There are about 500 skiing grounds in Japan. Their location depends upon the complex of various factors…principally physical, traffic condition, secondarily local industries, land ownership, and capital investment. It is necessary for the geographical study of the skiing grounds to research the factors above mentioned. The writer analyzes in this paper those factors of the Nozawa skiing ground, Nagano Pref. As the result, the writer shows several facts as follows:
I. The Nozawa skiing ground has the four developing stages, 1) Introducing stage (1913-'29), 2) Founding stage (1930-'39), 3) Developing stage (1940-'60), 4) Expanding stage (after 1961).
The 1950's were the developing years of skiing grounds in the nation wide scale. The developers from Tokyo were more active than local people to skiing grounds. However, the management of skiing ground at Nozawa was transfered to the village government from the Nozawa Skiing Club, and the scale of its ground and facilities were enlarged, as a result, Nozawa skiing ground acquired the nation wide fame in the 1960's.
II. Nozawa, one of the deep snow area in the central Japan, has conquered its economic handicap in winter by founding skiing ground. It was very important that the leaders of this village considered to conquest the handicap of snow. Many village houses change to the skier's inns “lnshuku” (Minshuku is a cheap lodging houses in tourist resort, and most of them are usually operated by farmers or fishers as side work.) in winter. This skiing ground did not appear spontaneously, on the contrary, it was introduced systemath cally to conquer the handicap of snow.
III. The area of skiing grounds is formed of renting the forest and waste lands in Japan. As for Nozawa Skiing Ground, it is same. The charge of these leased land is very cheap (10-20yen/m²). Up to now, the skiing grounds are not used except in winter. It should be considered to make a counterplan for the protection of soil and natural environment as a whole.
IV. The settlement of Nozawa was a local health spa just after the World War II. Since the 1950's, this function had changed to skiing from local health spa. For this reason, Minshukus have been founded since the 1960's, and they have remarkably increased in the 1970's.
V. The tourist industry at Nozawa becomes very active according to the development of skiing industry. Consequently, the population engaging in service and construction industry have increased. As a result, the decrease of village population has stopped in the 1970's. On the other hand, about 250 temporary labourers in winter are being required from the neighbouring areas.

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With the development of urbanization in Japan, the part-time farm households (farm families who devote themselves to both farming and side business) have been increasing in number and farming activities have been declining. On the other hand, rationalization of rural space such as farm land consolidation has been advanced corresponding to the devel-opment of agricultural techniques. It is a real fact that Japanese rural space includes not only many rural elements in landscape but also much more urban elements in functi-on. In order to classify and put in order such rural space, the writers attempt to divide the rural space considering the regional differences of economic activities of farm hous-eholds determined mainly by chances of non-agricultural side businesses.
At the beginning, an analysis of three sample villages in Toyama Prefecture of the Hokuriku . District facing the Sea of Japan was carried out. The location of the three villages and the central cities is shown in Figure 1. As a result, four ideal types of employ-ment structure of farm households were established. Here, the employment structure means a combination of economic activities in which members of farm families are engaged. Then comparing with these types, we drew a several additional types by a study of all rural space in Toyama Prefecture founded on experiential decisions of geographers and agricul-tural administrators in Toyama. With the same method, all ideal types of employment structure covering the whole rural space in the Hokuriku District were established, and the division of rural space in the Hokuriku District was carried out based on the six ideal types (Figure 2). The division largely depends on experiential decisions of well-informed geog-graphers and agricultural administrators in this district. This is due to a fact that the writers could not find any appropriate statistical sources and had bitter experiences of not recognizing any real regional unities of employment structure from combinations of various statistics. Since several maps of the division determined by different persons are very similar and the types of employment structure of one prefecture are rather coincident with those of other prefectures, the present method of division can be considered to be reli-able.
Under the provisions of the ideal types of employment structure of farm households, the following six spatial types are set up : A, B, C, D, E, and F type space. In addition to these six types, both D and E type space are divided into two sub-types: D₁ and D₂ type space, and E₁ and E₂ type space. F type space is also divided into four sub-types: F₁, F₂, F₃, and F₄ type space. In A type space heads of farm families and often other members commute to urban industrial jobs each day and yet continue to work on their farms in the evening, over weekends, and during annual holidays from the factory. The farmers keep their fields in expectation of higher value of the land in future. In B type space the members of farm families have just begun to commute to city-based factories or small scale factories in rural space because public and private transportation facilities have recently improved and various factories have been increasing in number even in rural space. But side businesses of farmers' wives are not so stable compared with those of A type space. Farm families in C type space live chiefly both on rice farming and wages of daily labor in construction works. In D typo space farm families still regard farming activities most important and they are occupied mainly by horticulture (D₁ type space) or rice production and second cropping (D₂ type space). In E type space there is little employment for village boys and girls who finished junior and senior high schools and they have to leave their home to find jobs outside.

