Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) have often caused severe disasters in Bhutan. Research groups including the present author conducted risk assessment of GLOFs in 1998 and 2002 in the northwestern and northern areas in Bhutan. These results and analyses of satellite images indicate that the most dangerous glacial lakes are likely to be moraine-dammed lakes with a large amount of lake water. In general, glacial lakes started as the scattered small supraglacial lakes, and develop a connected large supraglacial lake, and then a frontal dead-ice dammed lake, and finally a moraine-dammed lake. To conduct valid assessment of GLOF, quantitative researches on glacial lakes, moraine dams, and surroundings of lakes and glaciers are required. Dangerous glacial lakes at present are as follows: Thorthomi Glacial Lake in eastern Lunana, glacial lakes in the upper basins of Monde Chu, and those in the upper basins of Kuri Chu, which are located in Tibet on the southern slopes of Kula Kangri. Japanese geographers can assist scientists and officials in Bhutan providing satellite information for monitoring, supporting field researches, and intermediating between Bhutan and China for the research in the Kuri Chu basin in Tibet.

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These days in Japan, the number of children who become victims on brutal crimes is increasing. For decreasing the victims on such crimes, the activity of making crime prevention map is gradually spreading all over Japan. Many kinds of maps are being made in such activities. The aim of the map making activities is to foster children to understand the environment and landscape that some crimes are about to occur. Children learn such environment and landscape through the fieldwork and making crime prevention maps. Geography can play important role for making crime prevention map activities because geography and geographers accumulate the way of education of doing fieldwork, reading landscape and using Web-GIS as a tool for sharing neighborhood information. The more Geography and geographers should take part in making crime prevention map activities, the more useful and effective crime prevention activities and maps there will be.

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Mongolian Pastoral System has high mobility and has two characteristics in husbandry. One is the high ratio of castrated males in the herds and the other is the diverse use of animals. These characteristics are adaptations to the natural and social environments of the Mongolian Plateau. Mongolian nomadic pastoralism is not simply a subsistence economy, rather it is a military economy with information technology. In the 20th century, along with demilitarization associated with socialist modernization, nomadic pastoralism was turned into animal husbandry. Today, as Mongolia undergoes transformation into market economy, regional differences are widening, so are household differences. In this situation, herders still prefer to move in order to get better access to social resources, rather than natural resources.

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Japanese society has recently seen growing public concern about the issues of food. The government increasingly takes responsibility for food security in the globalized food systems, while new types of food practice are certainly emerging in farms, markets, restaurants and household. How can we understand such complicated situations? The food geography, tackling these issues especially in the western developed countries, probably provides a significant arena for the inter- and intra-disciplinary discussion. In order to attend this arena, as well as to understand the current situation of food production and consumption in Japan itself, it is necessary to share the key concepts and frameworks, which have dominated some recent subjects of food geography. This paper presents some discussion about how we can approach the issues of food in particular in the political-economic and socio-cultural contexts of Japan, conceptually focusing on the notions of the food regime, the global commodity chain, food deserts, the food network, the economics of conventions and actor-network theory, respectively. Most if not all of these notions have been articulated in the contexts of Anglo-American and European countries. This paper attempts to explore the possibilities of applying them to the Japanese context, with reference both to the academic background of their proponents and to the contextual difference between western and Japanese societies. As concluding remarks, we argue that we need further international and inter-disciplinary discussions and empirical studies from cross-cultural perspectives.

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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.

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