On August 14, the day before the announcement of Japan's surrender, Toshié turned twenty. For a woman, it was not a good age to be expecting the arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreign soldiers. Messages from the village office—via the neighborhood associations—warned young women to stay indoors at all times. Families were also cautioned to bury food in case the enemy soldiers requisitioned all the supplies. Who were they, these enemy men who were about to take over Japan? The only westerners Toshié had ever seen had been prisoners on the docks at Niigata. They had looked hostile, half wild. Would they be out now for revenge?

The work on the docks stopped. No money came in. Toshié stayed at home and waited. The endless village meetings also ground to a near halt. The youth school suspended its activities. The air raid team disbanded. The Women's Defense Association quietly ceased to exist. Only the neighborhood groups and the hamlet association continued to meet: the issue of rations and the requisitioning of food went on as before. For a while, the only duty was to survive.

The fields, however, would not wait for the harvest. Kurakichi had been able to purchase almost no fertilizer that year. The crops were poor. The year before he had taken his rice fields beside the river out of commission (there was little point in growing rice when it was all taken away by the government) and planted beans instead. Now the crops must be brought in. Shorthanded as the family was, Toshié could no longer stay indoors hiding. Toshié, her mother, her father, Masu, and even her unwell sister joined in the heavy work of picking and hauling the beans.

The fear did not last. Radio broadcasts reassured listeners that the occupying army was not out to commit violence. Everyone would be treated well, so long as they obeyed the rules. In mid-September, word came that a contingent of Americans had arrived in Niigata. But there were only sixteen of them, and the local newspaper reassured readers that their leader, a junior officer called Ben Dicksen, had informed the governor of Niigata that Americans investing the prefecture would not take any food from Japanese citizens, would not billet in schools or hospitals, and would observe the Japanese custom of driving on the left. For the most part, the Americans were as good as their word. Over the next few months, several thousand Americans were to take up stations in Niigata prefecture. Most of them were stationed in the prefecture's major cities—Niigata, Shibata, Takada, and Muramatsu. Only two groups came to Kosugi, one to research tsutsugamushi disease, and the other to investigate the impact of the land reform. The Americans were polite, scholarly, and unthreatening.

Not long after the surrender, Toshié took the train into Niigata to visit her cousin, Kimié. Kimié was now working as a geisha. Her father, Niichirõ, had sold her at the age of ten into a geisha house to work as a servant and train in the profession. Subsequently, she had gone to Tokyo to work in the Kagurazaka entertainment district as a trainee geisha. She had returned to Niigata fully qualified, and now belonged to an okiyaa geisha house in the city. Toshié had remained close to Kimiéas a child—after her first visit in the depths of the depression, Kimiéhad been a frequent visitor at the Sakaue house in Kosugi. Her life in Niigata seemed a fantasy to Toshié. Beautiful as ever, Kimié was in demand by Japanese businessmen, who would summon her to private rooms in elegant restaurants, where she would entertain them with songs, music, jokes, and games. She had beautiful clothes, wore her hair in an elaborate Japanese coiffure, but made up her face with a distinct touch of Western glamour. Toshié and her cousin went for a walk in the grounds of the Hakusan shrine—one of the leisure spots of Niigata. Here, in the grounds of the shrine, Toshié saw American servicemen strolling together, some with their comrades and others with Japanese girls. The occupying conquerors looked very different on this day from the bedraggled, hungry bunch she had seen working on the Niigata docks during the war. Well-fed, happy, relaxed, they seemed to be out for only one thing: to enjoy themselves, preferably in the company of pretty Japanese girls. Toshié, in her simple kimono and tied-up hair, felt distinctly drab next to her glamorous cousin. She noticed that her cousin was attracting a good deal of attention from the wandering Americans, several of whom whistled at them and called out in English to Kimié. Kimié—who spoke no English—responded gracefully, laughing and firmly moving on.

Fear of the Americans was replaced by anxiety about food. Japan in 1945 faced its greatest food crisis in more than a century. Farm families on average grew more than enough to feed themselves; the problem was how to feed the huge urban population that was dependent on their produce. And as always in such situations, the government did not leave this problem to the free market; rather, it resorted to compulsion to force farmers to share their supplies.

From March 1946, the government began falling behind in deliveries even of the meager rations allotted. By mid-1947, rations for Hokkaidō were arriving one and a half months behind schedule; Kyiishfi was running two weeks late; Osaka was twelve days; and Tokyo was running a week late. Urban Japanese were literally desperate to find food wherever and at whatever price they could, and from the closing months of 1945 packed trains headed for the countryside with passengers hanging on to the outside windows and sitting on the roof became a common sight. The police did what they could to control this black-marketeering. Uniformed and plain-clothes detectives boarded trains to search people for contraband food. But the hunger of city people, and the fact that the police themselves must have been as dependent on the black market as anyone else, mitigated the effectiveness of these efforts. Newspaper editorials called for the police to distinguish between ordinary citizens and professional profiteers, as the following article in the Asahi newspaper suggests:

Groups of pernicious black market operators are as usual strutting around on the trains making ordinary passengers frightened to move in the face of their violent behavior.... In these times when the rations are late and there is nothing to eat in the cities, it is important to note that people should not be prosecuted for bringing home a little [edible] souvenir; but that is exactly the kind of permissiveness that these pernicious operators are looking for. It is necessary to think of ways to distinguish clearly between food for travel or souvenirs, and food purchased by professional scavengers.

