THE JAPANESE VILLAGE IN TRANSITION
By Arthur F. Raper, Tamie Tsuchiyama, Herbert Passin, and David L. Sills'42. General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the A llied Powers, Tokyo, Japan;275 pp., 1950.
General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers has been responsible for publishing a most valuable series of reports which, if they had appeared through normal publishing channels, would have attracted wide attention. Whatever the longrun effects of Allied occupation of Japan may be in the political, economic or social fields, one thing is certain, students of the country have been given a rich store of factual information written in English that will serve them for many years to come.
The report discussed here which deals with Japanese village life is broken down into four parts, namely, (1) rural Japan today, (2) recent changes in village life, (3) a description of each of 13 villages selected as typical, and finally (4) a group of four chapters analyzing particular phases of Japanese rural life.
The first section of the book consists of admirably selected photographs each provided with a long caption. These in themselves give a concise survey of village life, and supplement material found in the usual geographical text books. The second section also employs photographs and supplements them with statistics usually shown graphically. Topics touched on include the increase in proportion of full-time farmers, types of reclamation plans, problems of taxation, need for technical assistance and the use of new crops.
Each of the thirteen villages described in part 3 of the book is discussed under the headings of land area and its use, the village people and how they make a living, village economic and social organizations and finally the changes in village life in the eighteen month period of the survey, which ended in December 1948. A large scale map, many photographs and statistical graphs illustrate each section.
The Japanese Village in Transition is an important and admirable example of a firsthand geographical study of a region. It provides basic information needed for writers of textbooks for use in colleges, will aid those making long-range development plans or those interested in assessing future trends in social affairs. The authors who include Americans and Japanese deserve commendation for a thorough and interesting volume and David L. Sills, '42, deserves our thanks for makings available a book which many of us would not otherwise have seen.
