Abstract
The urgent issue in current geography education is to examine what geography as a field of social studies in junior high schools should be. To resolve this issue, its relationship with history and its treatment of the world, would be a great discussion. On this regard, this paper analyzed the changes in relationship between geography and history in social studies and treatment of the world in both fields of them. Overall, history has focused on “Japan” rather than the “world.” On the other hand, though having dealt with the “world” and “Japan” almost equally, geography has recently moved its focus to domestic matters. Furthermore, history makes substantial relationship with geographical conditions, but geography tends to eliminate the historical elements by stressing on modern geographical phenomena. However, this situation should be improved because geographies of the world are important in social studies, and the geographical explanation of the world with the history is very effective in teaching.
