Abstract
A cause of the insular area in southwest Japan, the Tottori, Okayama, and Hiroshima Prefectures, about wild mushroom food custom was analyzed by using a correlation model previously proposed in relation with the natural vegetation of the Chugoku District. In a scatter diagram representing the counts of two factors, number of species used and counts by subtracting the number of species that are dried from those that are salted for preservation, two clusters were separately depicted by areas located in evergreen broad-leaved forest zone and areas in summergreen broad-leaved forest zone. There were significant differences between the two areas both in the counts of number of species used and preservation processing methods. This result indicated that the cause of the insular area in southwest Japan would be attributable to similar food custom as that of northeast Japan which exhibited by some areas in summergreen forest zone distributing in the Chugoku Mts. Additionally, it should be noted that the bordering of the two typical food customs appearing in the northeastern and the southwestern regions of Japan corresponds to local vegetation of a given area rather than its location, insofar as local wild mushroomuse.
