A huge area has been in the process of reclamation in the Saemangum area, Cholla North province, Republic of Korea, since 1991. The controversy concerning the objective as well as the value of the tidelands has become a heated issue nationwide. Agencies of the environmental movement and local grassroots organizations have protested the reclamation project, arguing that the project lacks a clear objective and will lead to destruction of the largest tidelands in the country.
This paper aims to examine the temporal space structures of environmental controversies which are socially constructed with regard to regional development issues. The authors clarified the temporal changes in the “Saemangum controversy” through newspapers and key informant interviews over the last five years according to the three different spatial dimensions of national, regional, and local.
The results showed that the points of issue concerning environmental problems with different spatial dimensions constitute multiple structures, varying with the arena of controversy. If an environmental problem is variable according to a spatial dimension as well as a temporal one, the key to solving lies in how to develop the structure of controversy, not in determining the fundamental aspects of the environmental problem.

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Nansei Shoto is a common geographic name used in maps to refer to the area between Kyushu Island and Formosa Island, while the term Ryukyu Rettou is more often used in scientific papers. In addition to Nansei Shoto, the terms Ryukyu Shoto, Satsunan Shoto, and other geographic names are also used in tiers in this area. This paper describes the development of these tiered geographic names and the process of their establishment in Japanese society. The geographic names in this area were basically given by the Hydrographic Department of the Japanese Navy in the Meiji era and have been used continuously to the present. The name Satsunan Shoto alone comes from the private sector and has taken root. The established geographic names entered common usage through their appearance in geography textbooks and atlases, and a textbook screening system has played an important role in unifying several patterns of use in geography books.
The Amami Shoto area used to belong to the Ryukyu Kingdom before its occupation by the Satsuma domain (one of the most powerful feudal domains in Tokugawa Japan) in the early 17th century. Even after the islands were ceded to the Satsuma domain, they were disguised to other countries as Ryukyu territory and were treated as an ambiguous border area. When a dispute over Ryukyu possession arose between Japan and China around 1880, the Japanese government started using the geographic name Ryukyu Shoto to refer to the area south of the Okinawa Shoto area (not including the Amami Shoto area). After the establishment of the term Satsunan Shoto to refer to the area north of the Amami Shoto area, the concept of dividing the Nansei Shoto area into the two regions of Satsunan Shoto and Ryukyu Shoto became common.
During and after the Second World War, the US military intended to treat the “Ryukyu Islands” as the area south of the Amami Shoto area and to govern them as an area of ethnologic unity independent of the Japanese mainland. Consequently, the geographic name came to be used politically as a device to separate Japan's national lands.
Although the Geographical Survey Institute standardized the geographic names in the Nansei Shoto area in 1954 and those in geography textbooks were also standardized, other geographic names are often used in scientific papers when indicating points common to Amami Shoto and Okinawa Shoto areas.
Geographic names in the Nansei Shoto area should be used after consideration of the historical and political background of each.

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In climate research, when climatologists need to know on which days a specific pressure pattern occurred, for example, “low in the west and high in the east (winter type)” or “high in the south and low in the north (summer type),” a huge number of surface weather charts must be scanned visually. To solve this problem, we propose an automatic detection method using pattern recognition developed in the computer science field. In this study, we used support vector machine (SVM), which is one pattern recognition method. Then, we classified pressure patterns into the “winter type” and “not winter type.” We confirmed the validity of the proposed method experimentally. In our experiments, we used the JRA-25 data from 1981 to 2000 for training data and test data.
The results showed that our SVM method achieves greater than 90% accuracy. Therefore, automatic detection of pressure pattern is possible by setting positive and negative examples based on a standard. Additionally, long-term data can be classified easily using our proposed method, and the results can be used to evaluate changes in the frequency of pressure patterns.

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The emergence and development of Chinese outbound tourism have been the result of an open policy and economic reform in China since the end of the 1980s. The rapid development of outbound tourism has been promoted by increases in income and leisure time, easing of international and domestic limitations, and improved infrastructure.
In Japan, the balance of payments deficit in outbound tourism has continued for a long time. Currently, Japan's government is trying to improve this disadvantageous situation. China, as a potential source of inbound visitors for Japan, has a vital position in the Visit Japan Campaign, which aims at significantly increasing the number of foreign tourists to Japan. However, there is little research on the spatial characteristics of Chinese tourists. The purpose of this study was to examine the spatial characteristics of Chinese tourists in Japan by analyzing package tours offered in China.
Most package tours of Japan have similar destinations. There is a distinctive regional inequality in tourist destinations among Chinese visitors compared with Korean and Taiwanese tourists. The main destinations of Chinese tourists are large cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. Chinese tourists are mainly attracted to shopping and exploring lively streets in cities. In addition to these activities, package tours include side trips to volcanoes and Japanese-style hot springs near these cities. Therefore Chinese tourist spaces in Japan are focused on metropolitan areas like Tokyo and Osaka. Presently, Chinese tours to Japan are limited only to group tours; certain limitations and restrictions are still in place. Therefore Chinese tourists generally must see many attractions and products when they travel to Japan.

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A climatological study was performed to understand the characteristics of the diurnal variation and vertical structure of the “Karakkaze wind,” which is the local wind observed over the Kanto Plain in winter. The data for a 15-year period (1992–2006) were analyzed. The data used in this study not only include the conventional AMeDAS data, surface observation, and sonde station data but also tower and wind profiler data, which have not been used in previous studies.
The following characteristics of the Karakkaze wind were revealed. 1) The surface wind system of the averaged Karakkaze-wind days shows a clearer diurnal variation than that of the winter average. In the area with clear diurnal variation, the daytime wind speed of the average of Karakkaze-wind days is strong and nearly twice that of the winter average. However, the wind weakens at night. 2) In the upper level of the atmospheric boundary layer, the wind speed decreases in the late morning and increases in the evening. 3) The convective mixed layer height may be higher on the Karakkaze-wind days because of weak atmospheric stability. Therefore the downward momentum transfer is larger on the averaged Karakkaze-wind days than the winter average, which results in the formation and maintenance of a strong Karakkaze wind in the daytime. 4) Relative humidity and precipitation are relatively high in the Hokuriku area and low in the Kanto Plain. Solar radiation is greater in the Kanto Plain and less in the Hokuriku area. This difference is more marked on the averaged Karakkaze-wind days than the winter average. These results indicate that the Karakkaze wind is associated with the foehn phenomenon, which can form a higher convective mixed layer and a larger downward momentum transfer.

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