In the big cities of our country, the tendency to make buildings higher started first after World War II in the center of the cities where intense commercial and administrative ac-tivties were carried on. From the latter half of the 1950's this tendency turned to reside-ntial buildings as a result of the adaptation of private and public funds to the change in the family structure and the desire for more efficient dwellings.
Ashiya with an area of about 17km² is located to the south of the eastern part of the Rokko mountain area and is a residential town situated between the big cities of Osaka and Kobe. It has a population of about 75, 000. Ashiya first came to hold the public eye as a residential town after World War I, when the upper-class people who made profits owing to the War could afford residences in the suburbs separating their home from their business. Ashiya is well suited for higher class residences due to its natural environment where the land is well drained. The residential area built up in Ashiya and other similar places such as Kobe and Kyoto before World War II will be called hereafter as a residential city of “Ashiya type”. Its characteristics are as follows:
(a) Lots are spacious compared to their proximity to large business districts.
(b) A varied topographic environment which includes mountains, hills, streams, and forests are utilized both as backgrounds for and integral parts of private gardens.
(c) Dwellers are mainly business proprietors with their offices in neighbouring big cities.
(d) The regional structure of the city has a simple pattern consisting of a residential region, small shopping areas around railway stations and the whole is surrounded by rural spaces.
(e) Facilities for production, amusement, higher education and medical care are mainly found in the other proximate areas.
“Rokurokuso” and the areas along the Ashiya River are typical residential areas of Ashiya-type. Rokurokuso was developed in the early Showa era (1927_??_1935) imitating European settlements in Hong Kong.
Since World War II, it has been difficult even in Ashiya to maintain the “Ashiya-type” city owing to war damage which resulted in land ownership suffering severe changes. There, with the progress of reconstruction, multi-family dwellings on small lots started to be built and such areas showed a clear difference with the former residential areas of Ashiya-type. From around 1960, high-rise residences came rapidly to be built in Ashiya. First they were built on the right side of the Miyagawa River to the south of the Hankyu rail line and then in the low and wet coastal area. Then they expanded to the foothills to the north of the Hankyu line and to the natural levees of the Ashiya River. While most of the earlier apartment-type buildings were four-storied, buildings of six stories increas-ed from 1965 and higher residential buildings prevailed in general in Ashiya.
By applying a grid of 300m meshes to the map of Ashiya and by calculating the ratio of floor space of buildings with more than three floors in each grid to the area of grid, it is shown (Fig. 4) that the distribution of high-rise buildings is dense in two types of area. One is the former Ashiya-type residential area and the other is the area where the natural land condition is inappropriate for the Ashiya-type residence and the economic efficiency has been pursued through the development with higher residential buildings.
The capital used for these high-rise buildings and company dwellings comes from the larger cities of Osaka, Kobe etc. and due to the population pressure of those cities, more than half of the residents of the above-mentioned housings are newcomers to the city of Ashiya.
In the area of high-rise residential buildings of Ashiya there are few shopping and amuse-ment facilities.

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Most Japanese urban geographers concntratd their efforts mainly on the problems of the rural-urban fringe at first after Second World War and then turned to the CBD. As a result the zone between them has been left practically untouched, except for a few spontaneous, though excellent, studies by Kiuchi et al.. This symposium was planned to fill up a part of the blank by restricting its theme to a part of the zone, i.e., to the zone encircling the CBD. To approach the theme the internationally comparative point of view was requested to the participants. Main results obatined may be summarized as follows:
In Japanese large cities the CBD is expanding not only vertically, but also horizontally. Changes caused by the expanding CBD do not occur in a uniform way in the adjoining zone. Such different ways of changes were reported in detail. Very interesting is the distribution of slums in a city. They have not come into being in the zone near the CBD but in peripheries of the built-up area. Their growth seem to have no direct relation with the expansion of the CBD. Furthermore, population migration is not very remarkable in this zone except for residential sections which developed mostly on uplands, but in peripheries of the built-up area, because dormitories and residences owned by companies, schools, national and local govermnts etc. dominate in most cases there. These phenomena show that processes which are going on in this zone are different from those in the United States. At the end of the symposium a generalized scheme of the urban structure was presented by Tanabe. This scheme would serve as a common base for further studies of the zone in future.

