The settlement pattern in the Chugoku mountainous region is regarded as lockeres Haufendorf in the terminology of German rural settlement geography. Auther intended to investigate its actual features from the viewpoint of the spatial relationships between village and field patterns. And in this treatise, Auther paid his attention to the developmental aspects of the rural settlement. This could throw light on the historical processes of the reclamation in the mountainous region of Chugoku district. The research area is NuKui district. Kate-cho, in the north-western mountainous region of Hiroshima Prefecture. In these persepectives, intensive field study has been conducted minutely at the level of each parcels of land. In this area there remains a historical material as Kenchi-cho, Agricultural land survey, describing each parcel and its holding in 1638. All the agricultural holdings are recorded according to their small place name (Honogi), not the location number. Identifying the place name. Auther constructed the village map showing relationships between a peasant house and his fields in the early Edo era. The map reveals that many peasants held their fields neighboring their own houses except a few big peasants. Auther guesses that this mountainous area, consisting of many small branch valleys, was reclaimed by the peasants who settled down sporadically in the medieval ages. The settlement pattern which is inherently identical with lockeres Haufendorf, considered to have developed from this process of the reclamation. After the Meiji Restoration, each parcel of the lot was recorded according to location number. In 1888, the old land tax roll (Kyu-tochi-daicho) was completed. This is a valuable datum about the landholding at the middle of the Meiji era. At that time, there were cases cultivator was not always landowner. A few powerful peasants have their fields far away from their own houses. On the other side, many peasants did not possess their cultivating fields. In this way, Buraku, basic regional unit of the rural community in modern Japan, come into existence under the leadership of those upper class peasants whose lots were distributed over Nukui district. Some earth gods in the small branch valleys were consolidated into a Buraku shrine. A primary school was also constructed at the foot of the Buraku shrine. Moreover, communal forests of 100 hectare belong to the common property to the Buraku. The map showing farming regions as of 1978, based on Census data (Noka-kihon-daicho), reveals that each settlements are grouped separately into the farming regions in the small branch valleys. In conclusion, Auther came to the thought that lockeres Haufendorf in the mountainous region of Chugoku district could be identified as dispersed settlement. Basically speaking, lockeres Haufendorf have much in common with dispersed settlement, judging from the spatial organization just as peasants cultivate rented or owned fields neighboring their own houses. Lockeres Haufendorf in the study area could be considered as a dispersed settlement (complex) consisting of toft and croft.

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