This paper aims to analyze the types of and principal factors in the in-migration of the elderly in Tokorozawa City, a suburban residential area of Tokyo.
Data for this analysis were collected through interviews and questionnaire surveys. Of 916 respondents who were 60 years old or over, 112 in-migrants came to Tokorozawa City after 60 years of age. Based on these data, the author classified the in-migration of the elderly into three types based on their co-migrants as follows: (1) migration by themselves ; (2) migration with their spouses; and (3) migration with their children. The author then analyzed the attributes of in-migrants, distribution of their previous residences, and reasons for moving.
The main findings are summarized in the following three points:
(1) There were about 1.8 times as many female as male in-migrants. Thus females were more likely to move than males.
(2) Most in-migrants moved with their spouses or by themselves, while 23% of the elderly in-migrants moved with their children. Co-migrants of elderly in-migrants were closely related to their attributes, distribution of their previous residences, and reasons for moving.
(3) The above three types have the following characteristics:
1. The single elderly, almost all female, intended to live with their children. Thirty percent of them decided to move as a result of being widowed. Their previous residences were distributed all over Japan.
2. The elderly who moved with their spouses tended to live near the residences of their children. Most of them migrated in their 60s. They migrated over a shorter distance, mostly coming from the Tokyo metropolitan area.
3. The elderly who moved with their children were ancillary migrants. They came from the surrounding area.
It is suggested that in any of these types, the elderly's decision on the destination depended on the location of their children's family's residences.

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The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the relationship between the meanings of rural spaces and the social context of rural settlements with the intention of developing a dynamic semiotics, and to investigate whether sociosemiotics as a theory of society and meaning could be a useful method in geography. There have been many previous semiotic studies on rural space. However, most of these studies focused on syntax or semantics, and their weak points were static analysis, disregard-ing the diversity of social subjects and social processes. However, pragmatic studies, which consider these social contexts, have been attempted by only a few scholars. On the other hand, sociosemiotics, a pragmatic theory of cultural objects and settlement space, has been believed useful mainly for the anal-ysis of cities and regions. However, the theoretical premises of sociosemiotics were not always based on detailed empirical studies. With the intention of improving these situations, the author undertook a pragmatic study of rural space, and shows the validity of the sosiosemiotic theory in empirical stud-ies based on this case study. In this paper, rural spaces are considered to be signs. The signifiers are ma-terial objects in the spaces, and the signifieds are ideologies and images on the spaces. The texts are the discourses of rural people and travellers through the rural spaces. The historical social process of the rural community is taken as the context.
As the site for the case study, the author selected the remote Madara Island in Saga Prefecture, west-ern Japan. On this island, Catholics and non-Catholics form separate settlements. The non-Catholics fol-low Shintoism, Buddhism, and folk beliefs. Their village is called Honmura (the native settlement), and it is located along an inlet in the southeastern part of the island. The Catholics migrated to the is-land at the end of the Edo era and formed scattered settlements on the tableland in the eastern part of the island. Their village is called Shinmura (the new settlement). The major occupation in these two villages was formerly farming and fishing, and at present is fishing only.
First the author classifies the spatial cognition of the people of the two societies into two scales, and interprets the discourses of the people. The two scales of spatial cognition consist of the island and village. The discourses on the scale of the island reveals people's love for and pride in the island, exclusionism toward outsiders and newcomers, and an inferiority complex toward cities irrespective of the generation. Travellers have an image of the island as being Catholic, with a primitive and sim-ple lifestyle in a peaceful society. On the scale of the village, the discourses of the elderly generation on the other parties' spaces is heated, exclusive and discriminatory. The discourses of the middle-aged generation was found to be composed and cool cognitive, while that of the young generation is objective and neutral. Based on these discourses, the author interprets the meanings of the village spaces. The meanings of the space of Honmura were superior, rich, powerful, and humanistic, and those of the space of Shinmura were inferior, poor, powerless, and religious before the 1970s. How-ever, these meanings have changed. The current meanings of the space of Honmura are inferior, less rich, experiencing decline, conservative, mundane, and shrewd, and those of the space of Shinmura are superior, rich, developing, enterprising, religious, and gentle. Travellers recognize Honmura as mundane and conservative, and in contrast Shinmura is viewed as religious and progressive.
Next, the author elucidates the historical social process on the island to investigate the social con-text of the discourses. The social process can be classified into four periods from the end of the Edo era to the present to describe the economy, society, politics, and culture of the island in these four periods.

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This study discusses the late Quaternary activity of the Arakawa fault, which runs along the Ara-kawa lowlands, between the Musashino and Omiya uplands. The Musashino upland is composed of an alluvial fan. These uplands are tephrostratigraphically and height-distributively divided into the S surface (Shimosueyoshi surface), M1 surface (Narimasu surface), M2 surface (Musashino surface), M3 surface (Nakadai surface), and Tc surface (Tachikawa surface) in descending order. The Omiya upland is correlated with the S and M1 surfaces. The S surface is composed of marine sediment and the M1 surface is mainly underlain by fluvial sand.
There is no significant height change in the longitudinal terrace profiles across the Arakawa fault. A comparison of the gradient between the M2 surface and S surface of the Musashino upland shows no accumulative deformation. These results suggest that the Arakawa fault had no activity during the late Quaternary.

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