水利事業をめぐる「公共性」の位相 : 植民地期朝鮮・富平水利組合の事例分析(1999年度シンポジウム アジアの中の日本(2)-水利組織と農村社会-)

Massive and stable supply of cheap rice from colonial Korea was an indispensable factor for pre-war Japan's economy to accelerate its capital accumulation. The rice production promotion project was the top priority among the agricultural policies of the Government-General of Korea. Especially, the irrigation association project was the most important one both in terms of the fiscal expenditure and of the effect of production promotion. Hitherto studies on the project chiefly have focused on the process of how the Government-General's political will penetrated into Korean rural societies through the irrigation associations. These studies often characterized the associations as quasi-administrative and bureaucratic organizations. In this paper, the irrigation associations' characteristics as "association" is rather emphasized. The irrigation associations in colonial Korea were never qualified as democratic associations ; they were not entitled to organize the members' voting organs but were entitled to organize mere consultative committees. It is natural, however, to suppose that there were some informal institutions to procure the minimum consensus among the associations' members, who consisted of persons owning farmland within the area, and related tenants. Without consensus, they could have never smoothly supplied irrigation water, which is categorized as a kind of "collective goods". Special attention is paid to analyze the activities and utterances of local elites who were members of the council committee of Pup'yong Irrigation Association in Kyonggi Province, most of whom were large- or middle-scale landlords. Furthermore, Some of them were core members of an informal organization consisting of related landowners. An interesting fact finding is that those local elites succeeded in becoming influential enough in the Association's policy-making process to realize their own needs, by making use of the organization' s meetings as opportunities to arouse public opinions in related area.