2019 Volume 17 Issue 4 Pages 393-399
We analyzed land use change and the affecting factors in Kugino, Minamata City, Kumamoto Prefecture. In Kugino, the various land uses had been distributed before World War II, while most of the lands except for cultivated lands had been replaced by timber forests. The result showed that the traditional land uses were deeply related to topographic features and lifestyle, and land uses in 1984 were less related to the social economy. We classified the traditional land uses in Kugino into four types, namely settlement and field, grassland, Satoyama, and deciduous forest. Satoyama, which was a common land use type in Japan, was used for not only coppice forest but also shifting cultivation before the war. However, most of them were afforested after the war. Most of the timber forests are abandoned due to a steep slope and shortage of forestry workers. We have to establish sustainable land uses instead of the forests.
