Since Japan is a mountainous country, the arable land covers only 16per cent of the whole area. Plains are cultivated as far as possible, and even considerably steep mountainous districts are also put under the plough. 12per cent of the whole upland field and 8per cent of the whole paddy-field in this country are situated on steep slopes of more than 15 degrees. Moreover, draining of lakes and the shallow sea beds is being carried on. It seems, therefore, there is hardly any more room to be brought under cultivation.
1. The paddy-field, which now covers 56per cent of Japan's cultivated land, has been the most essential land utilization type since the prehistoric age. Irrigation facilities are indispensable for ploughing a rice-field. And, Japanese farmers have taken the utmost pains to carry out irrigation works through periods. There are two ways in which a paddy-field can be enlarged in time to come. One is to improve the variety of rice-plant and growing technics in order to enable farmers to enlarge a paddy-field in districts of low temperature, chiefly in Hokkaido District. The other way is to work out irrigation facilities on a large scale so that a rice-field can be tilled on an eminence or on the slanting surface of a volcano which has never been utilized as a rice-field.
2. The upland-field, which is the secondary type of land utilization in this country, has been so far cultivated in the districts where a paddy-field is unable to be tilled. From times past, farmers generally cropt a field with crops for self-supporting. Since the middle of the 19th Century, however, such an upland-field has been increased as can be cropt with fruits, vegetables, tea-shrubs, mulberry-trees and other industrial crops; and it is showing a high productivity.

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For the approach to the reasons of dwelling dispersion, it is fundamentally necessary that the settled order should be made clear by tracing back to the early stage of the reclamation and throughout the progress. From this point, the writer researched into the dispersed settlement on the deltaic plain between two rivers, the Edo and the Furutone, Kanto lowland. The following conclusions were reached:
1. The pioners located their homes apart from one another and rarely adjoined besides the line villages. This dispersion of the pioneers resulted from selecting the highest island-like embankment in order to secure their farmsteads from flood waters. When the embankment was too lower to avoid flood, the dweller still more raised up the ground artificially.
2. The community in this region is chiefly organized with the relation of head and branch, so the reasons for the dispersed dwelling can be attainable through the branching of the families. Distinguishing the families in the same lineage and ranging them in settled order, and then drawing them on the map, the settlement growth and especially where the branch families select as the house sites are made clear. These distribution types are classified as follows; (A) scattering type of branch families, (B) adjoining type of a branch family to its head family, (C) adjoining type of a branch family to another.
3. Classifying the own-fields of the dispersed branch families by distribution, two types are recognized; (a) concentrated type around the house site or stretched type in front of his house site, and (b) remote type. The latter is subdivided into three types; (1) scattered type, (2) distant and yet concentrated type, (3) two groups type in front and at a distance. Each of these types is exemplified in Fig. 3, 4 and 5. When the dwelling is located in the center of the own-fields the most convenience of farming is given. In this region, however, some of the dispersed branch families have the fields in type of remoteness and scattering, because they can not get at will the favorable elevated house site everywhere.
4. The adjoining type of a branch family to its head family has also two distribution types of the own-fields; (a) stretched type in front of both families in their way, (b) remote type in the branch family's fields. The latter is classified into the same three types as the case of the dispersed branch families. The examples are given in Fig. 6 and 7.
5. The adjoining type of a branch family to another makes the distribution types of the own-fields as follows; (a) contrated type adjacent to the house site in each family or stretched type in front of both families in their way, and (b) remote type in the later settler. This dwelling type and the distribution types of fields are based on taking the elevated dry lots for the house sites.
6. Subsequently some farmers removed from other places and they also settled in the types of adjoining and scattering. In that case, the settlers mostly looked for the elevated dry lots and consequently the same dwelling types were shaped.
7. The ruined sites were scarcely resettled and were usually changed to the fields and even the lots leaved to the overgrowth with trees and grasses turned out. The inhabitants seem to have evaded such ruined sites psychologically.
8. In Tab. 3 the elevated island-like lots are classified by size and are compared with the existence of dwelling. Inspecting this, the greater the lot area becomes, the more dweller it stands, conversely, the smaller lots are entirely used as the fields. By every size of the elevated lots, averaging the area of the house sites possessing on each, the home site areas increase in proportion to the elevated lot areas. This proves that the locating of the dwelling is adapted for the elevated lots. The changes of the landuse follow even the artificial changes,

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The differentiation of urban society and rural society is a continuous process, and the relation between town and country is always correlative allowing no absolute severance at all. Standing upon this viewpoint of continuance, some continuous scales are needed in order to take measure of the cifferentiation of urban society and rural society. For such a scale, we adopted the coefficient of evenness led by Lorenz curves. We applied it to the case of Hiroshima Prefecture and achieved the following results.
1. The coefficient of evenness about the total population is less than 0.60 in the districts fronting on the sea, and generally more than that in the districts of inland.
2. The coefficient of evenness about the distribution of the population engaged in the secondary and the third industries indicates the numerical value of 80per cent to that of the total population.
3. The coefficidnt of evenness becomes smaller with the change of the time.
Compared the above results with the qualitative knowledge already acquired through other means, it comes to this conclusion that the coefficient of evenness thus gained is very suitable as a continuous scale to survey the differentiation of urban society and rural society. The coefficient of evenness like this can also be utilized for socio-economic analysis.

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In Yamato which advanced in civilization from old times, the type of development of villages is somewhat different from that of other less advanced districts. The writer of this paper endeavoured to investigate the derivation of villages in the Edo era, through the actual circumstances of villages today, documents, gazetteers, oral traditions and legends, and in this way to seek the character of villages in Yamato.
1. The Yamato basin is a productive alluvial plain where agriculture has developed through periods. The density of population within the Basin is more than 1, 000 persons per 1 square kilometer today. It is supposed that villages developed from the bases of mountains at the circumference of the Basin to the low, swampy land of the western part. In the Basin, great and small farming villages of 20-100 houses lie scattered with a cultivated field at their circumferences.
2. Villages in the Basin having been established for an age, there are many the origins of which are almost impossible to be traced. In this country, when a new village is formed, it is usually an independent one named “Shinden” which literally means “a newly-established village with reclaimed rice-field”. In the case of Yamato, however, small villages called “Komura” literally meaning “a baby-village” were born by separating from their mother-villages, just like cell-division, in the village areas before the municipality system was put in force.
3. The baby-villages generally come about filling the spaces among the existing villages. The states of these villages form a slight contrast to each other in the east and in the west of the Basin. Mary of them are found in the east and very few in the west. In the former, babyvillages are not far from their mother-villages, while in the latter there is a long distance between these two kinds of villages.
4. There are some types of derivation of the baby-villages, namely, one baby-village is born of one mother-village and one mother-village has several baby-villages and one baby-village is born of several mothervillages, etc. It is an interesting phenomenon that some types of mothervillages and baby-villages make communities of different social constructions.
5. Most of these baby-villages were established by the fact that the number of houses gradually increased as the result of people's setting up a branch family for the sake of their living convenience. From the point of view of social structure, baby-villages are subordinate to their mother-villages.
From what were mentioned above, it is understood that the development of villages in Yamato was iust like a cell-cleavage, without any reform of farming technics and management. Practical investigations are remained for further research in this subject.

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