Gender and Generation in the Postwar History of Japanese Farm Women: Rethinking Inclusion in Depopulating Regions

The improvement in the status of Japanese farm women after 1945 was driven not only by changes in agricultural policy and cooperative organizations, but also by a reordering of generational relations within the farm household, among mother-in-law, daughter-in-law, and daughter. In rural Japan the household (ie) has constituted a family estate in which farmland as the space of production and the dwelling as the space of residence were nearly inseparable, an estate transmitted on the basis of a strong principle of blood lineage. Yet this process of generational succession had an ambivalent outcome: by pushing farm women out of the household, it also distanced them from farming itself. Building on this postwar history and combining it with interviews with women currently engaged in farming in rural Japan, this talk shows how the intersection of gender and generation manifests today as concrete walls in depopulating regions. It then asks who is in fact left behind by recent policies that claim to be inclusive, such as the “Agri-Women Project” (Nōgyō Joshi Project), and considers what it would mean for agricultural technology and policy to be genuinely gender-inclusive.