Although some dynamic aspects in Japanese farmhouse building constitition have been studied in disciplines of settlement geography and architecture, the regional understanding of such aspects is not sufficient yet from the viewpoint of comparalive geography. This paper is an inquiry into genetical processes of regional types of farmhouse building constitution in Tohoku, northeastern Japan. The author examinedthe present aspects and the changing processes of farmhouse building constitution in some investigation villages selected from two major regions, the central part of Iwate Prefecture and the Aizu District, and further compared them to those in the Sendai Plain discussed formerly.
Each region has a characteristic pattern in building constitution. In the Sendai Plain farmhouses have usually many attached buildings, to whih various functions are distributed. On the contrary, in Aizu District they have relatively few attached buildings and farm functions are concentrated in Sagyosha (workshop or barn), the main attached building. Central Iwate is intermediate between above two regions concerning the number of attached buildings and the space of Sagyosha floor. The present author identified from these patterns three regional types of building constitution in Tohoku; multi-building type in Sendai Plain, mono-building type in Aizu and intermediate type in central Iwate.
Each of these regional types has appeared in the process separation of attached buildings at two stages. The first stage occured before World War II. Multibuilding type in Sendai Plain is considered to have been established by the Taisho Period (1912-1925). In the central Iwate and Aizu, a considerable number of Sagyoshas were built at first from the 1910's to the 1930's. Through these decades the building constitution began to be differenciated from region to region. The second stage occured after World war II. Since 1955 a great number of Sagyoshas and other attached buildings have been added anywhere in Tohoku. Through this period the present charcters of each regional type were established.
These two stages were respectively under different socio-economic conditions. The separation of Sagyosha in the first stage was caused by the spread of treadle and power thrashers. The construction of various attached buildings in the second stage was a resullt of the recent large scale mechanization in agriculture. The main house itself changed from dirt floor to plate floor in domaniwa hall in the first stage and in the second stage it was wholly rebuilt in large scale. As a result of the rebuilding, the peculiar traditional house types such as Nanbumagariya and Chumonzukuri were almost lost in the investigation villages. The above changes proceeded in the first stage mainly among comparative by upper class farmers, but in the second stage they spread into lower classes.
Differences in those regional types are considered to have been brought about primarily by climatic conditions. Namely, in Aizu under snowy winter climate various functions are agglomerated in a few buildings for daily convenience and house-building difficulties. It might he necessary to further consider the relationships to agricultural structure and folk practice etc.

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The study of Indian village community has a long history. We can mark off its history into the following three periods.
The First Period (through the nineteenth century) …… The establishment of the study by English revenue officers and the formation of microscopic views.
The Second Period (first half of the twentieth century) …… Owing to the worsening of agrarian conditions, with such as the frequent occurence of famines and economic depression, there was a shift of research topic towards the survey of actual economic situations in a given village.
The Third Period (since Independence) …… Traditional views of the isolated and microscopic village community were declared as a myth and there was an opening of further research into a wider inter-village network through the use of field research and historical documents.
The present article deals mainly with the first period. It has two objects. Firstly, by means of a critical review of the literature and records relating to Indian village communities published in the nineteenth century, I will attempt to ascertain the process whereby settlements became characterized as self-sufflcient, independent entities, or “microcosmos”. The main sources refered to, are the Report of Madras Board of Revenue (1806), The Fifth Report (1812), E. Elphinstone's Report (1819) and “History of India” (1889), H. Mackenzie's Minute (1819), C. Metcalfe's Minute (1830), G. Campbell's “Modern India” (1852), K. Marx's Articles on India (1853-55) and “Das Kapital” (1867), H. Maine's “Ancient Laws” (1861) and “The Village Communities in the East and West” (1871), B.H. Baden-Powell's “Land Systems in British India” (1892) and “Indian Village Community” (1896) and R. Dutt's “Economic History of India” (1903) and so on. Through careful examination of the above literature, one is able to picture the image of the Indian village community as the economically self-sufficient, politically autonomous and isolated republican microcosmos, as it appeared by the 1820's. C. Metcalfe and G. Campbell, however, presented different views of the Indian village community. They recognized the presence of inter-village relationships in economic and political spheres and stressed the penetration of a monetary economy into village communities.
Although K. Marx and H. Maine refered to and utilized G. Campbell's book as source materials, they, again, confined it purposefully to an isolated microcosmos, for Indian village community must have appeared “ancient” to them. After H. Maine, the critical argument became focussed on the history of land tenure in India. The existing nature of Indian village community attracted less attentions than before. Through the last half of the nineteenth century, the general view was formed that the traditional Indian village community in the pre-British period, characterized by economic self-sufficiency and political autonomy, had been destroyed following the achievement of British dominion over India. This view, combined with the stresses which were put by Indian nationalists on their village communities, prevailed up until the beginning of the 1950's.
The second object of the present article is to make clear how contemporary historians re-examined the nature of Indian village communities just before and after the British Rule over India. They found that Indian village communities at that time had a wider extension of village life than had previously been recognized, and realized the presence of wider regional ties. Three types of inter-village network are pointed out. The first is the union of certain villages based on wider economic exchange, the so-called jajmani system. The second is the economic area which supports the weekly local markets and bazaars.

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In recent years, the felling of Akita-Sugi (Natural Cedar, Cryptomeria japonica) has rapidly decreased in volume of resource diminution, and the sawmill industries located in its area has faced to a serious supply problem.
In this paper, the author analysed the response of sawmill industries in Noshiro and Odate City in the Yoneshiro river basin famous as Akita-Sugi area.
The results are summarized as follows:
1) Akita-Sugi is the best qualified wood for sawmill industry in Japan. It is aged about two hundred years and distributed almost in national forests. The sawmill industry in Akita Prefecture has been priviledged the special sale system by the regional forestry office. Wartime and postwar deforestation of Akita-Sugi brought the rapid decrease of felling in recent years and it will be exhausted in near future.
2) Under these conditions, the sawmill industries in Noshiro and Odate City have responded differently.
a) The sawmill industries in Noshiro have added the processing in higher order such as Harimasa (a kind of hard board) and Meiboku (precious choice wood) production and pushed forward the dependence on imported timber. But such a conversion has brought the class differentiation between large-scale and small-scale factories.
b) The sawmill industries in Odate have little developed recently and the multiproduction is less in percentage than in Noshiro. The supply of timber has moderately changed to the domestic afforested Sugi. Thus a sawn timber market was established in 1973 for the purpose to exploit new consumption for the afforested Sugi.
3) There are two factors for the above different responses. The one is the difference in timber supply, that is, the sawmill industries in Noshiro are more urgent in this problem. The other is the different producing structure, that is, the multi-production is more advanced in Noshiro.

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