City dwellers brought money, valuables, furniture, and clothing to offer farmers in exchange for a bag of rice or potatoes. It is not surprising, given the prevalence and necessity of the black market, that many farmers could not resist the temptation to profit at the expense of the official delivery quota. Buyers, moreover, could be very persuasive; newspapers reported that black market gangs were even "boasting that they have been buying rice from young farmers through the use of threats."

Certainly, urbanites were very aware of the profits many villagers were making out of urban hardship. Most farmers above a certain level of production probably participated in the black market to some limited extent, and some certainly profited handsomely. But the reality of harsh quota requirements and strict penalties including fines and imprisonment ensured that the majority of farmers did their best to meet their legal obligations, suffering a degree of hardship as a result. For example, a 1949 survey of farm families found that 41 percent had found the previous year's quota "very hard" to meet, while another 51 percent had just "managed somehow." In addition, the villages continued to suffer from a surfeit of population, as urbanites remained with their rural families after repatriation or until the situation stabilized in the cities; and farmers continued to feel the effects of shortages of skilled manpower, animal power, and fertilizer.

For the most part, the greatest profits went to larger-scale farmers; in many cases, they were able to meet their quota requirements and still had rice or other crops left over to sell—often at many times the "official" quota price. Small farmers, on the other hand, usually had little or no surplus to sell after setting aside food for quotas and for their own needs—indeed, the evidence is that many ran a deficit. One newspaper article quotes a farmer who grew a tiny plot of potatoes:

Although the amount I grow is not enough even for my family, even for my tiny plot I am forced to cough up a quota of twenty kan [seventy-five kilograms]. After collecting [potatoes] from the fields, selecting the best ones to pass inspection, processing, and crating them, I deliver them to the agricultural association. Since the association is only small in scale, it must wait until it has collected a large amount before delivering in turn to the public food company. The food company distributes rations to consumers on a fixed day, but due to the rough treatment they have received, many of the potatoes are damaged by that time, and due to improper processing many are also rotten. Moreover, the farmers get paid in "new" yen three or even four months late. By contrast, large-scale farmers sell hundreds of kilos of potatoes directly from their fields to companies, factories and others who come in small trucks to pick up the produce, and pay ten times the official price, in cash. The farmer need not process, crate, or transport, and the buyer is able to deliver fresh produce to its employees—a very different situation from the public food company.

A 1949 bureau of justice report on economic crimes is frankly sympathetic with the plight of the farmers:

In the confusion [accompanying the end of the war], the food that they delivered in the midst of their poverty "for the sake of victory" melted away into private stores, but the people who commandeered it show no sign of being punished, and the food has now turned into a high-priced black market commodity. The money that they deposited in response to calls for "patriotic savings" has been frittered away. And people who, believing the government's promise for compensatory rations, turned in 100 percent of their quotas—though this meant turning in their own family supply—had to suffer when the promise was broken and rations never came. Meanwhile, those who did not meet their quotas have suffered nothing. With their sons in the army, farmers' labor disappeared, but an ox they were forced to sell for 350 now costs several tens of thousands. They were forced to make great sacrifices for the sake of the nation, and the lesson that they learnt is that honest people are losers.

For Toshié and her family, the system was pernicious. The village allotted quotas to farm households without taking account of details such as the differences in the productivity of one family's land versus another's. The majority of Kurakichi's rice land was on the reclaimed land on the riverside of the levee. The productivity of this land was much lower than that of good-quality rice land in the main part of the hamlet. Kurakichi was assessed as though his land was normally productive, and his assessment therefore amounted to virtually the entire crop. Politically powerless as a member of the hamlet's lower class, Kurakichi nevertheless cared enough for his family's reputation that he could not refuse to deliver his quota. He was well aware that anything he failed to deliver would have to be made up by other families on top of their existing quota, for which they would of course resent the Sakaue family.

Late in 1946, word reached Kosugi that a great reform was to take place in the Japanese countryside. General Douglas MacArthur himself had announced his intention to "remove economic obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies, establish respect for the dignity of man, and destroy the economic bondage which has enslaved the Japanese farmer for centuries of feudal oppression." After some prodding, a partially willing Japanese government had enacted a far-reaching land reform that was to be one of the major legacies of the Allied Occupation.

The prevailing analysis among American policy advisors on Japan was that latent "feudalism" had been a major contributing factor to Japanese ultranationalism and aggression. In the countryside, according to this argument, "the low status of the Japanese farmer over the years had created among that group a feeling of hopelessness and restlessness. Agrarian unrest in turn provided no small part of the stimulus to Japan's imperialistic foreign policy. Tenants particularly, and farmers generally, were in a large measure sympathetic to the extremist political movements led by Japan's militarists." At the same time, rural reform had long been a cherished goal of liberal Japanese intellectuals and bureaucrats who shared the widespread perception that the countryside was in a state of crisis and who felt a strong human sympathy for the oppressed condition of tenant farmers. Many of the leading bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture shared this liberal background—influenced no doubt by left-wing academics who taught agricultural affairs in the elite universities. These men had spearheaded a number of previous attempts at creating basic reforms in the countryside, and it is not surprising that they saw the fluid period at the end of the war as an opportunity for another such attempt.

