In most mountainous local communities in Japan, self-help ability and social capital is critically important to solve and/or mitigate various kinds of problems in their daily life because of depopulation and ageing in the communities. This paper investigates the prevalence of health worries and uneasiness in the local people in order to consider about their self-help ability and social capital, and analyses its related factors on individual, household and local community basis. The interview was conducted for all the people above 18 years old, who were present on the research day (1,445 people, and 72% of the target population).
As a result, the prevalence of health worries and uneasiness was the highest, followed by that of socio-economic complaints and others. Moreover, it was associated more with age than sex and household income and social activities and number of household members and geographical distance to clinics or hospitals, which had been pointed out by previous studies. In the community based analysis, contents of social capital and health worries and uneasiness were different among local communities within the same administrative village, so that the local community, which is the unit of seasonal hunting or ceremonies, was considered to be another independent health determinant factor of the people.