Coastal and near shore surverys were carried out by members of the Japanese Hydrographic Office on the beaches alnog the coasts of Japanese Islands from 1951 to 1952. As the results of these surveys, the author classified Japanese Cocasts into several shore types chiefly according to beach and near shore profiles and clarified the distribution of these shore types along the coasts of Japanese Islands. The author considered the conditions of the formation of these shore types. These results were summerized as follows.
(1) Beaches of Japanese Coasts are classified into 5 shore types.
A. Smooth profile beaches _??_steepe slop profile gentle slope profile
B. Steep slope beaches
C. Barred profile beaches _??_singular bar profile plural bar profile.
(2) Steep slope beaches develop on the eastern part of Toyama Bay along the Japan Sea Coast and the northern part of Suruga Bay and the western part of Sagami Bay along the Pacific Coast.
(3) Gentle slope beaches develop on Nemuro Strait in the Hokkaido Island, and Sendai Bay and Wakanoura Bay along the Pacific Coast, and Nakatsu Coast and Beppu Bay in the Setonaikai Sea.
(4) Steep profile beaches occupy only a part in coasts.
(5) Principal beaches of the Japanese Islands are the barred profie beaches. The principal beaches of the eastern Pacific Coast and Okhotsk Sea Coast of the Japanese Islands present singular bar profile, and most of the Japan Sea Coast and the western Pacific Coast the plural bar profile.
(6) The distribution of shore types in the Japanese Islands are influenced by the geographical situation of coasts; open sea coasts present without exception barred profile beaches, and coasts of bay, strait and inland sea present smooth profile beaches.
(7) Beach and near shore bottom gradient also have the relation to the distribution of shore types in. the Japanese Islands; coasts with gradient 1.0×10^-2 to 3.0×10^-2 present barred profile beaches, but comasts which are greater or smaller than this range of gradient, present steep and gentle smooth profile.
(8) The grain size of beach and near shore bottom sediments also influence the distribution of shore types; steep smooth slope beaches consist of gravel without exception, and most of barred profile beaches consist of sand and gentle smooth slope beaches also consist of sand, but locally mud.
(9) The influence of tide is not negligible, but in the coasts where the spring tidal range is less than 2.5 meters, various shore types develop.
(10) The wave height is imporant for the formation of offshore bar. In smooth profile beaches, average wave heights are less than 0.6 meters, and in barred profile beaches, the average wave heights are greater in general. They are from 0.4 to 1.5 meters.

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Nabeta, newly reclaimed land after the end of World War II, is inside part of Isewan in the central district of Japan. It is about 640 ha. in area. The Isewan Typhoon and the flood tide accompanying it came over Nabeta on Sept. 26, 1959, destroying the settlement and farms, and killed 125 out of 228 settlers.
Before the disaster, the settlement pattern of Nabeta was carried out as planned Strassendorf type along the several main roads that ran from the east to the west, so the villages were scattered all over the land. The slightly higher part of this reclaimed land of Nabeta was not used as settlement site, and settlers' houses were made of wood and they were but one-storyed houses. From the viewpoint of protecting settlers and their properties from the flood tide, this settlement plan was not complete.
As a result of the disaster the people decided that nearly half of all the area be used for factory site and the rest for agricultural land, the houses be rebuilt of ferro-block and three storyed and concentrated on the north-western corner, the highest part of this land. Then this settlement site was planned to be surrounded by the second dike. Consequently the settlement of Nabeta is being protected from high tide by two dikes, that is, a sea dike (the first dike) and the second dike.
Not only the settlement location and buildings but the site of fields of each farmer has been improved. Before the suffering, each farmer had dispersed fields, but after that he has considerably concentrated fields.

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In order to clarify the factors which had effects on the foundation of a political region, the author analysed the incorporation of the former villages “buraku” into an administrative village “mura”, when the new act of the city-town-and-village-system was made to work in 1889, taking a village called Niita-mura as an example, which lies 17 km to the north-east of Utsunomiya city which is about 100 km to the north of Tokyo.
The author has investigated and found the general conditions for the enforcement of that system by the central government, the regional factors inherited from the Edo Era (feudal days), and the new factors caused after the Meiji Restoration, all of which together had influence on the incorporation.
The most important factor to promote the foundation of the new administrative villages was the advice of the central government which intended to improve the financial situation of local communities. But each “buraku” has its own characteristic way to adapt itself to the strong political advice of the central government. Some of the regional factors of Niita-mura were the process of reclamation, the feudal lords who had ruled and divided Niita-mura into three groups, the common land of some “buraku”, and the irrigation system, because of which the incorporation was most necessary.
Niita-mura consists of 14 “buraku” ; Hakonomori and Uwano had been relatively newly established by the people from Ujiie, which was a rural town in this area on the west of Niita, and belonged to Utsunomiya-han (feudal territory); Kajigasawa, Fubasami and a branch village from Fubasami belonged to Kitsuregawa-han; the other 9 villages had beloned to Utsunomiya-han in the early period, and were governed by Sakura-han from 1750 to 75, and then directly ruled by the Shogunate. The northern “buraku” of Niita-mura and Ujiie-machi were concerned with the common land called Uwanohara (Upland).
Some policies of the central government after the Meiji Restoration influenced on the circumscription of an administrative village, the “mura”. For the modernization of all governmental and social situation the government refined the local administrative districts in 1873 and the elementary school districts in 1872, both of which were changed several times before 1889. These new districts played a role of destroying partially or modifying the relationship between these “buraku” derived from the Edo Era.
The boundary of incorporation almost coincided with the irrigation area of the Ichinohori canal and it was suitable for the rural village. But the irrigation association and other functional organizations have been founded later and the Mura area became nominal. At last it was desolved in 1954.

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