Arrayed against these forces were the landlords themselves and their supporters in the political parties and bureaucracy. These were by no means an insignificant group; the landlord class was the backbone of prewar political parties, which until 1925 relied on a very limited electorate for their votes, and landlords remained a powerful conservative influence within the political parties even as politicians moved into the arms of wealthy entrepreneurs for their financial support. Indeed, since much of the capital for Japan's early industrial development came from the landlord class, the links between conservative landlordism and industrial capitalism were deep. Even within the United States, conservative policy makers led by the long-serving ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, tended to favor the landlord and capitalist classes, who they perceived as having opposed militarism (and many of whom were among their personal friends). However, as a result of the prolonged agricultural depression in the 1920s and early 1930s, and the sustained assaults on landlord privilege by military-supported bureaucrats during the war, by 1945 the landlord class had been substantially weakened and was no longer able to mount the kind of powerful conservative campaign needed to stave off radical reform.

The law provided for compulsory purchase of land by the government, to be resold by farmers. Subject to purchase were:
1. All tenant-operated land owned by absentees
2. Tenant land in excess of one hectare per resident (four hectares in Hokkaido)
3. Owner-operated land that could not reasonably be managed by one family, defined as three hectares (twelve in Hokkaido)
4. Corporate-owned land not essential to the corporation's principal business
5. Idle agricultural land.

Dry field lands had similar criteria but different limits. Reclaimable land was also subject to the law even if not farmed. Only forest and waste lands were excepted.

The process set up by the Land Reform Law called for the creation of committees at the prefectural and village levels. Prefectural committees were composed of ten tenant farmers, six landlords, four independent farmers, and five "impartial" members—in practice, usually schoolteachers. In Niigata, each of the 395 cities, towns, and villages elected a land reform committee, each composed of ten members of whom landlords were two, independent farmers three, and tenants five. Village committees had considerable leeway in setting the terms of land reform, but the prefectural committee had to ratify their decisions. The aggressiveness of the village committees was determined to a great extent by how bold the tenant representatives were willing to be, and how much the independent farmer representatives supported the tenants. On the whole, Niigata was known for its radical committees. For example, the prefectural committee set a guideline price of no more than twenty-five times the rent of the land (thirty times for nonpaddy fields). Even by national standards, this was a low price, and eventually the Ministry of Agriculture, forests and fisheries, and the local U.S. commander pushed tenants to grant landlords a better deal. The new price was set at 31.7 times rent (thirty-six times for upland fields). This amounted to a price of ¥538.90 (less than two dollars) per tan for rice paddies, ¥256.90 for upland fields. Even this was some two hundred yen less than the standard price established at the national level. Landlords complained, "a tan [0.1 hectare] of land is worth no more than a straw mat." There was a good deal of truth in this complaint. In 1937, one tan of good quality rice paddy sold in Yokogoshi for ¥210 (about sixty dollars at the prevailing exchange rate). By 1947, the consumer price index stood at roughly forty-five times its 1937 level. Five hundred forty yen in 1947 was worth only twelve yen in 1937 money. By 1951, prices had increased another six times. Tenants were allowed to pay for the land over a period of fifteen years, and the price was not adjusted up for inflation. Landlords had to accept fifteen-year government notes in exchange for their land; the notes paid interest of only 3.6 percent.

The inflation, incidentally, had another important consequence affecting most farm families, regardless of their eligibility for land under the reform measures. Inflation effectively wiped out family debts. In the prewar period (and especially in the wake of the farm depression) these debts, which averaged about one year's income, were a major impediment to improvement of the material conditions of rural lives. However, the beneficial effects of the land reform were to some extent countered by a massive increase in taxes applicable to farmers. Tax increases under the 1947 Shoup Plan brought large numbers of formerly non-taxpaying farmers into the taxpaying fold. Taxes as a percentage of average total income increased from 6 percent in the mid-193os, to 2.1 percent in the late 1940s, before declining again in the 1950s (by contrast, rents declined from 24 percent to less than 1 percent).

The land reform was by no means implemented without opposition. The tactics employed by landlords were many and various, ranging from outright bullying and intimidation to more or less subtle legal maneuvers. Several landlords brought suits arguing the basic unconstitutionality of the Land Reform Law. After all, Article 13 of the new constitution guaranteed that "the right to own or to hold property is inviolable." For the most part, these cases were thrown out on narrow grounds. More frequently, landlords took their tenants to court for repossession of land prior to the implementation of the reform (if the land was no longer rented, it could not be forcibly sequestered), in the knowledge that the court system was likely to be more sympathetic to landlords than to land reform committees. For example, local occupation authorities reported in July 1947 that in Otawara, Tochigi prefecture, a court issued orders barring tenants from setting foot on the lands of fourteen landlords. None of the tenants was heard in the court cases, and the land reform committee had no money to appeal. The local branch of the Japan Farmers' Union was the only body to try to resist; but when the union took its case to local prosecutors, it was ignored. In other cases in Tochigi prefecture, the landlord had "simply taken over the land, by planting or putting his men on the land. In many cases, this is the end of the story. The tenant simply resigns himself to his fate." In Utsunomiya, according to another complaint, more than four hundred tenants had filed complaints against landlords who were illegally reclaiming land, but "not a single case has been prosecuted or investigated by the prosecutor's office." The occupation authorities in Kyushu reported that landlords were forcing tenants off their land through a number of tactics, including attempts to infiltrate land reform committees and suppress tenant commissioners (according to the report, conservative forces "can muster sufficient pressure so that tenant commissioners, already cowed by a long tradition of subserviency, become ineffectual"); protests of land reform committee decisions (with the goal of delaying committee actions); organization into landlord associations for the purpose of concerted action and solidarity (tenants, the report points out, are seldom organized, and are not "adequately indoctrinated concerning their rights and prerogatives"); denouncing of land reform commissioners as "reds" to the military authorities; and exertion of undue influence over local newspapers that might otherwise help and inform tenants.

