THE FORMATION OF FOREST-LAND OWNERSHIP IN THE UPPER BASIN OF RIVER NAKA, TOKUSHIMA PREFECTURE

Abstract

There are regional differences of forest-land ownership in Japan which was formed by the land taxation reform in the early period of Meiji era. Generally, national forest-lands were succeeded to the feudal clans' forest lands in the Edo era. The forest-lands in Tokushima Prefecture were managed by the Tokushima feudal clan directly, so they should have become national forest-lands in the early period of Meiji era, but they came almost into the possession of private owners. The object of this study is to clarify the reason for the formation of the private forest-lands and the actual process of the formation of private possession. The author has found and investigated many papers of the early period of Meiji era relative to the land registers of shifting cultivation of the Edo era in Kito village which is located in the upper basin of River Naka. Tokushima Prefecture, eastern part of Shikoku island (Fig. 1). The results obtained are as follows: 1. The actual process of the formation of the private possession in the early Period of Meiji era is as follows: (1)The greater part of the forest-lands in this village was under shifting cultivation. So the shifting cultivation lands and their surrounding forest-lands were divided into the possession as private lands inventionally and equally. (2)This division was carried out on the basis of the land registers of shifting cultivation wrought out in the feudal age with respect to the land scale and its places. (3)The number of ownership was egual to the number of the farmers living in this village in the early period of Meiji era. The number of division was more than eight times that of the land registers of shifting cultivation. (4)The division was made based on the same family-name group which was coincided with the group using the same forest-lands for their lives, at first. Further subdivision was made in order that each farmer in the group of the same family name could get an equal value of land by considering the scale of possession and land productivity. (5)The forest-lands managed directly by the feudal clan were disposed for the common ownership of farmers. 2. Relatively high productivity of the shifting cultivation here was due to the realization of the private forest-lands. The shifting cultivation lands had supported the life of farmers and had sprawled into the forest-lands managed directly by the feudal clan. These conditions were favorable to realize the private and common forest-lands in the early period of Meiji era, and were admitted not only in this village, but also in other mountainous regions in Shikoku. These are different from the forest-lands in the northeastern part of Japan which had a much larger distribution of national forest-lands in which the productivity of shifting cultivation was low in the Edo era.