Rural land-use planning in Japan

Japan is a country that stands out in any comparative context but especially so when the topic is land utilization and the comparison is with the older industrialized nations of Western Europe, North America and Australasia. The feature most marking it out from all other cases discussed in this book is the much greater intensity of land use in the Japanese archipelago. The total surface area of these precipitous, rocky islands is about one and a half times the size of West Germany. But since most of the land is too steep and harsh for use, a population of 120 million (equal to France and West Germany combined) and the production and consumption demands of the world’s most buoyant economy must crowd into a habitable land area of 85 000 km² (a sixth the size of France). Japan is alone at the very top of the scale if we compare land utilization in terms of population per unit area (Table 6.1), and stands out just as strikingly at the bottom in terms of agricultural land per capital (Table 6.2). Table 6.1 Comparative population densities (persons/km²).

	USA	France	UK	FDR	Japan
Gross density (total land area)	23	97	229	250	301
Net density (habitable area)	34	132	249	349	925

Source: Rural Development Planning Commission 1981. Table 6.2 Agricultural land area per capita (cropland and permanent pasture.

Country	Area (hectares)
Australia	31.0
Canada	3.0
USA	1.8
France	0.6
UK	0.3
Netherlands	0.3
Switzerland	0.3
West Germany	0.2
Japan	0.04

Source: FAO 1986, own compilation.