Proceedings of the General Meeting of the Association of Japanese Geographers

This presentations aims to assess sustainability of island tourism in Japan. In most Japanese islands, coastal tourism has not developed to the same degree as in other countries. However, recent years have seen an increase in diverse forms of tourism like ecotourism or art tourism. From three examples, Yakushima island, Miyajima island and Naoshima island, we aim to test indicators suggested by the UNWTO in 2004 and suggest a model for sustainability evaluation.

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Yatsuta are narrow rice paddies, surrounded by woodland or grassland, considered by many ecologists to be an important landscape for preserving biodiversity in rural environments. The distribution of narrow rice paddies was mapped using GIS techniques for extracting polygons based on width. In the Kanto Region, narrow rice paddies accounted for only a small area within total rice paddy area, but narrow rice paddies accounted for a large proportion of the line of contact with adjacent land uses, and especially accounted for a large proportion of the contact between rice paddies and woodland.

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The graveyard development is active in the city region in China in the background of the economic growth and a population increase. As for the graveyard by Fengshui, a lot of graveyards are developed by the influence of the idea "It is suitable should return by person's life" on the foot of a mountain slope in a northern part left from the urban area in Beijing City. Various devices are performed to save the land resource corresponding to the increasing graveyard demand in Beijing City.

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At present landslide hazard assessment has given an important role in developing land utilization regulations aimed at minimizing the lives and damages of property. To assess the landslides, variety of approaches have been used in landslide assessments. They can be classified into qualitative and quantitative assessments. Walapane is one of the important social and economic area in Nuwara Eliya district. The landslides frequently occurred in this area, and it was seriously affected to the livelihood and lives. This area was selected due to the considerable amount of annual rainfall, the significance of the slope and yearly change of the land use. Therefore the problem was the landslide hazard and its prevention for a sustainable development of this area. The objective of this study is to prepare landslide hazards zonation map in Walapane. There were six data layers used in this study such as slope changes, annual rainfall variation, a variation of soil types, land use change, geology and the distance from the waterbodies. Then every factor was classified according to the features of each factor and the factor which had been affected by the landslide earlier. The classification was done according to the three risk classes called low risk, moderate risk, and high risk. Then all the vector maps were converted into raster format. For landslide susceptibility map, weight scheme was applied to the factors based on their importance for landslides. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to calculate the weight, the. Six data layers were overlaid considering weights of each factor. Then the landslide hazards zonation map was prepared. Landslide hazards zonation map was developed for November, December and January. According to the past landslide data, most of the landslides occurred in this period. Walapane was classified into three risk level in each month based on the final landslide hazard zonation maps (Table 1).
The map was validated using past landslide data. The overall accuracy of the hazard maps were November 68%; December 85% and January 63%.

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