The purpose of this paper is to propose a new analytical framework for promoting researches on Japan's hilly and mountainous areas based on geographical points of view. Firstly, the author examined the relation between rural studies and disciplines employing the researcher's data on Internet provided by the National Institute of Informatics. He found that the regional study approach aiming to obtain a synthetic view was quite useful for conducting rural studies of Japan. Rural geographers should be engaged in their research work employing such an approach. Then hitherto studies on hilly and mountainous areas were reviewed to grasp problems concerning the research methods. The most crucial problem in the past studies was that no systematic view was prepared for making clear the characteristics of those areas. Therefore the author proposed a theoretical framework based on the regional study approach for filling up a gap between the research results and the real situation.