Important Cultural Landscape List and the Decay of Traditional Agricultural Life: A Case of Dispersed Settlement in the Tonami Plain, Japan

摘要

In 2004, Japanese Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties was partially revised to include the idea of cultural landscape. Based on the revision, the Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports and Science became capable of selecting Important Cultural Landscape for preservation of a distinctive land use form associated with its regional culture, custom, and beliefs. The new ideology toward landscape, cultural landscape was diffused from UNESCO via the national authority to local governments in top-down manner, at the time of the revision of Japanese landscape law to include the cultural landscape concept in 2004. Consequently, Japanese local authorities have gradually imported the concept via the application process of ICL whereas the Japanese government also had been espoused it from UNESCO. In the light of these circumstances, the purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of the concept of conserving local landscapes, by grading them according to a globalized evaluation system, using the Tonami plain as a case study. In doing this, the author also critically investigates the historical origin, status quo, and prospects of ICL.