Diary of a Farmer at the Foot of Mt. Kanpū: Living off the Land in Northern Japan, 1935–1936

On March 13, 1935, in a small village on the craggy Oga Peninsula in northeastern Japan, an industrious vegetable farmer named Yoshida Saburō began writing a one-year chronicle of his life and community, having received the assignment from Tokyo financier Shibusawa Keizō, a passionate folklore enthusiast and ethnological research supporter. In his diary, Yoshida reports meticulous discussions of farming and village life, providing thorough documentation of his family’s meals, daily itemized tallies of income and expenditures, plus crop and household financial data going back seven years. His coverage of folkways, customs, and superstitions give insight into traditions and faith, while illuminating his progressivism that is further highlighted by critiques of other farmers’ methods.

Yoshida reveals a microcosm populated by unsympathetic landlords, destitute tenant farmers, disenfranchised young men, vulnerable young women, and increasingly covetous villagers amidst poverty, all within a contracting economy and a growing imperialist state. Yet it is not an isolated world; the village is strongly connected to the outside at the local and regional levels, and to the state. Yoshida’s chronicle is representative of the living conditions of at least sixty percent of Japan’s population in the 1930s, shedding light on an important period in the country’s modern history—an era that was the culmination of seven decades of political and economic development, with rising rural poverty exacerbated by a clash between feudalism and capitalism. In the historical record, Yoshida himself is a rare and valuable link between the farmer of the early modern period and that of the early postwar era. His diary was published in 1938 by the Attic Museum (which was founded by Shibusawa), complete with 160 illustrations, including photographs taken by the author, before slipping into semilegendary status. This annotated and amended English version, containing more than twenty new photographs, allows the world to vicariously experience a tiny farming village in prewar Japan through Yoshida’s precise documentation.

For his translation of the diary, Donald C. Wood received the 2022–2023 Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize, awarded by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University in New York.

• Saburō Yoshida, Author

  Yoshida Saburō was a small-scale vegetable farmer in northeastern Japan during the 1930s, who kept a one-year daily record of his and his household’s activities and the goings-on of his village.

• Donald C. Wood, Editor

  Donald C. Wood is associate professor in the Graduate School of Medicine, Akita University, Japan.

• A true labor of love by a deeply knowledgeable scholar of rural life in the Tōhoku region. Donald
  Wood’s translation beautifully captures the rhythms of daily life in a poor rural community in
  Akita Prefecture during the 1930s, as described by a young farmer struggling to provide for his
  family on a marginal plot of rented land. The introduction and notes add valuable context to
  this unique source. I recommend this book highly to scholars, students, and anyone with in an
  interest in the rapid transformations of twentieth-century Japanese society.

  
  —Simon Partner, Duke University
• This is an extraordinary record of rural life in mid-1930s Japan, quite unlike anything that has yet appeared in English. Yoshida is at once an ordinary farmer, struggling just to get by in the harsh conditions of northeast Japan, but he is also a memorably eloquent diarist of farming life His diligence, dynamism, and innovative spirit shine on every page. Donald Wood’s prize-winning translation and his extensive notations, illustrated throughout with Yoshida’s own photographs and drawings, bring alive to all readers the daily life of the Yoshida household and its village during a crucial decade in modern Japanese history.
  —William Kelly, Yale University