NATURE, MARKETS AND STATE RESPONSE: THE DROUGHT OF 1939 IN JAPAN AND KOREA
Large areas of Northeast Asia experienced drought in 1939. Agricultural production in Korea decreased significantly, but the drought did not cause famine in Japan despite its dependence on rice imports from Korea. The paper analyses the impact of the 1939 drought on the markets for rice and electricity in Japan. The authorities were ill-prepared for such a disaster but willing to use it for the purpose of covering for other problems. The drought thus accelerated the move of Japan's economic system towards a managed economy. A lower total rainfall in Japan in 1940 did not generate similar problems, suggesting that the broader political, economic, and social context is crucial to the identification of short-term climatic fluctuations as crises.
Rice for the masses: food policy and the adoption of imperial self-sufficiency in early twentieth-century Japan
The adoption, following the Rice Riots of 1918, of a policy of 'imperial self-sufficiency' in rice is generally regarded as a triumph for Japan's industrial interests, securing as it did lower food prices for wage-earners, and as a major cause of the 'agricultural problem' of the inter-war years. However, when viewed against the background of developments in the rice market and in Japan's international trade in rice from 1890 onwards, it can also be seen as a response to, on the one hand, shifts in the pattern of food demand as consumers became better off and adopted 'urban' life-styles, and, on the other, the emergence of bureaucratic support for the protection of the small-scale, rice-cultivating farm household in Japan. In this light, what turned out to be a costly solution, in both the short and long terms, to the food supply problem of industrial Japan can be argued to have been less a 'defeat for agriculture' and more a compromise between industrial interests, consumer demand and the prevailing structure of agriculture.
PRECISION FARMING APPROACHES TO SMALL-FARM AGRICULTRUE
Precision farming implies a management strategy to increase productivity and economic returns with a reduced impact on the environment. It is based on the application of information technology to a description of variability in the field, variable-rate operations and the decisionmaking system. There are three technology levels and three strategies in the development of precision farming. Precision farming practices can be used on small farms as well as big ones, and they play a core role in rural development programs which are integrated with industry. A real-time soil spectrophotometer was developed to describe soil variability in farmers' fields, to be used in precision farming.