This paper examines the interpretation of the geographic context in which outsourcing of public service is undertaken in a peripheral region. In Japan, peripheral municipalities often have difficulties in introducing outsourcing schemes because there are few local independent revenue sources and welfare service industries are lacking. Sannohe town which has consigned services to a private company outside the region was examined as a case.
Judging from the long-term contract with a large professional service enterprise outside the region and cumulative negotiations with the enterprise, the “cooperative contracting” form has been followed by Sannohe. At the same time, Sannohe town has a fiduciary obligation to owe recruit residents in the ancillary sector, while maintaining the wage level that received by temporary workers. Sannohe town retains the authority to determine the content of service. As a result, the service contents have not changed even though the provider was replaced, with the exception that the number of employees in the consigned business has increased. On the other hand, fiscal expenses for the management of the services have risen although cost reductions with outsourcing were expected.
This service management system has significantly influenced the strategy of the Sannohe municipal administration. At first, the aim of outsourcing was labor cost reduction. However, the civil service has played an important role in local employment. Therefore, cutbacks of staffs engaged in the service sector gave rise to anxiety about service deterioration and of rising unemployment in the region. In consideration of such regional conditions, the administration shifted its primary aim of privatization from cost reduction to “expanding employment opportunities in the town” and “long-term continuation of service provision.” In this processes, two geographic factors specific to peripheral regions, i.e., scarcity of employment opportunities and lack of professional service enterprises that can manage various sectors, have influenced the scheme and management of privatization in Sannohe.
Based on the conditions of outsourcing in Sannohe, it is difficult for peripheral municipalities to use outsourcing or competitive tendering scheme to reduce fiscal costs. In such municipalities, there are many constraints to overcome at the local labor market or service level.

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This paper examines how thoroughly and effectively the self-organizing map (SOM) can analyze urban residential characteristics. As an artificial neural network, the SOM is able to extract characteristic patterns of multidimensional data by learning their features. Compared with the factor analyses used in previous research, the SOM reflects more information on residential characteristics in the research outcomes by directly classifying the characteristics. In addition, “feature maps” available through the SOM visualize their temporal changes. All districts in a dataset are classified with neurons on the SOM. Moreover, by calculating the statistics on all districts using each neuron, it is possible to visualize spatiotemporal transformations of the features on these maps, which are called “aggregated maps” in this paper.
To demonstrate the thoroughness and effectiveness of the SOM, this paper focuses on transformations of built-up areas in Kobe, Japan, by analyzing residential characteristics before and after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995. The earthquake hit the Hanshin area, severely damaging Kobe's inner-city area crowded with wooden houses. For this SOM analysis, a spatiotemporal dataset on the residential characteristics of Kobe was developed from small-area statistics from population censuses conducted in 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005.

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Since the 1990s, childcare services have gained widespread public attention in Japan because of the falling birthrate. In particular, extended-care service has become more important considering the diverse range of employment opportunities for women and mothers in recent years. This paper focuses on the local support for extended-care services in hot spring resort areas, where many female employees are needed in Japanese-style inns and other service enterprises. Ultimately, the abundance of working women in these resort areas created a greater demand for extended-care services.
In Japan, soon after the Second World War, the central government started to improve public daycare centers for war orphans and children of impoverished workers. By the 1980s, the overall number of daycare centers had increased. However, care ages and care hours in public daycare centers were so limited that mothers who worked in the service industry could not use the public centers. The needs of such mothers were accommodated by private centers that provided extended services. During that period, some fatal accidents in private centers demonstrated the inadequacy of services offered by public daycare centers. After the 1990s, the central government started to subsidize nighttime childcare services.
In Nanao, one of the most famous hot spring resort areas in the Hokuriku district, one Japanese-style inn has a workplace nursery, and 13.8% of authorized daycare centers provide services past 20:00. This is a higher rate than the national average, but is necessary for the following reasons: Japanese-style inns need to accommodate well-trained employees to maintain the quality of services for guests; and, as the working hours of a Japanese-style inn are atypical compared with a regular office job, there is subsequently a greater need for childcare services at night. In response to these conditions, a major Japanese-style inn established a workplace nursery in the 1980s, and an association of other Japanese inns set up a daycare center with nighttime services. The daycare center established by the association of Japanese inns was authorized and supported by the local government. In addition, some authorized centers recognized the need for nighttime childcare services in this area and now provide extended care.
In conclusion, during the period when the central government had not yet provided extended services, local governments, companies, and activists in daycare centers met the childcare needs demanded by the working constraints in the Japanese-style inns in Nanao. Furthermore, the role of the municipal government was essential in the creation of extended-care programs because there are no private centers in Nanao, the population is small, and the history as a hot spring resort area is short.

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This study aimed to show the locational trends of large-scale retail stores from the perspective of locational regulations. The Tokushima urban region was selected as the study area.
First, the implementation process of locational regulations in the urban region was investigated. The parameters analyzed were the Large-Scale Retail Store Law and the Large-Scale Retail Store Location Law. As a result, the locational regulations of the study area were found to be less stringent than the national trend.
Second, the locational trends of large-scale retail stores in the Tokushima urban region were analyzed. Two findings were derived: 1) some non-local companies opened many stores such as general merchandise stores or supermarkets in the 1980s. In this period, the national government strictly implemented large-scale retail store regulations. 2) Although the national government enacted flexible locational regulations in the 1990s, large-scale retail stores were expanded to the suburbs after 2000. This may be due to the launching of new locational regulation such as the Large-Scale Retail Store Location Law in the 2000s.
Furthermore, due to the inconsistency between the local regulations and the Large-Scale Retail Store Law, the local government of the region was reluctant to enforce locational regulations. Therefore, the law governing the opening of large-scale retail stores was not fully complied with in the early decades, which eventually affected the location of large scale retail stores and the spatial pattern of commercial accumulation and shopping behavior of the people.

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