Important Cultural Landscape

What an Important Cultural Landscape is

An Important Cultural Landscape is a cultural landscape that the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has selected as particularly important, at the request of the prefecture or municipality in which it lies. The legal basis is Article 134 of the Act on Protection of Cultural Properties. The category was created by an amendment passed in 2004 and in force from 1 April 2005.

The Act defines a cultural landscape as land formed by the lives and livelihoods of the people of a region together with its climate and terrain, where that land is indispensable for understanding how people in Japan have lived and made a living. The selections bear this out: rice terraces, stepped fields above a bay, waterways through reed beds, upland pastures, fishing settlements and old mining towns. Their names usually state both the place and the kind of landscape.

There were 74 selections as of 1 October 2026. Only landscapes inside a landscape planning area or landscape district defined by a prefecture or municipality under the Landscape Act, and already protected by local measures, can be put forward. National selection is therefore layered on top of local protection rather than replacing it.

Selection, not designation

The verb matters. An Important Cultural Landscape is selected, not designated, which puts it alongside the Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings: in both cases the national government picks out an area that a local authority is already protecting. The two differ in scope. A preservation district centres on a group of traditional buildings forming a streetscape, while a cultural landscape takes in the whole pattern of land use, fields, irrigation channels, woodland and settlement included.

A Place of Scenic Beauty, by contrast, is designated for aesthetic value and cannot be altered without permission. A cultural landscape is valued for recording generations of work on the land, not for its looks.

Anyone planning to alter a selected landscape, or to do something that would affect its preservation, must notify the Commissioner 30 days in advance (Article 139). This is notification rather than permission, and maintenance, emergency measures after a disaster and acts with only minor effect are exempt. The Agency adds that ordinary farming, forestry and other productive activity needs no notice at all, so the work that shaped the landscape can carry on after selection.

The state subsidises surveys, preservation and utilisation plans, restoration work and public outreach for selected landscapes.