## Materials and Methods  
### Conceptual and Theoretical Frameworks  
There is no concrete definition of land grabbing that includes all necessary things that can be used for any geographical area. Rather, \"land grab\" needs to consider several aspects such as: size, people, control, usage, and legality. Considering these, the European Coordination Via Campesina [29] has shaped the definition of land grab as follows:  
Land grabbing is the control whether through ownership, lease, concession, contracts or general power of lager that locally-typical amounts of land by any persons or entities public or private, foreign or domestic via any means-legal or illegal for purposes of speculation, extraction, resource control or commodification at the expense of peasant farmers, agroecology, land stewardship, food sovereignty and human rights. On the contrary, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and United Nation (UN) refers land grabbing as land acquisitions that are large scale and engage foreign entities and local government that also exclude some actors and also impacts on food security [30; 31]. They also understand that the land grab has impacts on the social and local livelihoods, and sometimes have sovereignty issues as well [3]. The International Land Coalition strongly mentioned that a land grab has a direct impact on rural poor and their livelihood and also violate human rights to some extent [13; 32]. Moreover, a land grab has assumed a negative connotation, in particular a dynamic of power among those that have the control over the land [33; 34]. The control over land (particularly those of bigger size) by the national and foreign entities have the main phenomenon of a land grab. In the case of Japan, the size of the forestland owned by the foreigners was not so large (such as 1 to 2 ha mainly) but the foreigners have the use and selling rights and gained controlling power over the lands. Therefore, the forestland grab is conceptualized in this research as the transfer of control and rights over property and resources from local control to the outsiders such as national and foreign entities. On the contrary, forests provide a variety of environmental, economic, and social benefits, as well as home for the animals and plants. In order to understand how social-ecological interactions shape sustainable development of Hokkaido forests in the land-grabbing perspective, the study gathered ideas from the literature of social-ecological systems [10; 35; 36; 37]. In particular, the study used the \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline  & **2006** & **’07** & **’08** & **’09** & **’10** & **’11** & **’12** & **’13** & **’14** & **’15** & **’16** & **2017** & **Total** \\ \hline Company/Person & 03 & 08 & 12 & 06 & 15 & 14 & 09 & 14 & 15 & 16 & 29 & 44 & **185** \\ Area (ha) & 25 & 87 & 94 & 362 & 56 & 157 & 16 & 194 & 174 & 74 & 202 & 148 & **1589** \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Trends of forest land grabbing by the foreigners in Japan [26]. social-ecological model to discuss how interactions between institutions, actors, and resource uses shaped the sustainable development of the Japanese forests within the effect of the land-grabbing process (Figure 1). Accordingly, the study also analyzes the land rules and regulations of Japan in order to understand the social-ecological context of the Hokkaido's forestland grabbing situation. The triangular social-ecological model can easily express the divergent priorities of planning in which the societal view of nature puts forward the challenge of \"man versus nature\" [36]. Therefore, the analysis of the triangular model based on the social-economic framework (Figure 1) is done to address the question of sustainable development of the Hokkaido's forest due to land grabbing. The three dimensions of the framework led to three different perspectives of the land-grabbing effect on sustainable forest development.