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This chapter explores the diversity of joint ownership practice. Records compiled in the course of preparing for the Meiji Land Tax Reforms of the 1870s show practices that range from a variety of joint ownership regimes to multilayered fragmentation of rights to a single plot. Noted land tax reform scholar Fukushima Masao divided these practices into two broad categories: multilayered land rights and redistributive practices. This diversity in practices challenges some of the widespread beliefs about the relationship between specific rights in land and incentives: the belief that joint ownership necessarily entails inefficient, counterproductive incentive structures as well as beliefs about the relationship between joint ownership and environmental conditions.

One of the greatest difficulties encountered by students of property law comes from the English habit of splitting what may in a general way be called ownership into its component parts and making each of them an abstract entity. This chapter gives a simple and general account of ownership, before turning to its most common types of fragmentation. In principle, owners are perfectly free to do nothing at all with the thing: in principle, the law of property imposes no positive duties on an owner. The owner is protected against those who trespass on, interfere with, or take the thing owned; and in English law this protection extends to those who are putative owners. Two other features of ownership are risk and debts. This chapter also discusses co-ownership, of which there are two kinds according to English law: joint ownership and ownership in common. It is very common for people to have property rights that are limited in time. There are two main types: life interest and lease (or bailment).

This chapter starts by looking at what natural resources are and their place in a theory of justice. It identifies two forms that claims to natural resources tend to take: general claims and particular claims. General claims are then used to formulate a simple argument to show that natural resources are appropriate objects of egalitarian justice, because they are the subject of equal original claims. There follows a discussion of how best to understand Equal Original Claims, in terms of four understandings of original ownership that are common to Western political philosophy: No Ownership, Joint Ownership, Equal Division, and Common Ownership. No Ownership and Joint Ownership are dismissed on the basis that they are incompatible with Equal Original Claims, leaving Equal Division and Common Ownership as the two remaining contenders.

This chapter takes a multilayered approach to the practice of local joint ownership in several regions at both domain and village levels as well as in a broad, national context of Japan. Each level of analysis—national, regional, local—requires different methods and employs different kinds of data. For instance, it employ daimyo domain-level data to examine two key examples of domain-managed warichi. While domain ordinances may be reasonably complete, serial data on actual practice within the domain is conspicuously limited. Some efforts that call for diachronic analyses therefore draw on documents that represent an incomplete record. Among these sources are notebooks that record the outcome of reallocation of access to land, and the occasional settlements of disputes over redistribution.

This chapter discusses the adaptability of joint ownership systems over time. This concept is partly tied to the place of tenants in these regimes. Many early modern and modern cultivators were either purely tenant farmers or owner tenants who cultivated some lands that they owned outright as well as lands that they rented from others. These two groups represented the vast majority of the agricultural population in late-sixteenth-century to early-twentieth-century Japan. In particular, the chapter examines the case where villagers decided to limit warichiuse to a particular part of the Kawaji village, discontinuing villagewide implementation. Kawaji first implemented warichiright after a 1682 domainwide survey that touched many Echigo villages.

Chapter 3 turns to political theory to explore the normative foundations of the state’s power over immigration. It examines theories based on (1) the value of cultural and national identity, (2) the right to property, (3) freedom of association, and (4) freedom from unwanted obligations. The first three appeal to the value of collective self-determination. On the nationalist view, the fundamental imperative of immigration control is the preservation of culturally distinctive nations. The property argument derives the right of immigration control from the labor of citizens. The freedom-of-association argument regards citizens as parties to associations, such as marriage or a golf club, which have the right to refuse association with nonassociates. The freedom-from unwanted-obligations-argument does not directly engage with the idea of collective self-determination. I argue that each of these theories falls short of providing a convincing theory of state authority over immigration.