What happens
The Pacific Story examines how land tenancy shaped the lives of Japanese farmers. The episode, broadcast on December 15, 1946, follows Jun Kusaku, a landless tenant farmer who pays heavy rent to landlords and faces eviction after a bad harvest. It traces how tenant movements formed, were suppressed, and re-formed over the decades, and how the American occupation directed the government toward land reform. The story presents the new land law that would let tenants buy farmland from absentee owners over thirty years, and the farmers' hopes that it will finally bring them ownership.
Rural Japan, from the early twentieth century through the American occupation after World War II
Characters: Jun Kusaku, Jun Kusaku's son, Jun Kusaku's father, Landlord
Listen for: The tenant farmers discussing whether the new land law will truly give them ownership of the land they work
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.