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Most of these proprietors then recruited farmers to do the actual labor under a “permanent lease” contract, under which the lessee would pay about 10 percent of the gross produce of the land to the lessor-proprietor. In turn, the lessee often subleased the fields to tenant peasants and received as rent about 50 percent of the gross produce of the land. Accordingly, the lessor-proprietor, who had power to collect rents from the original lease, customarily was called the largelease holder (ta-tsu hu), and the original lessee, who had power to collect rents from the sublessee, was called the small-lease holder (hsiao-tsu hu).

100 Soon, however, the Meiji leaders acknowledged that Westernization of law was not only desirable but also inevitable if they were to achieve their ultimate goal of becoming an independent state equal to the Western powers. To “enrich the country, strengthen the army” ( fukoku-kyohei), they decided to modernize their state by adopting Western capitalism. 101 Further, the deprivation of customs autonomy and the extraterritoriality provided in the unequal treaties between Japan and Western powers had an extremely grave influence on the Japanese political and economic system.

Han Chinese settlers in Taiwan had gradually formed their own traditional Chinese society by the late nineteenth century. Most settlers had arrived in Taiwan during or before the eighteenth century. After one or two hundred years, their descendants regarded Taiwan as their permanent home. 82 Han Chinese settlers shaped the legal relations to land on Taiwan in accordance with the customs of their native regions in China. 83 There were three kinds of fields: private fields, aboriginal fields, and o‹cial fields, of which the first were the majority.