Life During The Meiji Era

Agrarian images seem out of place in the highly urbanized and cosmopolitan society Japan has become. When the subject of Japan is broached these days, one is far more likely to think of bullet trains and robotics, the fashion industry, anime, and popular music idols than rustic villagers in sedge hats bent over a flooded rice paddy. In fact, the rural population in Japan has been steadily decreasing for several decades, and the challenge of how to stem the flow of young people to the cities or to lure new residents to take their places is heavy on the minds of local administrators.
Most of the most radical changes happened to Japan during the Meiji era. Then rural people were tightly tied with soil, the ground they stood on, the fields they walked through, even after death. Their lives depended on soil as they grew crop on the soil to survive, got resources from soil for trade, and were buried into the soil. Even though farmers could leave their lands and work in town and find a chance of becoming an up-class citizen, they in reality were as
In their hardships they valued soil as it gave same some means to survive. As food was scarce, and this did not depend on how fruitful the year was, the farmers did everything they could to earn their living and feed their families. Their labor year was divided into two parts – one where they almost broke their backs in the fields, and another when farmers had to seek other means to earn money or food. The situation was worsened by the fact that the rent for using the land could not be paid by all farmers which lead to payments made not in the monetary form, but by land itself. For farmers this was like a slow death. Each year they could not pay the rent, and each year they gave away a plot of land as payment, having less means to survive and less means to grow their own