This paper analyzes the development process of grain elevators in Kansas, focusing especially on the time-spatial competition and grouping of elevator companies. Originally constructed by flour milling companies, elevator construction boomed in the 1870s as railroads expanded to the west. Then, in the 1920s, many farmers' cooperatives built elevators. The first elevators were small with capacities of 5, 000 to 15, 000 bushels and were constructed of wood with sheet metal for protection against weather and fire. Wooden elevators gradually changed to concrete ones in the 1930s, and the storage capacity expanded to 150, 000 to 450, 000 bushels. Known as the Cathedral of the Plains, a grain elevator in a rural area served as a market and gathering point for grains produced within a 5to 10 -mile radius. Each elevator also supplied fuel, fertilizer, seed, chemicals, feed, and daily necessities to farmers. However, only a few elevator companies established in the 19th century have survived through the consolidation of the grain business.
In the late 1950s, the large grain elevators with over 1-million bushel capacity, which are called terminal elevators, were constructed with governmental subsidies. Some elevator companies that own huge terminal elevators, in places such as Abilene, Salina, Hutchinson, and Wichita, emerged on the old Chisholm Trail. Collingwood and Garvey are examples. The companies constructed terminal elevators and gathered grain from more than 100 elevators that they had built or purchased in rural Kansas and Oklahoma. Although the names can be seen on the walls of elevators, Collingwood was taken over by ADM in 1987, and the last terminal elevator of Garvey was sold to DeBruce in 1996.
Major grain companies had elevators and their own service areas in rural areas, as the Bunge Corporation had service areas in southwest Kansas, and Continental Grain in northwest and central Kansas in the 1950s and 1960s. However, major grain companies concentrated their attention more on terminal elevators and acquired them in the 1970s and 1980s. Major grain companies consequently integrated grain marketing vertically. For example, the Sauna terminal elevator owned by Cargill, the world's largest grain company, has a capacity of 32 million bushels and stores grain from contracted elevators within a 90-mile radius.

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In the high economic growth era, a tide of people from the nonmetropolitan area flowed into the metropolitan areas where they put down roots for starting and nurturing their families. To obtain the fundamental knowledge to understand the processes that led to the expansion of metropolitan suburbs, we examined the residential careers of people from the nonmetropolitan area. Longitudinal data on residential careers were collected through a survey of graduates of high schools in Nagano Prefecture who lived in the Tokyo metropolitan area using a retrospective questionnaire. In the data, the end of each residential career is not converged into a specific area, as different from the data used in the preceding studies. Thus, it enables us to investigate the spatial characteristics of residential moves within the metropolitan area generally. In addition, the residential careers of three cohorts (around 60, 50 and 40 years old at present) were studied comparatively in terms of the socioeconomic context to apply the concept of life-course.
From the viewpoint of family life cycle, the residential careers of the three cohorts have similar characteristics. The number of residential moves after marriage is normally one or two, and the mobility of the family peaks when the age of the householder is around 30. Most of the householders become owner-occupiers in the first half of their 30s, when the mobility of the family decreases drastically. While the inclination toward the home ownership can be observed in each of the three cohorts, the time for purchasing a house and affordable types of housing are influenced by the conditions of the housing market and the lifestyle of the generation of the time. That is, families in all generations want to be owner-occupiers, but types house purchased and ability to buy a owneroccupied house were influenced by the socio-economic context of the time.
Summing up the spatial characteristics of residential moves within the metropolitan area, shortdistance and centrifugal moves are prominent and most moves are made within the sector zones of the metropolitan circle. Because the desire of a family for larger living space is materialized by residential relocations in the concentric structure of the urban land price, centrifugal moves mainly have an origin around the core of the metropolitan area and cause the suburbanization of residential place. After purchasing their own home, some families change houses within a narrow district nearby. These residential careers in the aggregate result in the suburbanization of residence and set the foundation for subsequent independence of metropolitan suburbs.

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This paper documents the vegetation distribution of the moor on the summit of Mt. Hiragatake and its circumference, located on the boundary between Gunma and Niigata Prefectures, to clarify the invasion of nonnative vegetation after the moor became arid. It is clear that Pinus pumila and Sasa kurilensis, nonnative moor vegetation, invaded the moor from the circumference. They were distributed over the boundary region of the moor, and P. pumila invaded the moor first, forming shrub vegetation. The shrub blocked the northwesterly wind in winter, forming an environment with a temperature not too low and high desiccation, allowing S. kurilensis to invade. Such an environment protects S. kurilensis, it became vigorously. Finally, S. kurilensis replaced P. pumila. The invasion of other nonnative moor vegetation will simultaneously progress further following the invasion of S. kurilensis.

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