This study reviews geographical studies on Japan’s retailing systems. Retail system studies encompass several topics: 1) economic growth and retail development in the 1960s, 2) retail format diversification beginning in the 1980s, 3) informatization in Japan’s distribution systems, 4) suburban retailing development in the 1990s, and 5) Japan’s distribution system internationalization. To explain these themes comprehensively, this study sets up two domains, “retail store location” and “retail chain management,” both of which are related to each other. For example, information and delivery networks have influenced store locations, because chain stores try to reduce total delivery costs as far as possible by store location strategies, for instance, high density store networks for convenience store chains. This study aims to explain how retail chains developed their own networks in Japanese consumer markets and impacted and restructured Japanese retailing systems.

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This article attempts to examine the changes in Japanese tourism geography in the 2000s, clarifying the results of its researchers, textbooks and academic papers, and consider future visions. The most notable development in the changing demographics of the researchers is a drop in the average age. Young researchers who are mainly university students have had the chance to learn tourism geography as a first discipline at their universities. However, judging by the evidence from textbooks, tourism geography in Japan only began to be admitted as an academic discipline in this decade and a statement of definition of tourism geography is going to be more related to ‘space’ mind rather than ‘region’ mind. On the other hand, however, none of the textbooks have introduced a common theory or models of tourism space. As regards academic papers in the 2000s, peer-reviewed papers tend to be in major geographical journals in Japan, but a higher number of papers are published in bulletins. This situation may arise from the fact that tourism geography is based mostly on regional studies. Also the methodology of Japanese tourism geography is not as advanced compared with the rest of the world, and more scientific methodology is needed in the research such as statistical method, qualitative survey methods, GIS or collaborative methods with the physical sciences.

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Japan is subject to disasters due to its natural condition. Until the 1970s, the relationship between river flood and the geomorphological condition in alluvial plains was studied and the results were applied to hazard mapping. After the 1980s, landslide and debris flow, earthquake, and volcanic activity became the main problems of disaster prevention. After the Great Hanshin Awaji Earthquake Disaster of 1995, geographical studies on earthquake disaster have increased. The Association of Japanese Geographers (AJG) established the Commission of Disaster Responses in 2001, and the commission holds symposia on disasters from the geographical viewpoint every year in the general meeting of the AJG. The mapping of the tsunami stricken area of the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster of 2011 was carried out by a special team of the Association of Japanese Geographers. A study relating to that disaster is being conducted now in the fields of physical geography and human geography. The role of the Japanese geographer is becoming very important throughout the world in the study of disasters.

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The objective of this study is to clarify the changes of agriculture in mountainous regions under the Common Agricaltural Policy (CAP) by focusing on the relationship between farm management and agricultural policy in the mountainous regions of France. In particular, a composition of income from subsidies that accounted for the total agricultural income and an investigation on the perspectives of farm households were emphasized. Since the 1960s, structural policy has differentiated between dairy husbandry management and other Mézenc operations, decreased the agricultural population, increased the number of corporation management companies, and increased productivity by agricultural production engineering and the breed improvement of livestock and grain. Meanwhile, production control policy promoted management differentiation between dairy farmers of Mézenc and diversified management types by preferential measures for beef cattle and sheep. As for agricultural income, it was clarified that the dependence of beef cattle farmers and farmers of mixed sheep on subsidies was high because of payment for the number of livestock and because dairy farmers who could not receive payment connected directly to production were disadvantaged in receiving a subsidy. However, it was clarified that cross-compliance (environment compliance rules) for subsidy requirements increased the burden of farm households and, as a result, decreased the motivation for farming operations; hence, there exists a backlash against the system and the government.

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This paper recreates an appropriate tourism model to sustain rural land use in Mae Kampong village, Chiang Mai province, Thailand. The study focuses on the village’s current land use and existing tourism management. The data, collected by interview and field observation, were analyzed and compared with tourism trends in the area for modification into an integrated tourism model for sustainable rural land use. In this paper, the sustainability of rural land use is shown to derive from the maintenance and increase of community capital, including natural, human, social, financial or built, and cultural capital. These categories of capital can also be comparably merged with four elements of rural land use sustainability, ecological, economic, social, and cultural sustainability as a conceptual framework for an integrated tourism model. Land use in Mae Kampong village can be sustained by the existing tourism management model, which has been integrated mainly by community-based tourism and ecotourism. Recently, however, long-stay tourism and health tourism have arisen with the possibility of creating new resources and generating new wealth from tourism and rural land use, such as an increase in rental houses and resort hotels, the development of health products from forest tea, and the organic local food served to tourists in homestays. The recreated tourism model, therefore, is integrated by four types of tourism, community-based, long-stay, health, and ecotourism, so as to achieve a higher living standard which attributed the overall rural land use sustainability to four components of its sustainability.

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From the viewpoint of the food chain and based on an intensive survey, we discussed the growth of horticulture and the impact on remote rural villages. A case-study village was selected in Raebareli District, Uttar Pradesh, that is outside the area directly affected by big cities like Lucknow and Kanpur, in order to investigate the real situation of farmers engaged in the newly developed horticulture. According to the survey some farmers can get higher income from the recently introduced commercial crops such as banana, mango and menthol but the cost of cultivation is not small. Therefore, only higher-level farmers can introduce these high-income commercial crops and the lower-level ones cannot. In this sense the direct impact of the newly introduced commercial crops is exclusive to the higher-level farmers. But we focused on the increase in employment opportunities for agricultural laborers within the village. This is created by the commercial crop farming of higher-level farmers. Lower-level villagers cannot self-directively engage in agricultural labor in the horticultural sector, though the higher-level farmers can develop their self-directive farm management. However, in whatever form, expansion of cash income opportunities has brought chances to improve quality of life in remote rural areas where there are very few non-agricultural employment opportunities. It is important for the village to introduce commercial crops as a form of horticultural crop that needs much manpower to cultivate. Such crops carry significance for the village economy, more so than the traditional crops that have been mechanized and need little manpower to cultivate.

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Understanding the type of spaces and scenery that people prefer is important when designing and managing tourist destinations. A technique based on participants’ own photography has been used to analyze visitors’ scenic perceptions during their on-site experiences. We created a density map of visitors’ photo-taking locations and thus evaluated the space potential, based on their visual preferences. This study attempts to reduce certain biases by modeling the maps using the kernel density estimation (KDE) method. Two types of weighted scores are used in the density computation and five indicators are set as the components of the weighted scores: the scores of likeability which indicates the emotional distance with each photograph, the scores based on the object types of photos, the reciprocal number of photographs created by each participant, the distance between the photo-taking locations and the participants’ starting points, and the reciprocal of the photo-taking time. The weighted scores enabled more accurate density maps of the photo-taking locations, better indicating the potential of locations when compared to the result with non-weighted scores. The results will contribute to park management and to policies relating to the conservation, maintenance, and promotion of visual resources.

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