入会林野からみた「ムラ」領域の空間構造

大分県久住町都野地区の事例

抄録

The object of this thesis is to clarify what sort of systematic relationship exists between villages and the forest-land commons and what type of spatial structure is formed there.
The district studied is the Miyakono District, Kujumachi, Oita Prefecture in the eastern part of Kyushu (located at the southern foot of the Kuju Mountain Range, a group of the highest volcanoes in Kyushu). This district can topographically be divided into three zones from north to south: the mountain zone, the flatland zone and the hilly zone. Within the Miyakono District, there are 25 villages and 363 sections of forest-land commons.
A forest-land common is a plot of forest-land which, by custom, is utilized jointly by the villagers for fetching firewood, mowing grass and grazing cattle. Especially for paddy-rice production in Japan, the forest-land commons used to be something indispensable for the formers in enhancing the productivity of rice. The forest-land commons were, in fact, extremely important in that they formed the basis of the traditional type of agriculture in which grass gathered from the forest-land was not only used as feed for the cattle and as barnyard manure but were also put to direct use in the paddy fields where the grass was spread across the fields to be used as manure.
It has been found that these 363 sections of forest-land commons, in view of their ownership relations and of the way they cluster together regionally, comprised a total of 63 commonage groups. As a result of the studies made on these 63 commonage groups and the actual groups of people formed on the basis of the commonage groups, that is, the Pastureland group and the Field-burning group (consisting of people who burn up the field in order to eliminate harmful insects and to increase the output of grass), it has also been found that territories, ranging from Type A to Type E, have been formed.
Among the Types A to E, the territory of Type A is the largest in the district, covering a wide area extending across the Miyakono District from the northwestern mountain zone to almost all of the flatland. The terrftory contains 11 of the 25 villages in the Miyakono District and, of these 11 villages, two are located along the line extending at the foot of the mountain and the remaining 9 on the flat-land. The number of commonage grops with which the abovementioned 11 villages are related reaches as many as 23. At the innermost region (northern mountain area) is Bogazuru in which is located Juichi Bokuya, or‘Eleven's Pastureland’(which all of the 11 villages have the right to use). To the south of the above-mentioned pastureland, an area that corresponds to the second innermost mountain region, there are the Nanakumi Rinya, or the ‘Seven groups' Forest-land’(which 7 of the 11 villages have the right to use) and the Kyukumi Bokuya, or the‘Nine groups' Pastureland’, (which 9 of the 11 villages have right to use). Further to the south of the above-mentioned plots of land and in the mountains close to the villages, there are numerous plots of pastureland, some of which are used by 2-5 of the 11 villages, and others by only one village each. As to the forms of these plots of pastureland, it has been found that, as shown in the right bottom of the Fig. 4, they are of four-layer structure.
The villages located on the flatland either have no territory of their own in the forest-land common or, even if they do, the volume of territory they own is small in most cases. From such date obtained as mentioned above, it is possible for us to read as to how the communities have endeavored to survive together despite the conditions disadvantageous to their grass-manure agriculture. What they have done in order to maintain such villages under unfavorable conditions as described above is that the communities made certain that the forest-land commons and the villages were functionally related to one another