Kinjiro Ninomiya is known as the developer and implementer of the Hotoku-Shiho, a representative method for restoring devastated farming villages that were widespread at the end of the Edo period. Kinjiro created a new planning system using objective and rational methods and significantly influenced the efforts of his contemporaries. Hotoku-Shiho is a comprehensive planning project that integrates civil engineering projects and economic and social measures, with the aim of increasing the number of people by creating employment through the development of wasteland and rebuilding the territory and finances by rotating income from the developed land. The Hotoku-Shiho-Hinagata (HSH), the subject of this study, is a handbook that focuses on the economic and social means and strategies of the Hotoku-Shiho and contains ideas and methods by Kinjiro. In this paper, I organized and introduced the structure and contents of the HSH and then discussed the characteristics of ideas and methods by Kinjiro from the perspective of Hotoku-Shiho as a rural planning method, focusing on the following two aspects. First, to expand the number of independent middle-class farmers, which is the basis of the rural reconstruction of the Hotoku-Shiho, the HSH carefully prepared measures to support the livelihood reconstruction necessary for struggling farmers to continue farming. Second, tabulation of the mathematically predicted values enabled to concretely set goals and evaluate the degree of achievement.