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In order to make clear the characteristics of cold air drainage, observations were carried out on the gentle slope of Mt. Neko in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. Period of the cold air drainage is defined as a period when the air temperature shows minus (plus) anomaly and the wind velocity plus (minus) anomaly from the moving mean of five terms. The results of the observations can be summarized as follows : (1) Three main maxima in the occurrence frequency (Fig. 5) of cold air drainage are generally seen in the night time in August. They are, (i) between 21h30m and 23h00m, (ii) 24h00m and 1 h30m, and (iii) 4h00m and 6h30m. However, four maxima are found for all observations including May and Decem-ber, and this additional peak is observed between 19h30m and 21 h00m. In all cases, the last maximum which occurs between 4h00m and 6h30m is the strongest and its occurrence in frequency is about 70%. (2) The directions of the cold air drainage converge within _??_45° of the mean direction, which coincides with the direction of maximum inclination of the slope. (3) During the cold air drainage, it is found, that the warm cores appear locally and they move from the lower part to the upper part of the slope with velocities of 0.3-0.8m/s. The occurrence of the warm core has not significant relation with the intensification of general wind of the upper layer. I t is thought, therefore, that the warm core is caused by sinking of warm air from the upper layer as the compensation flow of the cold air drainage

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1) Fruit growing regions in the Tohoku District are the largest area in Japan, which grow apples and other decidous tree fruits. Fruit regions concentrate in 7 inland basins: Tsugaru Plain, Yamagata and Fukushima Basin etc. These places are suitable for fruit growing.
In view of this, they are in striking contrast to citrus fruits regions, which concentrate in the coast districts. Since 1960, increased yield of orange and trade liberalization of banana had great impact on the farming of fruit tree. The remedial measure for depressoon are different in each region.
2) Tsugaru Plain which has been an apple producing region since the Meiji era, and now the largest one in scale, has increased its production in spite of falling demand for apples. By the clearance of forests and the reconversion from rice fields, the villagers in the Tsugaru Plain have increased apple orchards. By the improvement of varieties, they have made their apple cultivation intensive. As the result of the increased production of new varieties, the fruit dealers have strengthen their influence on the process of circulation. Recently, the cultivation of grapes has increased here, but has not developed into the diversified fruit farming.
3) In Yamagata Basin and Fukushima Basin, the diverse management, that grows apple or Japanese pear as the staple plant, and grape, peach, or cherry as the subsidiary plant, has developed. When the fruit growers met with an apple depression, they increased the yield of the grape and peach, which have taken the place of the apple as a staple product in some regions.
Such multimanagement of fruit growers has been realized by the factors of physical condition that helps the growth of every decidous tree fruit, of existence of processed fruitindustry, of management's consciousness of farmer to seek the profitable fruits.
The fruits cultivation, in the north-Eastern part of Yonezawa Basin, are going to change into monoculture of grape, from the diverse management, making full use of steep slope of newly cultivated orchards.
4) Fruit management in Yokote Basin and Kitakami Basin are not so much favored with physical and managerial conditions as the other fruit regions, fruit yield in those regions does not make remarkable increase.

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Recently, golf courses have been remarkably developed in Japan. The number of golf courses in this country is said to rank fifth in the whole world.
The number of Japanese golf players are growing so rapidly that the golf course hardly meet the demand of the players ; there has been an unbalance between the number of golf courses and that of players in Japan.
Golf players are distributed geographically uneven in the Japanese islands. Golf players are, on the whole, concentrated along the so called Pacific Belt where a large number of big cities are densely located. The number of golf players in the prefectures along the coast of the Sea of Japan and in the northern part of the Tohoku District in total is com-paratively small. The geographical distribution above mentioned can be mainly explained by the population distribution and climatic conditions.
Golf courses are most densely distributed around big cities. Furthermore, golf courses have been recently developed around local cities of medium size. There are a lot of golf courses which are located within 50 km distance from the downtowns of Tokyo and Osaka respectively, to which one can easily go and back in a day from each urban center. As the development of the communication facilities is going on, the spatial boundary of the area above mentioned is becoming wider and wider.
The golf courses in Kanto District are classified into six groups according to the topographical conditions.
There are still a lot of aspects which have not been referred in this article. One of the most important one among them is concerned with administrative regulations.

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