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It is a very serious problem that our maritime circumstances are changing rapidly, especially, regarding to a tendency of possessing of waters by coastal countries and to contaminations of waters according to rapid growth of industrial progress of all over the world. Maritime products as a resource of food are very important for all mankind, especially for Japanese. Fishing ground of Japanese fisheries has been expanding in these years, but it seems to have come to bounds in international competition.
The symposium was intended to discuss three viewpoints including somewhat newer standpoints than ever. The first was on the Japanese fishery itself, either of coastal fishery or of pelagic fishery, with an orthodox technigue in Japanese economic geography up to this time. The second was concerning to the process of the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, because Japanese fishery might be considered in global scale. The third was discussed from an understanding in geography, from cultural anthropological standpoint.
The members of the symposium consist of four reporters, four commentators, five chair-men, two organizers and some fifty attendants. In the morning session, three reporters read their papers from 9:00 to 12:00 a.m.. The afternoon session started from 1:00 p.m., and commentators led discussion till 5:00 p.m.. There were interesting arguemends by these participants, but we had not enough time to complete all these discussions, conclusion.
The papers of the reporters are in the following.
(1) Takeichi Yoshiki (Nagasaki Univ.) explained coastal fishery of Japan, showing some samples of isolated islands of western Japan. He described the recent tendency, and pointed out the facts that coastal fishery is not declining so far as it has been said, and some villages are keeping their constant products by the efforts of fishermen.
(2) Naoki Kusuhara (Nagasaki Univ.) spoke about pelagic fishery of Japan, with the connection of landing ports of its products. He handled some fishing ports of the Pacific coast of eastern Japan, and mentioned the condition of capital in fishery.
(3) Kenzo Kawakami (The Foreign Office), who is an expert of international conference of fishery, lectured the history of laws and treaties of fisheries and of the seas. He said that Japanese fishery would be soon influenced by the problem of 200-nautical-mile economic waters which was discussed at Caracas in 1974.
(4) Takeshi Saito (Kagoshia Univ.) compared fish-traps of stone fences, fishponds for marine culturings and salt beds, which stood at estuaries, rivermouths and shallow waters. He tried to combine these three cultural constructions, which are somewhat characteristicelements of Southeast Asia.
Concerning these reports, commentators gave some questions and comments to each reporters, and led some discussions with many debators from the floor: Michihiro Kono (Okayama Univ.) to Yoshiki's report, Akira Osaki (Kokushikan Univ.) to Kusuhara's, Hisashi Tajima (Shizuoka Univ.) to Kawakami's and Hiroshi Oguri (Tokyo Gakugei Univ.) to Saito's. There were plenty of remarkable comments, and each discussion, as an individual problem, came to some good results, but it was very difficult to combine all these arguements into the focussed one. It may need another chance to continue such discussions for obtaining some fruitful conclusion about these problems.

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Symposium on the procedures and problems of the environmental impact assessment was held in cooperation with the Committee on the Environment Assessment of the Association of the Japanese Geographers. The speakers and the themes were as follows: (1) K. Nakaseko: Geological conditions and the environment assessment. (2) M. Kusaka: Assessment of geomorphological conditions in the city areas. (3) T. Kawamura: Assessment of climatic conditions. (4) Y. Hosono: Change of the hydrological environment due to urban development. (5) T. Nakanishi: Assessment of environment by the vegetation. (6) H. Sasaki: Change of green areas in the urban configurations. (7) M. Yoshida: Residential environment judged by the consiousness of residents. (d) Y. Mizoo: Assessment of sight-seeing and tourist resort planning. (9) H. Yoshikawa: On the system of environment assessment.
The main problems pointed out are summarized in the following several items: (1) How can we sum up the results of assessment, which are different qualitatively? (2) We must take into consideration the human, social or economic conditions to the environmental assessment. How do we, however, determine or define the range of environment? (3) We shall have to make assessment individually, according to the scales of geographical phenomena. (4) How do we make assessment of future change: e.g. the change of ground water level or vegetation in the urban areas? Our knowledge about these changes is poor at present. (5) Lastly, how can geographers contribute to the policy decision through the assessment of environment?

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Transport is one of the most conspicuous spatial phenomena on the earth's surface. Several themes have interested geographers: the nature of transport network in regions with different character and composition; mode and efficiency of changing transport means which reflect the growing demand of the region. This symposium was planned to attempt an effort to build up a theoretical system of transport geography by making review on studies of various aspects of transport phenomena in particular regions. By request of the organizers four speakers prepared the reports. The symposium, held from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on October 8th, was composed of reports, comments and discussions on specific reports, and final discussion on general subjects.
The Transport and the Region—a case in the port city of Kobe and the inland region of Harima, reported by Minoru Beika, Kobe University. According to the reporter the growth of Kobe was attained in a close connection with the development of the port since its opening in 1868, and he described various roles which the municipal and private institutions played in subsequent periods. He also predicted that the recent opening of the Chugoku Jukan Express Way would force a considerable change to the existing structure of the Harima region. A discussion after the report was directed towards the following topics: correlation in directions of port facilities' expansion and shift of urban centers; relationship of the port's hinterland with the metropolitan growth; and significance of various small-scale industries of Kobe in relation to large-scale heavy industries. Concerning the diminishing rate of increase of the cargo handled at the port, it was pointed out that port activities should be interpreted in a long-range view, since the country's economic growth has turned downwards.
The Bus Transport and the Region— an example in Hyogo Prefecture, reported by Tatsuo Kimura, Kobe Gakuin University. Giving a general description of bus service routes in two separate regions of Hyogo, Tajima and Awaji, Prof. Kimura traced the development of bus transport, and showed changing patterns of network served by bus. In Tajima a change of the nation's railway policy influenced the pattern which was formerly focussed on several important railway stations and could be termed as a multi-nuclei system, and there emerged a new pattern, in which trunk bus routes are arranged in parallel with the rail. While it is possible to delimit the transport sphere by means of frequency of bus service in Tajima, it seems difficult to do in Awaji. The subjects discussed after the report relate to the following questions: When was a change brought about in bus routes patterns invarious parts of the country? To what degree should we consider regional peculiarities in establishing a sphere of transport? How does the transport sphere thus defined correlate with the sphere of retail trade?
Formation of Railway Network in Metropolitan Regions, reported by Eiichi Aoki, Tokyo Gakugei University. Processes of railway development in Tokyo and Osaka regions were examined in relation with urbanization processes for the four periods beginning at the end of the 19th century. In both cases the role of rapid transit was gradually strengthened to meet especially the growing demand made by commuters for urban centers.The shift from street-car to rapid transit as a chief transport means was depicted with many maps. The discussion followed was focussed on the difference of the role which rapid transit should play in city regions with different population size, and the reporter finally out thus pointed.

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