Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to report the present conditions of the mountain villages in Japan and to offer view-points for regional policy. The traditional mountain village societies in Japan are rapidly aging because the indus-tries that have historically supported these villages - namely agriculture and forestry - are no longer relevant. The government increased taxes for supporting mountain villages in order to fund the constructions of roads and infra-structure projects for the region since 1970. However, the revenue from the increased taxes was negatively offset by the continuing decrease in population of the region, therefore the funds were not effective. My proposal to halt the economic recession of mountain villages is to promote the forestry and agriculture industries directly through inha-bitants of urban areas. This would include strategies and programs set up to enable the mountain villages to sell and to distribute their products directly to urban regions.
