Sokendai Review of Cultural and Social Studies

ENGLISH SUMMARY

Finding Vacancy in Modernization:
A case study of part time farmer

Ayumi, WATANABE

(The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, School of Cultural and Social Studies,
Department of Japanese History)

Key words:

temporary employee, rural community in modern, woman’s labor, vacancy, efficiency,
employment system, wage, corner-cutting

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the modernization of work style of temporary work through a case study of part time farming work that has been done from late 1960’s to recent times. The part time farming is a temporary farming labor: day labor, seasonal labor or year labor. Even in the age of machinery farming, there are over 100 million of people who work as part time farmers in Japan now.

Temporary work as part time farmer is one of the popular women work style. Most of studies consider women’s work in rural communities through the case study of temporary work of unmarried women had done till 1965. These studies assume temporary work that the labor of vacant time in the life and one year in a word. In addition, these studies pointed out that temporary workers are premodern worker groups because they make groups by using shared territorial bond and the connections and they contract farmers in each group. However, part time farmer in the Ogata village find vacancy in farming season by doing some corner-cutting or reconstruct the farming calendar in their farm. Later, temporary work became businesslike labor without distinction of the age and hometown by the diversification of the employment system.