抄録
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the basic structures of land tenure and land use in Korean rural villages, and to consider how and why they have changed under Japanese rule by analyzing the cadasters and cadastral maps. This study on the famous clan villages and the neighboring villages of Kangdong-myun in Kyungju City also intends to examine the narrative specified by many researches and interviews about the study area under Japanese rule.
The results are summarized as follows:
1. In the study area, houses and farmland are often surrounded by forested mountain ridges. From the point of view of land tenure, although the residential places and farmland in low plains were the subject of a complex system of ownership by various kinds of people, most of the forest on the mountain ridges tended to be owned by members of a few clans. The people, in particular, who belonged to the powerful clan having its own headquarters and tombs in the area had often units of land characteristically composed of mountain ridges with tombs, residential places and farmland at the foot of those mountains.
2. In the study area under Japanese rule, changes in land use conspicuously appeared in a few periods when the infrastructure such as new railways, roads and irrigation canals were constructed, and most of these changes occurred only in the low plains. In those days, members of the powerful clan having its own headquarters and tombs in the area tended to maintain characteristic units of land while building new houses to set up branch families and developing tombs towards the lower part of mountain ridges. On the other hand, the people who owned neither tombs nor forests had flexibly built new houses and bought new lands whether they belonged to the clan or not. As a result, among the villages modeled on the clan villages, the people in each village owned and used their lands in different ways under Japanese rule.
3. Under Japanese rule, the members of powerful clans firmly resisted when outsiders, Japanese, companies and state (the Government-General of Choseon etc.) came to buy or to take over a portion of their units of land. The residents of these neighborhoods also recognized that the mountain ridges with tombs must be preserved as forests. Consequently, although the area on the low plain had easily undergone a spatial change, the houses and farmlands surrounded by the mountain ridges with forests have been firmly maintained as before.
