Abstract
The organizers gave the following introduction. Mountain land is important because it occupies about 80% of the whole land in our country, but in which there are many remote places inconvenient in traffic and mostly developed only by religious faith, fire-burned field farming, charcoal burning, mining and so forth. Recently mountain villages generally tend to decline as the result of the high national economic growth while some of them are developing as places for sightseeing or recreation. We are going to study the transfigu-ration of mountain villages and find proper ways to improve villagers' life by promoting the use of their land.
Seven speakers reported their researches. Mr. T. Miyaguchi studied the condition of Tani Village in a deep snowy district of Toyama Prefecture, where exceptionally a stable community life based on various kind of professions is found compared with most of other mountain villages which are suffering from decreasing population. He pointed out that the reasons for that are increasing farm products and establishing public institutions. Mr. G. YYamaguchi reported of the upper limit of highly elevated mountain villages over 1, 000 meters above sea level in Central Japan, dividing three occupation groups; 1) agriculture, forestry and mining, 2) transportation and 3) consumption (hot springs, religious facilities, sightseeing, etc). Recently the upper limit, which is different respectively, has generally descended to 1, 200 meters. Mr. K. Sakaguchi reported on the desolation of suburban villages in the north of Kyoto and, after his detailed studies of these areas since the Meiji era, pointed out there are two kinds of general factors for it; “pulling” factors in cities and “pushing” factors in mountain villages. The pushing factors are the decrease of charcoal production, enlargement of differences between classes, city-centered adminis-tration and problems of education. Mr. K. Miida picked up all mountain villages in Japan that have prevented outflow of population by encouraging traditional industries among many other villages in “depopulation” (a remarkable decrease in population which makes villages impossible to maintain community administration). These villages are distributed mostly in the northern part of Japan and metropolitan regions. Mr. K. Fukuda reported on the development and the preservation of environment in the mountain land around Man-no Pond in the Shikoku district, where the plan of a livestock farming park was given up in order to preserve the water quality and golf links were built up with strict restrictions. However, there incurred many difficulties in prevention of calamities as well as in the pre-servation of environment caused by growing turf in the reserve forest area. Mr. J. Yama-mura reported on the sightseeing and recreation of mountain villages in central highlands. There are two ways of development ; those mainly actuated by local capital and those by outside capital. The former are successful in a way but the latter are incurring the increase of public investment and environment problems while contributing to the improvement of the local economy. They should, he suggested, encourage agriculture and forestry and develop sightseeing and recreation that can make a good use of their nature, history and so on. Mr. T. Arisue dealt with the transfigurations of villages caused by construction of forest roads. He classified them into five types; those without any sudden change, those changing without construction of roads, those with remarkable change on account of it, those developing rapidly, blessed with trunk roads and sightseeing resources, and common desolate villages with little transfiguration.
Some comments were made on these reports by Messrs. T. Ichikawa, K. Shimakata, Y. Kagose, Y. Fujita and G. Tomioka, being followed by the discussions on the three points:
