A Comparative History of the Agricultural and Forestry Resource Development before, during, and after the Second World War

在20世纪30年代的日本，一个代表经济价值来源的新词“资源”（SHIGEN）受到了世界舆论的广泛关注。特别是，这种倾向与日本政府的战争准备有着深刻的关系，这是具有日本特色的。他们努力充分利用农林“资源”，只为了进行战争，而不考虑其可持续性，这导致了日本作为一个工业原料贫乏的国家，所有农产品都被动员为军事资源的不寻常的情况。这与其他主要战败国德国的情况不同，更不用说美国了。这可以看作是日本经济“畸形”结构的反映，日本经济在早期发展了庞大的垄断企业，而日本仍然是一个农业国，日本一半的劳动人口从事农业部门。

In Japan of 1930's, a new word "SHIGEN" (resource), meaning the source from which the economic value was derived, received much attention in the world of public opinions. Especially we could find the Japanese characteristic in that this tendency was deeply related with the war preparation of Japanese government. They made effort to use fully the agricultural and forestry "resource" only for the conduct of war without considering their sustainability, which led to the unusual situation that all the agricultural products were mobilized as military resources of Japan, a country with poor industrial raw materials. It was different from the case of Germany, other primary defeated state, to say nothing of USA. It could be regarded as the reflection of the "malformed" structure of Japanese economy, in which the huge monopolistic enterprises were developed in earlier time, while being still an agricultural country, as was shown in that the half of working people of Japan were engaged in the agricultural sector.