Farming Out Factories: Japan's Law to Promote the Introduction of Industry into Agricultural Village Areas

Questions as to how social regulation serves renewed accumulation may be answered by mesoscale studies of the ways states make sites and localities available to new forms of production. In this study I examine the important social-regulatory role of the Japanese state in the rapid creation of new factory sites for flexible producers after 1970, particularly through negotiation with rural constituencies. Firms in leading sectors of Japanese industry have spun-off thousands of new production units over the past twenty years, not only as a result of growth but as a continuous strategy to achieve that growth. One way new factories obtained land and labor was through Japan's 1971 Law to Promote the Introduction of Industry into Agricultural Village Areas, Nōson Chiiki Kōgyō Dōnyū Sokushin Hō. This policy coaxed farmtown governments to carve new industrial parks out of farmland and to sell improved factory sites to manufacturing firms. By subscribing hundreds of farmtowns into this national program annually in the 1970s, the policy helped to structure the external conditions of industrial firms' flexibility, granting full rein to the internal logics allowing their greater spatial reach. By early 1992, over 6800 factories had acquired rural sites under this program and 444000 workers had been hired, many from farm households. The state has by no means abandoned interventionism in this growth period, but has actively reregulated the countryside away from its former engagements in agriculture and into the service of flexible industrial production.