The Shanghai household registered population is highly aged. The elderly occupy a large proportion and continues to increase because of the aging of the generations of one-child families. This study examines the influential factors in the elder care decision-making process of those households with registered elderly people, focusing on changing notions of elder care and changing parent–child relationships. In-depth interviews were conducted with both nursing home residents and community dwelling elderly individuals in downtown Shanghai. Our analysis of the interviews identified three main issues regarding elder care. First, the traditional Filial Piety is changing in response to modern society. Second, family members’ inability to provide elder care, the burdens of maintaining an independent household, and nursing home features and conditions are the main factors influencing the decision to enter a nursing home. Third, Filial Piety continues to be expressed through close residential distances between parents and children and a high visit frequency of children’s visits to elderly parents.

Scientific forestry and its environmentalist vision influenced the modern Japanese approach to forestry in the mainland as well as its colonies. Annexed into the Japanese empire with Taiwan in 1895, the Penghu Islands played a significant role in colonial forestry in two ways: The treeless landscape gave rise to an afforestation project by colonial foresters, including Tashiro Antei, and encouraged the construction of Honda Seiroku’s understanding of forest zones and the environmental history of “devastation.” Although the plantation project in the islands did not succeed due to dry climate and strong sea breeze, Honda’s vision of Penghu with a tropical forest in the past was reinforced by Ino Kanori’s historical research and was accepted among colonial foresters in Taiwan through dispute, compromise, and a fusion of understandings. It supported the colonial forestry with an environmentalist expectation of a “reforestation” project, criticizing the Chinese population for creating the treeless landscape before the Japanese colonization. This shows a complicated relationship between scientific forestry and colonialism, in which an environmentalist idea developed parallel to the establishment of forestry science through communication between the metropole and the colony.

New information and communication technologies make it possible to conduct detailed analyses of the use of space by visitors at different scales. For example, geotagged social media records can be used to capture the digital footprint of human spatial behavior within a city. This study demonstrates the potential of these data using information from photo-sharing services to compare the distribution of visitors according to their country of residence among three major tourism sites of central Tokyo, namely. Shinjuku, Asakusa, and Ginza. We classified geotagged photographs from Flickr according to country of residence using information from user profiles and analyzing the distribution with geographical information systems (GIS). We then compared the varying spatial patterns of three groups of visitors by country of residence: Japan, Asia, and Europe. The results showed that both domestic and foreign visitors tended to visit places close to railroad stations. However, the distribution of the areas of interest (AOI) for foreign visitors showed higher spatial concentrations than those for domestic visitors. In Shinjuku and Ginza, differences were seen between Asians and Europeans in AOI, but no such differences were observed in Asakusa. These distinctions may be attributable to the spatial structures of tourism sites and the mode of visitors’ activities.