Abstract
Water is closely related to and indispensable for the living environment. This is true for both urban and rural areas. People are eager to live in sunny and well-drained places with clean and plentiful water resources. In the case of unsatisfactory environments, efforts have been made to devise new technology to improve them. Therefore, present rural settlements are themselves the accumulated results of past effort.
Rapid modernization caused drastic changes in the physical and social structure of settlements. As a result, residents were unable to adapt themselves to the new changes and failed to manage their environment by themselves. Therefore central and local government have partly taken the initiative and provided facilities to improve the environment.
Rural planning should fully grasp present problems and provide a comprehensive prescription for the long term future of rural areas. In this report the following are described:
1) present water problems in the living environment
2) measures for water management and their effectiveness
3) hard-ware and soft-ware of water management. In considering water planning, emphasis is given to the necessity for comprehensive environmental planning and management in which water planning plays a part.