Nevertheless, the results of the land reform are indisputable. Tenant farmers radically changed their economic and social positions. The tenants who benefited the most from the reform were those who rented the most land: in other words, those who made their living mainly from farming as opposed to wage labor mixed with farming. Haga Yūkichi is an example of such a farmer in Kosugi. Haga was adopted into a poor tenant family in Kosugi in 1932. Virtually all of the two hectares of land that he farmed was rented. Haga grew rice, vegetables, and mulberry, and he rented patches of land from as many as seven different landlords. Some of these were local petty landlords, but Haga also rented from the Itō family—he remembers them as the best of the landlords he rented from, charging a low cash rent (he rented mulberry fields from them, so could not pay in kind) and supporting the hamlet's annual festival. With the land reform, Haga gained title to all of the land he had been renting. He was now one of the larger landowners in the hamlet. At the beginning of the 1960s, he was able to knock down the shabby peasant house in which he had been living and build a large and comfortable house on the family compound. Haga has devoted much energy over the succeeding forty years to cultivating a fine Japanese garden with unusual rocks, a pond, and painstakingly tended trees and shrubs. Today, a vigorous man of ninety-one, he still credits the land reform for all of his subsequent good fortune.

By contrast, Toshié‘s family benefited only slightly from the reform. Part of the reason is that farming was not their main economic activity. At the peak, they farmed 1.2 hectares of land, but by the end of the war this had declined to 0.7 hectares as Kurakichi sold off his tenancy rights to the part of the prefectural land that he no longer had the manpower to farm. The 0.3 hectares they rented from the prefecture was not subject to provisions of the reform, and could not be purchased. Kurakichi rented about 0.4 hectares in addition to this land, most of it from the Kofunato family. The relationship between the Sakaue and Kofunato families was a close one, but always based on the understanding that the latter were of higher standing, and that in exchange for providing favors for the Sakaue, the Sakaue in turn would recognize obligation to the Kofunato. There was also a family connection: Kurakichi's mother and the Kofunato family head's mother had been sisters. Thus, before the land reform came into effect, when the Kofunato family head asked for the return of most of their land, Kurakichi felt that he had to comply. Toshié tried to dissuade Kurakichi, but he felt that the rental arrangement was only one part of a relationship that encompassed many ties and obligations—and that to fight the rental issue would be to threaten the entire relationship. Moreover, Kurakichi argued to his daughter that he now had no sons to pass the land on to. In the end Kurakichi returned threequarters of the land. He gained 0.1 hectare through the land reform. By the end of 1947, the Sakaue family was farming only 0.4 hectare of land—0.3 hectare of rice, and a vegetable plot. This was enough for the family to retain its official and subjective identity as "farmers"; but the land reform nevertheless placed Toshié's family even more firmly into the class of those who must perform wage labor to get by.

For no one did the land reform mean more than for the house of Itō. Over generations of frugal management and opportunistic purchase, the Itō family had built their holdings from a few tens to almost two thousand hectares. As one of the largest landowning families in Japan, they were a symbol for the land reform. With some three thousand tenants tilling their land, they were seen as the embodiment of the feudal system. Now the end had come.

In fact, the collapse of the Itō family's empire was not as sudden as the idea of the land reform suggests. For the past fifteen years, tenant activism and government policy had reduced the attractiveness of land as an investment. Most wealthier landlords had diversified into commercial investments—particularly in joint stock companies. The Itō family had invested substantially in banks, breweries, and railway companies, and the majority of these investments weathered the postwar chaos to become valuable sources of wealth for the family (the exception was their investment in the South Manchurian Railway, which became worthless). The Itõ family lost close to two thousand hectares as a result of the land reform. Unlike smaller landlords who could negotiate with tenants to return part or all of the land, the Itō were too big and too visible to play such games. The family instead had to develop a strategy to make the best of what they were left with. This included some thirteen hundred hectares of woodland, which was not subject to the land reform, as well as homes in Niigata, Tokyo, Zushi, and Karuizawa. By placing managers on site and entering into joint ventures, Bunkichi rapidly began turning his woodland holdings into a money-producing asset, which was to be an important component of the family's income in the years to come. The family's efforts to maximize woodland income were to cause problems, though, as some managers had the idea of growing buckwheat and sweet potatoes in the woods, opening themselves to the charge that the land was actually farmland and thus subject to forced sale under the land reform (one lawsuit on this issue dragged on into the late 1960s).

At home, meanwhile, Bunkichi increasingly saw his grand landlord's home as a liability. He had been deeply impressed by the Russian revolution and its aftermath, and he had become convinced that a similar revolution was inevitable in Japan. He had indeed come to believe that the trappings of a great landlord were potentially fatal in the postwar environment (his view was not totally unreasonable: landlords in neighboring China were routinely being shot in villages taken over by the communists). Already by the end of the war, Bunkichi's house had become a semipublic institution; its outbuildings were being used as a workshop for disabled workers, a shop to benefit Japanese refugees from Manchuria, and an official storage depot for government-controlled rice.

