Rural areas as living space are blessed with important qualities; space, clean air, woods and rivers, and present a better living environment for the nation than their urban counterparts. Rural development and improvement projects have tended to neglect or even destroy these qualities without recognizing their importance for human living. We should not allow further degradation under the widely-condoned justifications of modernization and efficiency.
We can easily find examples of landscape degradation; cutting down century-old trees to locate roads efficiently, blocking the top of roadside streams with concrete plates to enlarge the roads, replacing hedges with concrete walls, etc. The traditional scene of houses with white walls and thatched roofs, blended into the surrounding green fields, is losing ground to modern houses which show little harmony in materials, colors and shapes. Serene, restful rural settings are being swept away and turned into tasteless living space.
The degradation of landscapes is partly attributable to individuals' differing sense of beauty, but more importantly to a lack of recognition that housing is the most important element of the rural landscape. There is also a wide-spreading feeling that individuals should be able to do anything they want. This has lead to justification for new buildings without regard to harmony with surrounding natural or architectural beauty. This is true also of public buildings.
One nation-wide survey demonstrates that people's values are changing; more people are now becoming less purely materialistic and value natural surroundings rather than artificial ones. Another survey shows that urban people favouring rural living are increasing. We can foresee from these findings that more people will value rural living in the coming 21st century. This is where we stand now: we should give proper weight to landscape planning as an important element of rural planning practice.

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Dwelling density of fishing villages is affected by the existence of agriculture. Fishing villages with agriculture generally have a lower density and those without a higher density. Dwelling density and industrial structure characterize the neighbourhood space of fishing villages.
In densely-housed villages, the size of dwellings is relatively small, while it is large in sparcely-housed ones. These days, however, there is a tendency that dwellings are enlarged by building on a second floor, especially in high-density villages. So there is now smaller difference as to the size of newly built dwellings in these two types of villages. Although a dwelling plan is basically moulded by dwelling density and industrial structure, there are some characteristics peculiar to each area and some others which are in common areawide. Recently, the dwelling plans have been getting more similar, which indicates that the influence of agricultural or fishing practices has been diminishing. It is also noticeable that the number of rooms has been increasing as a second floor or a middle corridor is introduced. This enables each member of a family to have a separate bedroom, especially young people are often given a room where they can be private. This tendency reflects an individualistic life style which is spreading over the whole society. It should be recognized, however, that most dwellings still have “rooms partitioned by light sliding doors” as before. which are used for gatherings with family members or neighbours.
The tendency of individualism and functionalism in modern society is a positive historical current, which ought to be acknowledged. But while individualization and functional division is going on, it is also necessary to integrate them. In fishing villages traditional characteristics of community firmly remain, and openess and flexibility of dwellings are still retained, which have already been lost in big cities. Yet it is a problem that these characteristics show signs of being lost.

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Today, there are two urgent problems in depopulated rural regions in Japan: deciding courses of development for declining areas and their details, and preventing farmland deterioration and establish-ing proper land use structure.The author already indicated an innovatory approach to thefirst pro-blem, and the present study deals with the second issue.
In land use planning, “major land use” and “minor land use” should be linked together. The former concept is evolved around the idea of “core-area”. Rural exodus may bring about a positive outcome by striking a balance between the number of farms and decreasing local manpower resources. This is to say that the remaining farmers could accumulate farmland and form a “core-area”. Idle farmland in surrounding villages could then be utilized by the farmers in the core-area. The idea of“minor land use” is introduced to indicate a form of diversified farming to be developed in the core-area. With this style of farming, paddy fields, upland, pasture land and pasture forest are to be utilized as one operational unit.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the farmland conservation and improvement of living conditions in the core-area and its surrounding region. It is based on a survey conducted at Tsunan-cho, Niigata prefecture. The investigation included the history of rural exodus, shift of land use, present farm operation, and change in social stratification brought about through the high economic growth. Despite experiencing severe depopulation, some villages present a higher grade in the scale of income expectancy. The reason for this is that the remaining farmers expanded their farming sizes through accumulating idle land (including land in other villages, mainly obtained on lease) . To add to this, they have achieved diversified farming, such as enlarged sericulture and livestock farming by converting corpses, in a way suited to their mountain locations. Hence, this region is developing by transforming the demerits of depopulation into the forces of enlargement and diversification of farming.
This study is confined to a morphological analysis and a functional analysis is further needed. In order to do this, performance characteristics classification using land condition and social factor criterion should be done.

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