WHEN we think of Japan, our thoughts turn to the giant trading and manufacturing corporations whose names have become household words in Australia and throughout the Western world.
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Companies like Mitsubishi, Itochu, Komatsu, Toyota, Yamaha, Fuji, Canon and National: their very names evoke perceptions of power, success, profitability and influence.
But what's interesting about Japan is not the spectacular growth and success of its mega-corporations, but the real power that is still vested in its farm sector - a farm sector we tend to disparage as a quaint anachronism.
Just how much influence is wielded by Japan's farm sector can be gauged from last week's decision by that country's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to back away from a planned shake-up of the agricultural sector.
A deregulation panel set up by Abe had sought the abolition of the political arm of Japan Agriculture (JA), the national representative body of Japan's powerful network of local agricultural co-operatives.
But the move was blocked by opposition from within Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which is heavily influenced by JA.
So influential is JA, which also enjoys close links with Japan's agriculture ministry and employs 240,000 staff across the country, that it was described in a recent article in The Economist as "probably Japan's most powerful lobby".
Its power base is not the "big end" of agriculture, but the small end: the part-time farmers who make up nearly two-thirds of Japan's 1.5 million farmers, and who carry significant electoral clout at local level.
It has been the looming political presence of JA that has been responsible for Japan's maintenance of high tariffs on imported food products such as beef and pork, and most particularly on rice - described as the "spiritual cornerstone" of Japanese agriculture.
And it's now JA and its protectionist stance that is standing in the way of Japan signing up to the Trans-Pacific Partnership being promoted by the US to create a free trade zone across the Pacific.
Many Australian farmers have had misgivings about our successive trade ministers signing-up to wide-ranging free trade deals as well, but farmers' concerns here - about trade policy or anything else - barely register as a political factor, as they do in Japan.
That is partly due to the relative size of the farmer bloc in the respective countries: in Japan farmers account for just over one per cent of the population; here, they number less than 0.5pc.
But it's also a comment on how farmers are variously regarded.
In Japan, as in continental Europe, memories of war-related food shortages are still fresh and potent.
Farmers are valued by the broader community for their efforts at keeping home-grown food on the plate.
And protectionist policies in Europe and Japan have resulted in farms generally remaining small in scale - "inefficient", by Australian technical standards, but perhaps more "efficient" than we give credit for in terms of social cohesion, productive employment and landscape care.
The strength of the Japanese farm lobby owes much also to the pervasive influence of co-operatives, which organise much of the marketing of farm produce in Japan, as well as the supply of farm inputs, and give their farmer members a local rallying point, and a national voice with JA.
All of the foregoing is not necessarily to defend Japan's protectionist agricultural policies, but merely to highlight how farmers there have succeeded in retaining an enviable level of political clout.
Here, even if farmers had a compliant political party, it would count for little because of the rate at which rural electorates are disappearing.
Japan remains a niggling reminder to more "enlightened" nations like us, of how farmer power can be effectively mustered, harnessed and deployed for unashamedly self interest.
