1) Today, the agricultural competitive power of each country depends mainly on the result of its own agricultural structural policy. But, a structural policy based on marketing principles isn't equally effective in all countries, due to their different social and economic conditions.
We can classify these situations into 4 types depending on the necessity or availability of this policy as follows: (1) Countries where the special agricultural structural policy hasn't been needed, (2) Countries where the agricultural structural policy has already been achieved, (3) Countries where the agricultural structural policy has been impossible to be adopted till now, (4) Countries where the agricultural structural policy hasn't been urgently necessary yet. Japan and many Asian countries belong to type (3).
2) After the Meiji Restoration, many rural problems, which were caused by rapid modernization, increased in Japan, In the Taisho period, this gave rise to various rural movements, peasant disputes and community agriculture movements to protect peasant life and rural societies from these problems, that have obtained excellent results. These movements depended on local communities which were usually called “mura”. A mura is a kind of hamlet which has its origin in the rural society of the Edo period, but it's worthy of notice that these have been reformed to enable them to perform new functions suitable to modern society. These movements which have depended on mura have shown a great ability to rationalize land-property and land-use in particular.
3) Such Japanese historical experience gives us some indications as to the Japanese-style of agricultural structural policy. If we were to express the features of this policy in a word, “organizing”, which is in contrast to Western-style “market competition, ” would be the right word. The agricultural structural policy that depends on “organizing” is available in many countries which belong to type (3).