Bunkichi was deeply committed to leading the life of a "man of culture." He had been collecting art objects since his return from America, and he had formed close ties with local and national cultural organizations, particularly the Tokyo Arts Club, an elite club patronized by the leading museum managers and craftsmen of the capital. Thus, Bunkichi developed a plan to turn his house into a museum, a plan that he put into operation within a few months of the surrender. This plan had the further advantage that it would protect his house from onerous postwar taxes and possibly from hostile claims under the land reform legislation (Bunkichi's compound was so large that parts of it could be interpreted as "farm land").

In addition to his family heirlooms and objects of historical interest, Bunkichi took advantage of the postwar economic chaos to add large numbers of newly purchased art objects to his museum's collection. In the first decade after the war, Bunkichi's friends in Tokyo also arranged for his museum to host special exhibits of art objects from the national museum. Bunkichi's Northern Culture Museum opened in January 1946. Bunkichi and his family continued to live in a wing of the house, and Bunkichi became director of the museum, a position that his son (Bunkichi VIII, known by his foreign friends as Bunny) still holds today. The ltō family has continued to invest substantial sums of money in the house and gardens.

With the land reform, Bunkichi was forced to lay off much of his administrative staff, including his ten managers. But he was able to use his influence to secure important jobs for them in the agricultural cooperative, in the village office, and, in two cases, as mayors of Yokogoshi. The last in particular may seem strange in an era when mayors must be democratically elected, but in the earlier postwar years the ltõ family still had considerable say over village affairs, including over issues such as which candidates would and would not stand in mayoral elections. By the mid-1960s, however, a noticeable change occurred in the political environment of the village: villagers were much more likely to elect a candidate they thought would bring economic benefits to the village than to accept a candidate imposed on them by tradition. From that time, the political influence of the ltõ family has declined substantially, though by no means completely.

The Occupation brought a new face to Japan. In the cities, jazz music, cabarets, and Hollywood movies flourished amidst the ruins. The countryside, too, was affected by the wave of Americanization: spontaneously at times, and as a result of Occupation policy at others. The fashions and customs of America portrayed in American movies filtered down to the villages, through the media of books, popular magazines, and the radio. Even the staid rural magazine Ie no Hikari reflected the new ambiance. Beginning in 1947, the magazine offered features such as "How to make a Neckerchief," portraying women dressed entirely in American-style clothes (not just Western dresses, which had been popular before the war too, but dresses in the vogue of the time: wasp-waisted and full to the knees).

The permanent wave, or perm, seems to have taken rural Japan by storm at the turn of the 1950s. Before the war, these hairstyles were quite common among fashionable women in the big cities, but virtually unknown in the countryside. Toshié had seen one once, when she was living with the Yamazaki family in Nishiyama. A woman who worked in Tokyo was back visiting her family. Toshié's fellow child minders agreed that it looked like a sparrow's nest. During the war, perms were proscribed as extravagant, unnatural, and (worst of all) American. Thus, most rural women had seldom if ever seen a permanent wave by the opening years of the Occupation. But in 1952, the Tanaka hairdresser in Yokogoshi acquired the sadistic-looking machinery necessary to administer the perm, and by the mid-I950s rural Japanese housewives felt incomplete without their neat bunch of curls.

Rural wives were also exposed to American culture through the new foods that specialists from the home life extension department were recommending as a way to improve their diet. Bread, potatoes, milk sauces, and cheese were all promoted as tasty and nutritious alternatives to the repetitive rural diet of rice and other grains flavored with morsels of pickle or fish. In part, these new food ideas emanated from research carried out at the Ministry of Agriculture by its new home life extension department-an Occupation-mandated initiative, which sent seven hundred specially trained young specialists on green bicycles pedaling through the Japanese countryside to spread the word on nutrition and family health. Experiments in bread making gave rural families a sense of new beginnings, more tangible than the abstractions of democracy and the revised Civil Code.

The Occupation also provided an important stimulus for welfare in Japan through the passage of key laws—notably the Social Welfare Law of March 1951—and through the inclusion in the constitution of the principle that "the State shall use its endeavors for the promotion and extension of social welfare and security, and of public health." Henceforth, the provision of welfare was to be a right of the people and an obligation of the state, rather than an act of benevolence to the deserving needy. In response to the new law, prefectures set up social welfare offices to administer benefits, staffed with social workers qualified under the new system. American officials also provided technological assistance in the form of medicines, pesticides, new fertilizers, and the most comprehensive soil surveys ever performed in Japan. The cumulative effect of wartime and Occupation welfare and technical assistance policies was a rapid improvement in the health conditions of rural Japan—though much of the effect of this was not seen until the early post-Occupation years.

The war was over, Toshié's brothers dead, her father a shadow of his former self, but life must go on. Masu, Rikichi's bride, returned tearfully to her family, vowing that she would run away and return to live again with the Sakaue family. A year or two later, however, she remarried, and she continued living in Kosugi until her death in 1997. Meanwhile, Toshié had turned twenty-two, and it was time for her, too, to get married.

The nation's new constitution had been promulgated in the previous year, and it gave important new rights to women, including the right to vote, the right to inherit equal shares of property, the right to retain property after marriage, and the right to set up independent households. But in rural Japan in 1947, it did not replace the father's customary right to choose a husband for his daughter. The negotiations to select a husband for Toshié were carried out almost entirely behind her back. The candidate selected by Kurakichi was a relative of the Kofunato family—former landlords of Kurakichi, with whom the Sakaue family remained close. The prospective groom's parents had contacted their Kofunato cousins, who in turn approached Kurakichi.

