| Summary: | This dissertation examines the evolution of family, gender and community relationships in rural Japan within the context of a postwar state intervention known as the Life Reform Program (LRP). Using a combination of archival and oral sources, it examines the concrete effects of governmental intervention by tracing the local history of Hamlet M, in today's Nikko city, located 90 miles north of Tokyo. The LRP aimed to democratize rural Japan by "modernizing" both agricultural production techniques and, importantly, the everyday practices of local people. It began with efforts to implement modern technologies and science-based techniques to increase efficiency in daily work-related activities. Delving into the more personal sphere of family relationships, the LRP critiqued rural family structure as excessively hierarchical and as an outgrowth of outdated feudal forms that had led to wartime militarism.
I focus in particular on the roles that key female actors played in the dissemination of LRP ideology and in its practice at the national level, local level, and at the interface between these two. Existing scholarship recognizes the central role of women in the LRP, but has not adequately addressed how and why women became the source of LRP's continuation and development. LRP participants were concerned with the working lives of rural women, their household arrangements, domestic chores, changing family and gender dynamics, and their increased role in the community. At the same time, they recreated and utilized gender concepts, especially that of female, to enhance women's status in rural Japan and their own positions in society. An examination of the role of gender in the LRP illuminates what was tacitly involved in the LRP's maneuver to influence family and local relationships. Overall this analysis explores vital historical changes through which the Japanese state penetrated local society through active female figures---both public and private. These efforts impacted the commercialization of agriculture, and ultimately led to the increased economic independence of rural women in the Japanese family during the period. The LRP played a crucial role in the sphere of rural revitalization, and in the process, women were made the conservative mainstay of rural Japan.
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