Impacts of land reclamation on the landscape of Lake Biwa, Japan

Land reclamation on water bodies has been a common practice in Japan in the last century due to modernization, the growth of population, the geographical characteristics of the Japanese archipelago and the scarcity of available land (85% of the country is composed by woods and mountains).Also, land reclamation has had repercussions in the physical environment as well as in the social and cultural life of the population living in the places where these developments were carried out, particularly regarding the way in which people perceived the landscape.This paper will examine two cases in the Lake Biwa, corresponding to both urban and rural areas in order to show two different ways in which land reclamation was developed in Lake Biwa.