Increasing interaction between natives and newcomers within a local area, brought about by repopulation in the countryside of contemporary Japan, has changed the system of local community organizations. The patterns of social change and the character of local communities vary within rural areas mainly according to their distance from a city. Therefore, there are considerable relationships between regional demographic patterns and the reorganization of local communities. In this article, first the author classifies Niigata Region by cluster analysis of population structure. Second, he induces the types of neighborhood associations, one of the most important local organizations, in terms of their spatial relations with agricultural associations, and examines correspondence between the classified sub-regions and the types. Last, he investigates the case of Kurosaki in the southwest suburbs of Niigata City.
In the concluding remarks, the following categories are established. First, rural dynamics from the 1960s onward resulted in a regional differentiation composed of four sub-regions. Three of them are arranged into the rural-urban continuum: commuters' housing districts on one side and farmers' villages on the other. The other, which contains both housing estates and farming settlements, is placed outside it. Second, both on the urban fringe and in the housing estates, the new types of neighborhood associations have emerged since the 1960s through the division of existing neighborhood associations or newly established associations without relation to any existing organizations. Third, in some places, newly formed neighborhood associations league together within the village before the divisions. Fourth, the patterns of these reorganizations depend upon the regional population and the regional policy of their municipalities. Consequently, the simplified system of a village organization has been changed into a more stratified and pluralistic structure, which characterizes contemporary suburban local communities.
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