In suburban areas of big cities, agricultural land acquisition is often caused by farmers who converted their agricultural land into urban uses as substitutional agricultural land. And agricultural land in a municipality is often acquired by non-resident farmers.<br>The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship between urbanization and some features of agricultural land acquisition and to identify the regional pattern of the acquisition. The indices related to urbanization and acquisition are used for the analysis. The survey area is Saitama Prefecture, a suburban area of the Tokyo Metropolis.<br>The structure of this research are as follows: Firstly, the ninety-two municipalities of Saitama Prefecture are classified zonally by time-distance to the Tokyo CBD. Then the zonal features of indices through the classification are discussed. Secondly, by using principal component analysis, and cluster analysis, ninety-two municipalities are classified.<br>The analysis shows the following results:<br>1) The degree of urbanization corresponds to the time-distance to the Tokyo CBD. The relation between them can be summarized in three types of regions: within 60 minutes of the Tokyo CBD; between 60 and 140 minutes; and more than 140 minutes.<br>2) By principal component analysis, the first principal component is given a meaning as the activity of agricultural land acquistion and the second principal component as the degree of urbanization. The relation between the distribution of the first principal component scores and that of the second ones is noteworthy. The municipalities which have higher scores of the second principal component (the degree of urbanization) are concentrated on the outer boundary of the Tokyo Metropolis. The municipalities which have higher scores of the first principal component (the activity of agricultural land acquisition) are distributed around or overlapping the areas of higher scores of the second principal component.<br>3) Four regions are identified by cluster analysis. These are named Neighborhood areas Suburban areas and Outer fringe areas (both plane and mountainious types). These regions are regarded to be the same as the three types of regions mentioned in 1).<br>The features of agricultural land acquisition are identified as a pattern resembling concentric circles. This means that the agricultural land acquisition around a big city is strongly affected by urbanization process. There is a lot of conversion of agricultural land into urban uses in urbanizing areas. The demands for substitutional agricultural land are also created there. Substitutional agricultural land is acquired around the site of urban development usually in suburban areas. The results obtained by principal component analysis fit in with the realities of agricultural land acquisition.