抄録
Agricultural newcomers face various difficulties when settling in rural communities. Previous researches pointed out that trust, which is built mainly by guardian, plays an important role in the farmland gaining process. Also, these researches tend to regard the hamlet as a negative factor for settling. However, we have to consider the reason that a hamlet has a character of barrier. In this paper, we focus on hamlet, and examine the relevance between hamlet and farmland gaining process, and investigate the character of trust.
The newcomer (Family S) came to Fujii in 2000, but could not gain farmland, although there was much rentable farmland. The reason is that people rent their farmland after getting a better understanding of his/her personality. S tried to gain an intimate access to people in the hamlet. In this entering process, groups and organizations in the hamlet as well as the guardian played important roles. The guardian introduced S to groups, and interactions within these groups made S adapt to folkways of the hamlet. This interaction enabled S to gain new farmland.
We could see the importance of the hamlet at this point that the interaction in groups of hamlet plays an important role in farmland gaining. The hamlet works as a resource, and there is the logic of small organization of management, which wants to prevent population outflow and to maintain each farm’ s producing and livelihood.
When we consider along with this logic, we are able to make the following observations regarding the nature of trust: it will be gained gradually by entering the hamlet, and it requires not only the recognition of personality, but also the strong probability of contribution to the small farm and the hamlet, which are the life security organization, in other words, the probability of permanent living in the hamlet.
