Specifically, a relative was discussing how money was sent over from America and then invested in property. The property was leased out to other farmers. Then World War II happened and America came in and made a rule banning leased farmland. Apparently his relatives had to make a decision between giving it up to their tenants or farming it themselves. There was also an uncle who went to America, and since he was there, his land could not be touched. Any truth to any of these family stories?
Yes. This part of agricultural land law reform in Japan that set out to reverse widespread tenancy in Japanese agriculture. At the time of WWII, almost 50% of land was leased out, and 70% of Japanese farmers were indebted tenants who farmed for absentee landlords.
After the war, an agronomist named Wolf Ladejinsky convinced the occupation authority to pass agricultural reform laws to reverse this. His case was strengthened by the spread of Communism in China and Korea at the time, which was winning widespread support among the landless rural population.
Ladejinsky had escaped from Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and was convinced that the Bolsheviks would never have won power without their land reforms which redistributed land to the landless, and was determined to preempt the spread of Communism by taking away the land issue from them.
The result was a law limiting farm size to a 3 hectare limit, whereby landlords were compensated with largely worthless bonds paying 3.6% interest. Local land committees were set up where the landless tenants outnumbered landlords to implement the reforms. Despite landlord resistance, the postwar Japanese government and occupation authorities combined with the land committees ensured that they did not get far, and by the mid 1950s only around 10% of land was tenanted. Rural incomes and production soared, aided by postwar inflation that eliminated most agricultural debt.
Strict rules on land resales were implemented to ensure that the land did not return to tenancy, as had occurred in the Meiji era (when a similar land reform had taken place, but which saw tenancy return after a few decades as more successful farmers bought out the less successful).
Source:
How Asia Works by Joe Studwell
Land Reform in Japan by Ronald Dore