Agricultural landownership in Japan has changed drastically over the last century due to post‐World War II land reforms and cultural, political, and economic shifts in the subsequent decades. Initial land reform shifted the concentrated ownership of land from the wealthy to small‐scale farmers. But as Japan industrialized and became more urban‐centered, a substantial amount of rural land has been left abandoned or unmanaged by descendants of those farmers. This paper analyzes the attitudes of absentee agricultural landowners in Japan to better understand the prevalence of economically rational versus traditional attitudes toward land ownership. We draw on the rural sociological literature on place attachment to hypothesize why some absentee landowners feel a strong tie to the land of their ancestors, while others would be willing to sell for a reasonable price. We use unique survey data obtained from 466 absentee agricultural landowners in Japan. Logistic regression results indicate that attachment to place, gender, age, educational attainment, and usage of land is significant predictors of whether landowners hold traditional, rather than economic, values. We discuss the implications of these findings for the future of sustainable agricultural land management in Japan.

中文翻译：

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传统价值还是经济价值？日本社会和农业转型中的缺席土地所有者态度分析

由于第二次世界大战后的土地改革以及随后几十年的文化，政治和经济变化，上个世纪日本的农业土地所有权发生了巨大变化。最初的土地改革将土地的集中所有权从富裕的农民转变为小规模的农民。但是，随着日本工业化和城市化程度的提高，大量的农村土地被这些农民的后代遗弃或管理。本文分析了日本缺勤的农业土地所有者的态度，以更好地理解经济理性与传统土地所有权观念之间的关系。我们利用农村社会学文献上的地方依附性来假设一些缺席的地主为什么会与其祖先的土地紧密地联系在一起，而其他人愿意以合理的价格出售。我们使用从日本466位缺席的农业土地所有者获得的独特调查数据。Logistic回归结果表明，对土地的位置，性别，年龄，教育程度和土地使用的依恋是土地所有者是否持有传统价值而非经济价值的重要预测指标。我们将讨论这些发现对日本可持续农业土地管理的未来的意义。