Understanding the Image of Sea for Japanese People by Free Association Questionnaire

Abstract

ABSTRACT : Recently in Japan, as a new movement on issues of Japanese coastal areas, it has begun to discuss marine renewable energy and ocean floor mineral resources. From now on, the developments in the coastal areas are to be more considered as important matters by not only governments but also the residents who should be profited by the developments. Therefore, it is important to implement efficient marine governance by forging consensus with the residents. To supply helpful knowledge to tackle with the challenge, this research aimed to extract the complicated people’s consciousness toward the sea by utilizing free-association questionnaire through an internet survey (n=1034). The result clearly visualizes people’s multi-dimensional consciousness by the co-occurrence network of associated words consisting 9 major consciousness communities. By using GIS, how much people wrote about those consciousness communities was also aggregated for each prefecture, and the resulted maps indicated the people’s various kinds of consciousness rooted to their residential regions.