Japan

16 records, one of them written, and the country with the most unusual legal relationship between an estate and a protected landscape anywhere in this collection.

Japanese national parks are drawn as zones over land that stays in mixed ownership rather than bought outright by the state. A resort can therefore hold private ground inside a park boundary and build on it under the park's constraints — which is exactly what Amanemu does on a forested hillside inside Ise-Shima. The register is careful not to credit the park to the estate: it is a designation over ground the resort owns, and the two are different facts.

The second Japanese pattern is the working water. Ago Bay below Amanemu is farmed for pearls and laid out with rafts; the estate holds the slope, the forest and the hot springs under it, and no shoreline at all.

Fifteen of the sixteen records here are unwritten, and the country's onsen and mountain holdings are still to be read.