Agricultural mechanization in Japan has taken a form very different from that observed in
earlier-industrializing economies and has provided the technological basis for the postwar predominance
of the small-scale, part-time, rice-cultivating, farm household. The agricultural sectors of other industrializing
East Asian countries, however, appear to be following the path laid down by Japan’s farmers,
suggesting that small-scale mechanization may represent an element in a different pattern of agricultural
adjustment to industrialization from that observed elsewhere in the developed world. This paper
attempts to discover the historical determinants of the technology which has ensured the survival of the
small-scale rice cultivator in industrial Japan, through a case study of the development, by prewar
Japanese farmers, of its central element, the power tiller. Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd