Synopses & Reviews
The events of the early 1930s--a severe economic depression, political unrest, and profound social change--were unprecedented in the history of modern Japan and deeply unsettling to those who lived through them. This study of Japan's transformation by the crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts by average citizens to overcome the effects of the Great Depression. The author draws on the experiences of the inhabitants of a small farming community in northeastern Japan to illustrate how these efforts, commonly known as "rural revitalization," affected farm families' economic standing, their relationships with the state, and their attempts to bridge the growing divide between city and country, farm and factory. By revealing the ways in which the state and communities dealt with the Great Depression, this study brings us closer to a comparative, grassroots perspective on how average men and women addressed some of modernity's fundamental questions.
Review
Smith has produced a groundbreaking study of the impact of the Great Depression on Japan in the 1930s. The early 1930s, when Japan was wracked by internal and external problems, was called a 'time of crisis' by contemporary Japanese...This unique and insightful look at a crucial time in modern Japanese history is highly recommended. M. D. Ericson
Synopsis
This study of Japan's transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and policymakers in Tokyo. The author argues that these efforts changed the nation's thinking about the countryside, as well as Japan's conception of its economic and cultural relationship to the nation, in ways that have important implications for our understanding of both the war years and the postwar reconstruction. The reactions of inhabitants of rural areas to the depression shed new light on how average Japanese responded to the problems of modernization and how they re-created the countryside.
Synopsis
modernization and how they re-created the countryside.
About the Author
Kerry Smith is Associate Professor of History at Brown University.