Sustainnable Development of Regions and Ecotourism

In the last five decades, the regional system of Japan has experienced drastic industrialization and urbanization. This transformation is regarded as a concentrating process of industries and population into limited areas in the lower reaches of rivers. As a result of this transformation of regional system, we are now facing two socioeconomic problems to be coped with urgently. Firstly, the environmental pressure is too large under this concentration-typed regional system for us to maintain the ecosystem in and out of the region. Secondly, mountainous areas in the upper reaches of rivers have suffered from rapid depopulation, and the promoting measures, which have been adopted through construction industry or large scale resort development, are not effective from the view point of sustainability. The aim of this paper is to analyze socio-economic limitation of the present concentration-typed regional system and to study a new sustainable regional development, focusing on ecotourism which is supposed to play a significant role to communicate environmental information with other social functions