WI no land reform in Japan during US occupation?

raharris1973

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One of the major policies of America's post-WWII occupation of Japan was land reform, to break up the holdings of large landlords, reduce rural tenancy in Japan, and create more a more independent, and more democratic, farmer class in Japan.

It was all very New Deal-ish or Social Democratic in concept and execution. It seems natural that a Roosevelt or Truman Administration would find this social change desirable in Japan. Perhaps the only plausible PoDs would come if the occupation of Japan was carried out under a Republican Administration, for instance, if Dewey were elected in 1944, or if Wendell Willkie were elected in 1940 and the US fought the war under him.

As for later effects, the rural small farmer class became one of the political mainstays of the near-perpetually ruling center-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Rural areas were generally a vote bank for the LDP politicians, and the electoral system over represented rural constituencies. In turn, the LDP has supported agricultural protectionism. As well, land reform made for a more egalitarian rural and national economy than an unreformed land system and widespread tenancy would have allowed.

So if landlordism and tenancy had persisted in the absence of land reform, would Japan ultimately have become more politically diverse, without a hegemonic position for the LDP?

Could Japan's Socialists or Communists earned the support of the rural tenant classes in electoral politics, activism or even insurgency?

Or might a more conservative version of the LDP, attuned to landlord interests, have been hegemonic for most of Japan's postwar history.

What else would lack of land reform do to Japan's overall economy? And some other Asian countries, most notably Taiwan (I don't think Korea did), imitated Japan's system of land reform. Without the Japanese example, what does an unreformed land system do to the overall economy and politics of Taiwan under the ROC?

....also, let me just use this as an opportunity to shout out, "hey, we don't have nearly enough post WWII Japanese what-ifs!" Consider this my minor contribution to a solution of that problem.
 
As someone else interested in post WW2 Japanese what-ifs I'm interested to see where this discussion goes. One consequence might be the Cooperative/Cooperative Democratic/National/National Cooperative/National Democratic/Reformist Party (it's hard to keep track of various Japanese parties that formed and merged every couple of years during the occupation), might not have taken part in the general consolidation of the non-socialist parties that eventually formed the Liberal Democratic Party.

As a result you could end up with an agrarian focused party to the left of Liberal Democrats (or their alt equivalent) and to the right of the Socialists, perhaps laying the foundations for a two/two-and-a-half party system in Japan. To give them a bit more support, maybe some or all the Rightist Socialists could merge with them?
 
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I believe that the capitalists of the former zaibatsus would be more powerful politically. If landlordism continues, it is likely that there will be a much bigger migration to industrial cities, meaning those with capital will hit it big.
 
Does preventing land reform extend to other economic reforms started under the occupation, such as breaking up the Zaibatsus and laying the foundations for the Keiretsus? Because if so, then the postwar Japanese economy is going to be very different from OTL. Whilst some sort of growth would be inevitable after the devastation of the war, it could end up butterflying the Japanese economic miracle, or at least blunting it.
 

raharris1973

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Does preventing land reform extend to other economic reforms started under the occupation, such as breaking up the Zaibatsus and laying the foundations for the Keiretsus?

It probably does extend to those reforms as well, especially since the PoDs I have in mind involve a GOP administration not wanting to "export the New Deal". I'm not sure what the rationale would be for the large antitrust actions involved in breaking up the zaibatsu's in the absence of a similar willingness to break up large landholdings.

By the way, what are the fundamental differences between keiretsus and zaibatsu's? Are there fundamental differences? Or were the keiretsus just the zaibatsu's reborn under a different naming after the wave of deconcentration ebbed?
 
It probably does extend to those reforms as well, especially since the PoDs I have in mind involve a GOP administration not wanting to "export the New Deal". I'm not sure what the rationale would be for the large antitrust actions involved in breaking up the zaibatsu's in the absence of a similar willingness to break up large landholdings.

By the way, what are the fundamental differences between keiretsus and zaibatsu's? Are there fundamental differences? Or were the keiretsus just the zaibatsu's reborn under a different naming after the wave of deconcentration ebbed?

I don't entirely understand the difference myself, but I've had a look around and from what I can tell the Zaibatsus were tightly controlled by a number of families with the main companies owing their subsidiaries, whilst the Keiretsus tended to be a more informal relationship centred around large banks, where the main companies don't own their subsidies outright, but do exert a lot of influence due to their control of capital.

I typed indifference between keiretsu and zaibatsu into google and these are some of the results I got:

https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/explain-difference-between-zaibatsu-keiretsu-346207

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-a-keiretsu-and-a-zaibatsu

http://corporate.findlaw.com/corpor...-keiretsu-amp-150-understanding-japanese.html

Hopefully this helps.

As for your PoD, if you want a government that doesn't want to export the New Deal, it wouldn't be enough to have Dewey win the election, as he was very much a New Deal Republican. I also believe that MacArthur himself promoted and supported a number of the New Deal aspects of the occupation, so you might need to find an alternative SCAP.
 
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