Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between kinship and farmland rents among farm households in Inobe of Shiga Prefecture, which is a well urbanized rural area and two third of the total households （52 householdes） in the community are farm households. All of those farm households except one are practicing part-time farming with stable nonfarm jobs.
The kinship of traditional rural Japan has been well documented as the ‘Ie’ relationship. However, there are two subsystems of the kinship: one is genealogical kinship with a common ancestry; and the other is more general kinship related by marriage and blood. The former is locally called Itto, and the latter, Shinrui. The local people admit that they put higher priority on Itto over Shinrui. These two form a traditional network system of mutual aids for unexpected occasions such as funeral, which require intensive laborforce by their locally developed customs.
This kind of kinship, Itto, could be assumed to provide significant credibility even on economic activities such as land rental contracts. However, it is found that only one of the total land rental contracts （32 cases） in the community is related to this kind of kinship. This indicates the differentiation of credibility functions between social/cultural and economic activities in an urbanized rural area.
