agriculture, however, is very efficient and even scientific in its own way. Almost every square foot of tillable (пахотный) land is exploited as fully as possible. The rice seedlings or other crops are planted in careful straight rows that fill every square inch of space. The soil is carefully tilled to a depth of one or two feet.

Even before modern times Japanese agriculture had become self-consciously "scientific," and many treatises on improved seeds and su­perior agricultural methods were written by eighteenth-century farmers. Virtually all the suitable agricultural land had been put under cultivation (except in Hokkaido, which then was still a largely undeveloped border land), and both the government and farmers sought by every means to increase production. Thus, the population of around 30 million with which Japan entered the nineteenth century was perhaps almost the maximum that could be supported by the country in its preindustrial isolation.

The opening of Japan to world trade in the middle of the nineteenth century and the centralization and modernization of its government dramatically changed the situation, permitting a surge (подъём, рост) forward in agricul­tural production. Advanced agricultural techniques now could spread more rapidly from more progressive areas to backward regions; cheap transportation by steamships and then railroads made possible a greater regional specialization of crops. Most of Japan's political modernization and industrial growth in the late nineteenth century was financed by ‘surpluses achieved in agriculture. Population growth, however, in time outdistanced agricultural production, and by the beginning of the twentieth century Japan had developed a deficit of almost 20 percent in its food supply.

In the early years after World War II food was in extremely short supply, and hungry people tried to grow crops among the ruins of the cities and on any other scraps of unutilized land, but as the country slowly restored itself such desperate efforts were abandoned and some particularly uneconomic pieces of agricultural land were allowed to fall out of use. Meanwhile a rush of new technology brought another leap in agricultural productivity. Chemical fertilizers, which were already widely used, became available in even greater quantity, and mechanization at last came to agriculture, permitting a sharp decline in the farming population. In the depressed conditions of the early postwar years, close to half the Japanese remained engaged in agriculture, but thereafter the percentage declined drastically (решительно; радикально). At present only about 8 percent of Jap­anese live in farming households, and a mere quarter of these devote themselves exclusively to agriculture. The great majority combines seasonal work on the ancestral farm with other employment or, more frequently, perform their farming chores on weekends and in the early mornings and late evenings while holding down nonagricultural jobs within commuting distance in factories, offices, or stores. For a while the farm work was done primarily by wives and retired parents, but the parents have mostly died, and the wives have joined their husbands in taking other positions, leaving very few full-time farmers.