Post #2406562

"The Cold War was the reason. American planners in Tokyo feared that rural poverty and landlord domination were exactly the conditions in which communist movements flourished. They had watched what happened in China and did not want a repeat, so they did what they would never have considered at home: they redistributed productive assets from the wealthy to the poor on a massive scale and called it democratization. "Between 1947 and 1950, roughly thirty percent of Japan’s farmland changed hands under the land reform program. […] The landlord class as an economic force essentially ceased to exist. What replaced it was a rural middle class of owner-farmers. In the following decades, those farmers’ children moved to the cities and provided the workforce for Japan’s industrial expansion. The land reform did not just change who owned the fields; it restructured the society that would industrialize in the 1950s and 1960s. "South Korea and Taiwan followed the same template…" https://third-bit.com/2026/05/09/land-reform/