This paper presents an analysis of place name perception of residents in Takefu city and tries to explain the characteristics of their mental maps of the city.
Eight hundred and eighty nine pupils of the junior high schools in Takefu city were asked to write their addresses and also whether they knew each of 100 representative place names within the city. Those place names in the questionnaires were selected under the following three criteria: (1) Respondents can identify those places by the given place names. (2) Selected place names are almost evenly distributed throughout the city in terms of their locations. (3) Place names can be almost equally perceived by the respondents.
The author divided Takefu city into 100 smaller districts, each of which had an area of 1km2 respectively. Then, he selected one main place name from each district as a representative of it (Fig. 1). The selected names are those of “cho”. Each district means the object that residents perceive (percieved district) as well as the area where citizens live (dwelling district). A perceptional ratio was defined as the ratio (%) of the respondents in district who could perceive a given place name as the object of perception. The relation between the degrees of perception and the locations of place names was examined by means of both Spearman's rank correlation coefficients (Fig. 2) and regression analysis. In the regression analysis, the expected value of perceptional ratio was calculated by the distance between a dwelling district and each perceived district. The expected values were obtained from the regression equation in which both the distance and the perceptional ratio are logarithmically transformed. The residuals were analyzed to find the structure of place name perception (Table 1).
It was thus clarified that the structure of place name perception was influenced by two elements, the boundary of school-districts and two dominant centers in Takefu city.
