Indian Thoughts on Japan s Land Reform

Indian Thoughts on Japan's Land Reform Ronald Dore JAPANESE economists and sociologists began field studies of rural Japan in the 1930s, mostly by the quick-in quick-out household survey method. A handful of Americans and Europeans, one just before the war, the others after it, introduced the long-stay write- down-everything ethnographic technique to the study of Japanese villages. Finally, in the early 60s, came an Indian scholar to look at a Japanese village from an Indian perspective, combining the technique of patient long-term observation with the questionnaire survey and centering his inquiry on a major issue, the post-war land reform and its effects on the village economy and social structure.