2021 Volume 77 Issue 2 Pages 151-159
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the inter-prefecture travel were affected by the declaration of a state of emergency in Hokkaido and by the government’s declaration of a state of emergency in all 47 prefectures in Japan for avoiding the spread of COVID-19. The data used to clarify this are the Mobile Spatial Statistics (MSS) for the period January-June 2020. As MSS are provided in 500-m mesh estimated population, we aggregated the population of the mesh on prefecture to confirm the volume of travel. The results show that although the declaration of the state of emergency is significantly related to the inter-prefecture travel, it continues to be reduced even after the declaration of the state of emergency is ended, indicating that inter-prefecture travel are still constrained by structural changes and psychological effects.