If Toshié had had living brothers, then Kurakichi would have sought an affluent groom for Toshié, ideally an eldest son. Toshié would go as bride to live with her husband's family and share their fortunes. But since Toshié was effectively an only child, Kurakichi must look for a muko for Toshié—a groom who would come to live with, and be adopted into, the Sakaue family as heir. In this case, a poorer candidate was appropriate: generally a younger son with no prospects of his own, who would welcome the opportunity to make good as caretaker of the Sakaue family property. However, the candidate should be hardworking and capable, since the Sakaue family fortunes—such as they were—were to be placed in his hands.

Hideshirõ—the selected candidate—was a younger son in a large but poor family. He had lost his mother as a child, and his father had sent him to work as a boy with a farming family within the boundaries of Niigata city. He appeared to be hardworking. Kurakichi decided to accept him as groom and arranged with another relative to act as middleman in the negotiation of a wedding settlement. The negotiations were more formality than substance: Hideshirõ had nothing to bring to the Sakaue family but his hands and his body, while Kurakichi settled on a small sum to give Hideshirõ's parents as a wedding gift.

Toshié had noticed the unusual activity as the middleman came and went during the course of these negotiations, but she had received no hint of what it was all about. It therefore came as a bolt from the blue to learn that her husband had been chosen for her. She knew Hideshirõ. Until his departure for Niigata, the two had been in the same year at elementary school. But they had scarcely exchanged a word. Since graduation, Hideshirõ had been away, first as a farmworker and then in the military. The sexes had not mingled much at school. More recently, the two had attended a school reunion together, where she had been somewhat struck by Hideshirõ's antics as he fooled about with his friends. But the man she was to marry was a virtual stranger to Toshié.

At first Toshié's attitude was one of rebellion. She would not marry this clown! But the obedient habits of a lifetime quickly reasserted themselves, and Toshié meekly assisted in the preparations for her wedding. Her next reaction was furious embarrassment. She virtually stopped going out because she was so scared that she would bump into him. The humiliation of meeting him while she was with her friends was what particularly tormented her. Nevertheless, in spite of her instinctive resistance, Toshié accepted the decision of her parents. She accepted it not only because she had no choice, but also because such acceptance was a part of village culture. Once again, her feeling of belonging to the rural community outweighed considerations of personal preference.

In a more fortunate age, Toshié might have had the opportunity to experience romantic love, and perhaps even to marry a man she loved. Such marriages were at least possible. Haruko, the protagonist of Gail Bernstein's portrait of village life, married a man who was passionately in love with her at roughly the same time. In Kosugi, love matches as well as premarital sexual encounters were not unknown, though the latter were highly frowned upon (attitudes toward premarital sex seem to have varied greatly from region to region and even village to village; in some villages, "trying each other out" before marriage was said to be an accepted part of courting). But whatever the prevailing morality in Kosugi, Toshié was prevented from experiencing romantic love by the absence of all the able-bodied men during the period when she might have been most open to such encounters. Fifty years later, Toshié looks back wistfully on romantic experiences she might have missed, but she has clearly built an enduring relationship with her husband.

The wedding itself was a simple affair. Since Hideshirõ was to be a muko there was none of the ceremony that normally accompanied a bride's departure from her family home. Hideshirõ came to the Sakaue house with no fanfare, and Toshié greeted him wearing an ordinary kimono. The wedding celebrations extended to a meal for the twenty or so wedding guests, but this was certainly not one of the extravagant weddings that reformers so inveighed at. Toshié was busy most of the time in the kitchen, helping with the meal. She was silent throughout the simple ceremony. And then the guests were gone, the dishes washed and returned, and the family was once again alone—with its new member. Toshié and Hideshirõ were given the upstairs room, where they began their married life together.

There was no honeymoon. The very next day, the families of the hamlet were gathering by the river to cut rushes for use in roof thatching and basket making. The rules of the hamlet allowed such cutting only on specified days, and those who did not go would not get their allotment of rushes. Representing her family, Toshié went down to the river and worked all day amidst the rushes. Hideshirō, meanwhile, went out salmon fishing on the river with his fellow members of the Kosugi fishermen's union. Then on succeeding days, Hideshirō quietly took up his duties. He took over much of the farmwork from Kurakichi, and on holidays he went fishing on the river, the place where he was happiest. The following year, Hideshirō bought a boat and began trawling the river for gravel. The business of Japan was rebuilding, and building materials of all kinds were in demand. The layer of gravel on the bottom of the Agaiio was allocated by hamlet. Prices were high, and the rewards were good for anyone with the stamina to haul the gravel up. Collecting the gravel in the boat was not so difficult. But from the boat, Hideshirõ had to fill a bamboo basket with gravel and heft it up onto his shoulders as he staggered up the slope with it wearing straw sandals that he had made for himself in the winter.

After a marriage come children—or such was the case with all of Toshié's friends. But Toshié's joy when she found she was pregnant was soon dashed as she miscarried. The next year, she had another miscarriage. Then, nothing. No matter how hard she tried, she could not get pregnant again. Toshié watched her close friends giving birth and reveling in their new lives as mothers, and she felt a bitter envy. The doctor in Kameda sent her to a specialist in Niigata, who examined her and could find nothing wrong with her physically. Perhaps she was working too hard—but in her family's economic circumstances, that was something she could not avoid.

