The aim of this paper is to evaluate forest management for reducing the risks of Japanese cedar pollinosis in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. For this, we propose a new model with multizonal contingent markets based on the contingent valuation method (CVM) for valuing environmental goods widely distributed in the study area.
Following the framework of the CVM, the economic value of the environmental goods is estimated from people's willingness to pay (WTP) for a management option. A WTP is obtained by asking the question: “If management of Japanese cedar forest in a zone prevent pollen production causing pollinosis, how much could you afford to pay for forest management?” We prepared five concentric belts for each residential place (0-25, 25-50, 50-75, 75-100 and 100-125km from a residential place) so that we could repeat the same question on WTP for each concentric belt. A mail survey was conducted to obtain the data on WTP in eastern part of Yamaguchi Prefecture.
The total value of forest management is estimated in two phases. First, WTP functions are modelled for each concentric zonal market using a Tobit model. Second, by applying the WTP functions to every residential place (municipality) in the study area, we estimate the benefits of forest management for each pair of residential place and concentric belt. By summing the local benefits, we obtained the estimated total benefit (annual value) of managing all the Japanese cedar forest in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
The conclusions of this paper are summarized as follows:
1) A clear distance decay trend of WTPs is found using the proposed model of multizonal contingent markets with concentric belts from residential places. WTPs are also regulated by annual household income (INC). Since the number of households and the average income per household in densely inhabited districts (DID) are higher than in non-DIDs, greater benefits are estimated for managing Japanese cedar forest near DIDs.
2) The total estimated value of managing the entire Japanese cedar forest for 10 fiscal years is about 14.4 billion yen for all the households in Yamaguchi Prefecture. This value should be regarded as a benefit of a project of cedar forest management for risk reduction of cedar pollen pollinosis.
3) The forest management project should be implemented by the public sector, because of the following two reasons. First, managing the Japanese cedar forest is not cost-effective in timber markets since our estimated benefit is far lower than the cost of growing Japanese cedar as timber. Second, the benefit amounts to about 20% of the total budget for public forestry management in the prefecture. This shows that there is a substantial need to control allergic disease by forest management.

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The authors collected numerous bore and all-core samples and analyzed widespread volcanic tephras and fossil diatoms to investigate the changes in the sedimentary environments of the Takatomi lowlands located in the northern part of Gifu City, and obtained the following conclusions.
The Takatomi lowlands is composed of muddy lacustrine sediments and pumiceous fluvial sediments, called the Takatomi Formation. The Takatomi Formation is subdivided into the Takatomi basal gravel bed, the lower muddy bed, the pumiceous sand bed, and the upper muddy bed, from the lower to the upper levels. Widespread tephra called Aso-4 (87 ka), AT (26-29 ka), and K-Ah (7.3 ka) derived from volcanos in southern Kyushu were detected in the upper muddy bed. The fluvially rounded pumice particles obtained from the Takatomi pumiceous sand bed are correlated to On-Pm1 and On-Yb tephra (about 100 ka) of the Ontake Volcano located in the upper part of the Kiso River (drainage) basin.
The Takatomi basal gravel bed was deposited in an alluvial fan environment, and the lower and the upper Takatomi muddy beds were accumulated in a shallow freshwater lake environment. The Takatomi pumiceous sand bed is considered to have been transported by the Kiso River from the upper part of the drainage basin into the shallow freshwater lake of the Takatomi lowlands at about 100 ka, because no volcanic sediments are found in the drainage basin of the Toba River, which drains through the Takatomi lowlands today. The old Kiso River seems to have flowed westward through Seki City to the Takatomi lowlands, together with the Nagara River, and then turned to south to the lower Toba River. The Nishi-Fukase site, where the all-core bore Beta were obtained, has been in a stagnant marsh environment with the accumulation of peat layers since 31 ka. The Nagara River probably flowed southward down from the Umehara Fault in the Takatomi lowlands, along the present course of the lower Toba River, until modern times.

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This paper explores how and to what extent geographic proximity matters in collaboration in technological innovations of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Osaka Prefecture.Interfirm collaborations in technological innovations are identified using patent data for which sample SMEs co-applied with other firms or organizations. The author measures geographic distances between sample SMEs and their co-inventors and examines the relationships between the distances and their characteristics (e. g., firm size, industrial sector). The results are summarized as follows.
First, 40% of sample patents had co-patentees located within Osaka Prefecture, while the share of patents with patentees in Osaka of total patents published by the Japan Patent Office was only 17%. It is thus reasonable to assume that geographic proximity between patentees matters to some extent.
Second, smaller and younger firms showed a weak tendency to depend on technological collaborations with more geographically proximate partners, although this does not necessarily mean that the size of a firm determines the distance from its partner.
Third, mean distances from co-inventor firms differed by industrial sector. Three groups were identified: intraregional networks among SMEs; intraregional networks between SMEs and large hub companies; and interregional networks between SMEs in Osaka and large companies outside Osaka. The result indicates that there are various types of networks in terms of spatial scale and firm size in Osaka prefecture and that their differences can be partially affected by characteristics of industrial sectors.

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