抄録
Terakawa is one of the villages in the shifting cultivation areas lying in the western part of Shikoku mountain district and has 17 farmhouses. This village is situated along the uppermost course of the River Yoshino with the mountain path leading to Setouchi Region through the pass, 1, 400 meters above the sea. In this mountainous village is grown barnyard grass as the dominant crop of shifting cultivation on the slopes of the coniferous forest zone over 1, 000 meters above the sea. The cultivation on this zone marks the characteristics of land utilization in high regions in South. Western Japan. The author intends to study the shifting cultiation at Terakawa in relation to the social structure of mountain villages and to make clear that it is one of the main constituent elements of the village civilization.
(1) At Terakawa the shifting cultivation has developed since the early period of the Shogunate Days, because the feudal lord of Tosa (K.chi prefecture) encouraged the villagers to practise it as their means of self-support in order to maintain the mountain village in the borderland. They offered their laboour to their lord to guard the boundary zone and to carry on the lumber industry under his management. The organization of the village, containing about twenty houses at that time, was modern; there they were living under almost equal conditions.
(2) In the form of the shifting cultivation in the early days we find out its original one. The arable land near the village was allotted_??_to each farmer, while the vast areas of woodlands utilized as shifting fields were held in common. Barnyard grass was an important crop on the shifting fields, which were cultivated in succession for about three years and then laid fallow for about forty years. During the cultivation term all the farmers removed to the fields, and stayed there from April to November. When one section of the field was abandoned, they removed to another section of the woodland, where they burned new fields. The effective management of the shifting cultivation needed the methodical system of land and labour utilization; thence the remarkable village community such as Terakawa was established as the principal organization of management of the shifting cultivation.
(3) In the border region of the mountain district the lord's forest lands and the villagers' woodlands under the shifting cultivation were on competitve conditions. Since the breakdown of the feudal system the lord's land fell into the hands of the government, but owing to the fact that the state control became inactive by 1390', woodlands on the borderland were yet used in common by the villagers and the development of the shifting culivation was so remarkable that some thirty families (principally sharecroppers) came to this village from Setouchi Region. When the control of the border land by nation became more rigid in 1910', the shiting cultivation of the frontier was declining. The afforestation on national lands had advanced by time. The areas in this region had been distinctly divided into two zones, forested and agricultural.
(4) Now the lands as at Terakawa are privately owned and the shifting cultivation, too, is managed individually. Though the scale of the shifting culture is being reduced owing to the enclosure of common lands promoted by nation, it is more systematical and larger at Terakawa than any other places. There is no paddy field owing to the particular lay of the land and one farmer's permanent field averages 0.2 acres. So the shifting cultivation is very important as the self-sufficient agriculture. Though their economic life is controlled by capitalism, they remain self-supporting with regard to food which consists princpally of barnyard grass. The staple crop in shifting fields at Terakawa is barnyard grass as before.