Japan had lost the war after its leaders had promised victory. Toshié had lost both her brothers in the vain struggle. Many in Japan and abroad blamed the emperor, Hirohito, for Japan's warmongering and defeat. Some said he should be tried and hanged as a war criminal. But Toshié had been brought up to love and respect the emperor, and it is hard to change the habits of a lifetime. Moreover, the emperor who she read about in magazines now was very different from the emperor of the war years. The latter had been a remote, awesome figure in his military uniform, mounted on a beautiful white horse. Now, the emperor was traveling around the country wearing a plain dark suit, raising his hat to the people he met, and making himself visible to as many of his people as possible. His legal status had of course changed. No longer the supreme ruler of the nation, he was now its "symbol." For Toshié, he appears to have symbolized a simple and naive patriotism that transcended the betrayals of the war.

In early 1948, Toshié set out by train to visit the Imperial palace in Tokyo. She went as part of a large group from Kosugi and nearby hamlets in order to donate voluntary labor restoring the palace grounds.

There was a craze for doing such work in the early postwar years. A youth group from Miyagi prefecture first broached the idea. In October 1945, the group requested permission to enter the palace grounds to perform maintenance work on a volunteer basis. Normally, visits by outsiders to the massive palace compound in Tokyo were strictly forbidden. But the condition of the grounds was quite dilapidated after the depredations of the war. Although the palace was only partially affected by the bombings, the lack of manpower had led to a decline in maintenance. Given this fact, and the desire to put the emperor on a new footing with his subjects, the palace officials decided to allow the visit. A group of sixty youths arrived in November, bringing their own tools and food from their village. They worked for three days, staying in a hostel off the grounds. On the third day, the workgroup assembled in front of the palace where the emperor greeted them.

The news of this group was widely reported, and shortly thereafter the palace was flooded with requests from other village groups to perform similar services. For the next two decades, some twenty thousand people per year visited the palace to perform labor in the grounds. Threequarters of them were women.

It was only the second time in her life that Toshié had been on a long train journey (the first was to Sendai, to collect her brother's "remains"). She had never before been to the capital. The group traveled third class, sleeping on the train on the long, mountainous route to Tokyo. The journey took a total of twenty-four hours. The group took with them plenty of food, since they had been told that supplies were still short in the city. Indeed, they had been requested to bring extra as gifts for imperial household staff and the organizers of their stay. Arriving at Shinjuku station, Toshié was struck by the shabbiness and obvious poverty of Tokyo. Many buildings were still bombed-out hulks. There were thousands of people living on the streets. The people looked pinched and hungry. For the first time in her life, Toshié felt well-off compared to her fellow countrymen.

The group stayed in a hostel in Shinjuku and early the next morning took the train to Tokyo station, from where they walked to the Imperial palace. That day and the next, they worked hard on the banks of the palace grounds overlooking the inner moat. At the end of the second day, they received their reward. Together with other groups, they assembled in front of one of the palace buildings. After a long wait, the emperor and his wife came out to greet them. They were a very small couple, an ordinary middle-aged gentleman and his slightly dumpy wife. But they were also familiar from the magazine photos, a part of Toshié's imaginative world. And this was the emperor to whose image she had bowed every day of her school life! As the assembled group sang the national anthem (a hymn to the emperor, the words of which begin, "Your reign shall last for ten thousand generations"), Toshié felt tears running down her face.

After they finished the song, their group leader stepped up and made a prepared address to the emperor. The emperor then spoke to the assembled crowd. He spoke in informal Japanese, not at all like the strange language he had used in his surrender address, but not quite like an ordinary Japanese either. He told the people assembled that he knew many of them had lost loved ones in the war. They must do their best to soldier on. He was asking them personally. And he thanked them. His voice was hard to catch in the large space, but Toshié was nevertheless profoundly moved by the event. She has treasured it in her heart ever since.

For the first three years after her marriage, Toshié worked at whatever odd jobs she could find. Her mother was taking in piecework weaving baskets and knitting sweaters, and Toshié helped her out with these. She also helped her husband and father in the fields. But the work was irregular, and the family depended mainly on Hideshirō's gravel collecting on the river. Hideshirō was able to get a good income for this—about one thousand yen per day, equivalent to a good day's labor wage. Toshié gained a little extra income from farming. Although she only cultivated a small amount of land, the prices she received for her delivery quotas were improving every year, and by the beginning of the 1950s the quotas were largely removed. But the family still was living hand to mouth.

In October 1951, Niigata prefecture embarked on a second massive works project on the Agano River. The prewar river works, which had straightened the course of the river and narrowed its banks, had led to unintended consequences. As a result of the works, the flow of the river speeded up significantly, and this in turn led to a deepening of the river channel as silt was swept downstream by the accelerated flow. The deeper, lower, faster-running channel was weakening the foundations of the levee in some places. Moreover, as the overall water level sank by 1.2 meters, many of the irrigation pumps installed along the river were pumping dry air. The new project was intended to reverse the outflow of silt and to raise the water level by some two meters. From the end of F 1951, Toshié began working on this project. The work was close to home, so she was saved the rattling truck rides required for day labor in farther-off places. But the work took place in and out of the river regardless of rain or snow. Wearing rubber boots, baggy trousers, and a padded cotton jacket, she worked with a team of twenty or more men and women using simple materials to control the flow of the river. Their basic technique was to build a container composed of several frames of straight sapling branches, piled on top of one another and tied together with rope. Into the container they then hurled large stones, eventually sinking it to the bottom of the river. In this way they could create obstructions to the flow of the river and channel it in the direction the engineers wanted. It was freezing-cold, often wet work, and there were bleak winter days when Toshié thought of nothing but how to warm her chilled limbs. In the evening, after dark, she would trudge for two miles back to Kosugi through piled-up snow, her tired legs hardly able to move one in front of the other. She finally arrived home to a cold and draughty house. Hungry for warmth as well as food, she would huddle by the kotatsu with its meager charcoal glow. The family still depended on driftwood and brush from the riverbank for its fuel needs, and the effort of gathering this made it a precious commodity to be used as sparingly as possible. Her father, now in his late sixties and no longer feeling strong, had little energy left after taking care of the fields. After dinner, prepared by her mother and waiting for Toshié and Hideshirō on their return, Toshié would long for a hot bath. But more often than not the effort and expense of bringing water and heating it was too much, so she crawled under her bedcovers for warmth instead. Even these were too meager, though, and she could barely sleep for her freezing feet. In the morning, still cold and tired, she dragged herself up for another day of labor.

