Land to the Landless

In 1947, the United States government did something that its own politicians would have called socialism if anyone else had done it. Under American military occupation, Japan’s agricultural land was seized from landlords and sold to the tenant farmers who had been working it, at prices set well below market value, paid in bonds that inflation promptly turned into confetti. This was expropriation, and it worked. The Cold War was the reason. American planners in Tokyo feared that rural poverty and landlord domination were exactly the conditions in which communist movements flourished. They had watched what happened in China and did not want a repeat, so they did what they would never have considered at home: they redistributed productive assets from the wealthy to the poor on a massive scale and called it democratization. Between 1947 and 1950, roughly thirty percent of Japan’s farmland changed hands under the land reform program. Landlords who had lived off tenant rents for generations…