1. Uchinami district of Fukui Prefecture is a mountain village in the western part of Hakusan Mountains. With its steep slopes and deep gorges, it has few patches of plain-land and was isolated for long. Under such circumstances, the villagers who are not blessed with cultivable land have supported themselves with ‘out-going’ farming (they move in the spring time from their winter base to the temporal huts on the mountain slope where they carry out the shifting culture, and come back in the end of autumn.). But with the development of modern commercial economy, the self-sufficing economy has broken down and ‘out-going’ farming has declined with only a few execeptions.
2. ‘Out-going’ farms are distributed within a belt of 3-6 km from the base village and a height of 500-1, 000m.
They raise barnyard grass, millet, red beans, Soya beans and buckwheat on their burning cultivation fields, and grow coptis japonica for sale. As the productivity in the primitive burning cultivation is very, low there is much probability for those farmers to transfer to the more profitable and more paying occupations.
3. From the middle of Meiji era to the early Showa era (about 1890-1930), they pursued sericulture as a side job to gain cash. From about 1935, however, as the public works were begun in this village, the villagers were engaged in those works to gain cash, which led in consequence to the decadence of the burning cultivation. By and by charcoal-making took place among them. Therefore the ‘out-going’ farming decreased rapidly.
As the opening of the roads for trucks after the World War II made the connection with markets easier, the mountain forests which had been considered valueless have become commercial goods, and forest industry has developed. Consequently, drag roads are now under construction. The owners of the mountain forests prohibited the burning cultivation for the purpose of afforestation. From the above mentioned reasons, most of the villagers abandoned their shifting culture, and now are engaged in wage-earning work of civil engineering and forestry. ‘Out-going’ farming is now almost disappearing.