Always, in the back of her mind amidst these hardships, was her worry about her sister Kiyomi. Day in and day out, Kiyomi's unpredictable behavior caused her family nights of missed sleep and days of anguish. During the day, when she was under her mother's watchful eye, Kiyomi was generally subdued and obedient. At times, she was even capable of helping with the never-ending chores. But the other, the sick, Kiyomi had become a creature of the night. Once the family was all asleep she would sneak out of the house and begin her nightly wanderings, regardless of cold and regardless of her appearance, through the streets of the village, and farther if the opportunity arose. For Kiyomi, the increasing traffic on the road along the levee was a godsend, for now she could flag down a truck or a handcart on its way to a dawn market in a neighboring town, and talk the driver into taking her along. Usually it was not long before her companion realized that there was something strange about her, and he would hasten to set her down. But then she would flag down the next comer, until by morning she could be miles away from Kosugi. Kiyomi's family would awaken to discover her absence, but after a tour of the village to establish Kiyomi was nowhere nearby, there was nothing they could do but wait for the inevitable call from the police. This normally took the form of a message, relayed by telephone from the police who had picked up Kiyomi to the town hall in Yokogoshi, who would then send a messenger to Kosugi with the news that Kiyomi was safe. (After the end of the 1940s, Kosugi was equipped with telephone connections between the village office and the Kosugi school. Later still, every house in the hamlet was connected via an intravillage telephone system.) The embarrassment of the family had no end in sight. Toshié, her mother and father would do their best to keep an ear open in their sleep to make sure that Kiyomi did not sneak out. But controlling and caring for their sick family member was wearing them all down.

One evening in the midst of this existence, Toshié had a visit from a neighbor, Mrs. Nishikawa. Everyone in Kosugi knew that Toshié had suffered miscarriages, and most understood her anguish at not being able to produce children. Mrs. Nishikawa had a proposal. She had a relative, a common laborer who lived in a nearby village. This man was burdened by his love life. He had both a wife and a mistress. He had five children by his wife, and had just had a second by his mistress. He was unable to support his large family and was looking for a good family to take in one of his children. Would Toshié consider adopting his two-year-old daughter Keiko?

Keiko's family situation was obviously impossible. Without even seeing the girl, Toshié agreed to adopt her. Within a week, Toshié's new daughter was delivered to her, and she set about filing the necessary paperwork to adopt the child legally.

Keiko was a large, good-natured child, who obviously found life in Toshié's household far preferable to the hardships of her natural family. For Toshié, motherhood was a welcome diversion from her own hardships, though she could not allow it to divert her from her main activity: working to earn enough money to make ends meet. Indeed, the presence of Keiko imposed that much heavier a responsibility. Without a pause, Toshié continued with her daily labor on the river, while her mother took care of Keiko. Still, it was a comfort to hear the cheerful little voice in the evenings, to admire the progress Keiko made in walking and talking, and to play with her daughter on holidays.

However, Toshié was not to be allowed to enjoy the comforts of a happy family life. Yet another sadness was waiting for her just around the corner. In the middle of 1952, her father began complaining of a loss of appetite, and he began to lose weight. Although he still went out to the fields, he was becoming noticeably slower. He was evidently in pain. His wife, Tsugino, began to help him out more and more in the fields, but she could not stray too far from where Keiko was sitting and playing. Eventually, they decided to take Kurakichi to consult the doctor at the new clinic in Yokogoshi hamlet. The doctor ordered an X-ray to be taken of Kurakichi's chest and abdomen. The next time they went to the doctor, he ordered Kurakichi into the treatment room for an injection. While the nurse was preparing him, the doctor took Tsugino aside and told her that her husband had inoperable stomach cancer. He would probably be dead within six months.

The doctor ordered Kurakichi into the hospital, and the same day he was carried by ambulance from Kosugi to the hospital in neighboring Kameda town. He spent three months in the hospital before the doctors released him to die. The entire hospital stay was at the family's expense. Kurakichi lived for another three months. He was never told that he had cancer, and the doctors, as well as his family, constantly reassured him that he was getting better. On his death, the doctor said, "Well, it's a good thing he enjoyed a long life." He was seventy at his death, well above the average for peasant farmers of his generation. Today, though, he would be considered a young man.

Kurakichi had experienced the hardships of peasant life to the full. A lifetime of harsh labor, periods of near-desperate poverty, the death of both sons, a mentally ill daughter with no hope of treatment, a government that took far more than it gave, the slow sale of land, and the decline into indebtedness; all these had been his lot, with few indications of relief to come. He would perhaps have been astonished if he could have seen the remarkable changes that were to take place in Kosugi in the next ten years.