The objective of this paper is to investigate gender equality of participation in decision making in rural communities. A questionnaire survey was conducted to husbands and wives of agricultural organizational members, in A city Tochigi prefecture. The survey items included i) the actual conditions of participation in organizational activity, ii) the experiences of assumption of posts of rural organizations and committees. A binominal logit model is applied to investigate determinant factors of husbands and wives assumption of posts of rural organizations and committees. The dataset for the model consists of 131. The explanatory variables are sales, farm types (rice farms, or horticulture farms), family attribute, age, days of farm-work, off-farm work, and regional characteristics. The dependent variable is experiences of assumption of posts, categorized into 7 groups. As a result of their analysis, there are differences between husbands and wives on participation in decision making in rural communities. Husbands participate in agricultural organizational activities (meeting of productive cooperation, irrigation association, and so on); on the other hand wives participate in women's organizational activities (food processing and sales in agricultural festival). A lot of Male's agricultural committees had been elected from many part-time farm household areas. In case male and female are old, and their partner work off-farm work, male and female had been assumption of posts of agricultural committees. Male's agricultural committee had been elected, even if their days of farm-work are short.

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The effects of microtopography, soil water, and light conditions on the species diversity of understory plants were studied in abandoned terraced paddy fields on Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The study area was abandoned about 40 years ago and plant succession has progressed to various types of plant community since that time. A wide variety of soil water conditions formed in the abandoned terraced paddy fields, according to the microtopography, namely, paddy plane, levee, and levee slope. The number of species of both woody and lianous plants decreased significantly as the soil water content increased. Conversely, many herbaceous species adapted to various soil water conditions. In particular, many herbaceous plants grew in the understory in good light conditions, even in soils with high water contents. The understory of the forest community was shaded, whereas various light conditions occurred in the understories of the shrub and reed communities. Such mosaic arrangements of various soil water and light conditions among different landscape elements maintained a high species diversity of understory plants in the terraced paddy fields, abandoned many years ago.

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The establishment of recycling society is an important policy concern, and community development aiming at resource circulation in rural areas is necessary. Although the cooperation of many subjects is indispensable to resource circulation, various conflicts have arisen among related subjects because of differences in their interests and increase in the amount of work. But few studies describe conflicts among stakeholders and deduce the problems faced in promotion of environment-conscious resources to smoothly build a consensus.
In this study, we selected Yagi-cho, Nantan-city, Kyoto prefecture as the study area and used meta-game analysis to examine the mechanism of conflict that occurred among farmhouses or the consumers during the promotion of the use of liquid fertilizer by the local government. For this analysis, we traced the process of interaction and past conflicts caused by a discrepancy in each subject's intention and regarded this as the present phase. Then, we considered some scenarios derived from the combination of strategy options available to each subject and some issues to solve for inducing an ideal future scenario.
The results indicate that the most pressing problem after developing cooperative behaviour of livestock farmhouses by following a conviction of the administrative authorities was involving field husbandry farmhouses into the collaboration cycle. However, under the condition of uncertainty about consumers' demand for agricultural products made using liquid fertilizer, this was difficult to achieve because of the discrepancy in preference order in each scenario. Conversely, it is possible that as long as the local government and other subjects cooperate and improve the motivation of field husbandry farmhouses, the use of liquid fertilizers can spread rapidly.
Although the analytical method used in this study needs improvement, the results of this study illustrated the validity of the application of meta-game analysis to solve the conflict.

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