The purpose of this paper is to answer the challenging question raised by the Organizing Committee of the 60th Anniversary Conference of the Japan Association of Economic Geographers (JAEG): what is the nature or essence of economic geography? The present author examines Scott (2000) and Bathelt and Gluckler (2003) and finds that the mainstream of economic geography is based on the relational perspective in Western countries nowadays. In Japan, the so-called perspective of "regional structure" has been widely accepted. This was advocated by younger economic geographers who assembled in the research group by themselves in the latter half of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. One of the leaders was Prof. Yada, so that the present author examines his presidential lecture at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the JAEG (Yada, 2003) as well. According to Scott (2000) and Bathelt and Gluckler (2003), the mainstream of economic geography in Western countries turned from the regional geography to the theoretical and quantitative perspective in the 1960s. And it has turned from the latter to the relational perspective in the 1980s and the 1990s. On the other hand, there have been divergent perspectives among Japanese economic geographers at least since the foundation of the JAEG in 1954, and we find several streams, each of which has affinity either with regional geography, or with the theoretical and quantitative perspective, or with the relational economic geography. Both economic regional geography advocated by, e.g., the late Prof. Kamozawa and the perspective of "regional structure" have affinity with the relational economic geography in Western countries, because they attach a great deal of importance to the roles of economic actors in a region and their relationships with each other in shaping the region concerned. However, we can find a unique character of Japanese economic geography in its thinking that the relationships among regions are important not only in the horizontal perspective but also in the vertical one. The perspective of "regional structure" by the Japanese economic geographers sheds light on the spatial division of labor among regions in a national economy and on the stratification of multi-scale regions, namely from a locality or a municipal-scale region through relatively smaller region such as a prefecture and larger subnational region such as Kyushu in Japan to a national territory. Not only economic actors but also various regions are substantial entities. The latter is shaped by the former without doubt. However, the former is socialized in the latter (Takeuchi, 1993:21). The both are influential to each other, so that we should employ the perspective of structuration between individuals and a society or multi-scale regions. We should incorporate the concept of culture, especially divergence of economic spirit, into the study of economic geography. One of main concepts of this discipline is economic region or regional economy.

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Anglophone research in economic geography can be characterized by two separate, contested paradigms: Geographical economics (building on the work of the economists Krugman, Venables and Fujita), and geographical political economy (prevalent within geography). Elaborating on the latter, this paper explores what it means to think geographically about the (capitalist) economy. Focusing on geographies of commodity production as the driving force (even as markets are important emergent features in their own right), thinking geographically about the economy challenges many of the core claims of geographical economists. Beyond this, it raises deep questions about the capacity of globalizing capitalism, however it is governed, to overcome social and geographical inequality.

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The purpose of this paper is to extract and chronologically sort from major books and papers by Japanese economic geographers discussions about methodology, and point out characteristics and problems, referring to discussions about methodology in Western countries. After World War II, neoclassical location theory and regional science was developed in Western countries. In contrast, Marxian economic geography has been dominant in Japan and divided into different groups, such as descriptive economic chorography, uneven development theory, and Marxian location theory. Furthermore, in the early 1970s, a regional structure approach, which analyzes the system of regions in the national economy, emerged in order to resolve regional problems such as regional income disparity and depopulation and over congestion. Although various turns such as cultural, institutional, and relational turn repeatedly appeared in Western countries in the 1990s, the regional structure approach has developed by critically absorbing various theories, such as location theory and development theory, and by accumulating research results related to the four components of industrial location, regional economy, national land use and regional policy. Since the early 21^<st> century, Japanese economic geography has been facing up to a turning point. First, under both globalization and localization, it is necessary to reexamine the importance of a national economic perspective. Second, as we are changing into an information- and knowledge-based economy, we should establish a spatial point of view and new methodology concerning about invisible and intangible assets, such as knowledge flow and regional innovation atmosphere. Third, the trend of methodology is changing from the approach targeting pure economic phenomena into broadening its horizon to social, political, institutional, and cultural phenomena. While this trend can enrich the contents of economic geography, it also has the danger of losing the unifying force of economic geography. However, the more serious problem is "dilution" of discussion about methodology in economic geography. Active discussions about a new balance between generality and specialty, abstraction and concreteness, and economics and geography seem to be strongly required.

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The purpose of this paper is to discuss perspectives of economic geography in Japan based on the symposium, held at the 60th anniversary meeting of the Japan Association of Economic Geographers in 2013. Tracing methodological arguments in economic geography and related disciplines after the Second World War, the author emphasizes the perspective of socio-spatial dialectic that explores the power of geography in the globalizing economy. Japanese economic geography has had a close relationship with the discipline of economics, especially the political economy approach. In the 1950s and 1960s, economic geographers criticized environmental determinism and geopolitics before the Second World War, and explored "geography of economy" as a discipline of social sciences. This approach formed a different perspective from a conventional "exceptionalism" in the discipline of geography. Studies of "geography of economy", however, assumed that geography was derived from social and economic forces. What seems to be lacking was an insight into geography as "cause". Major tasks ahead for Japanese economic geographers are to demonstrate the insufficiency of the one-way power directionality that geographical development is an effect of economic forces, and to present the keys to understanding the empirical realities. To provide a road map to the current debates and points of contention, this paper critically examines three influential theses: the death of distance, the end of geography, and the mega-region.

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This paper aims to reconsider theoretical arguments in economic geography in the past two decades from three perspectives: institutional-cultural, network, and relational perspectives. The first chapter concerns institutional-cultural perspective. "Institution" is defined as the patterns of behavior that make everyday life predictable, structure societies, as well as coordinate various economic activities. Institutions can be classified into two categories. The first is formal institutions written and established publicly, often by governments, for example, laws, regulations, labor market, and education system. The second is informal institutions, which include customs, norms, conventions, ways of thinking, and behavior. Informal institutions affect how people think and how they behave in a certain situation. The word "culture" may be easy for people to understand in general. However, this term is ambiguous and comprises more symbolic and "hard-to-observe" realms. Institutions are often produced and reproduced at various territorial scales (for example, "nation" or "region"). These types of institution can be referred to as "territorial institutions." In human geography, territorial institutions matter as a geographical context. A region should not be considered as merely a physical space or "container." The second chapter focuses on network perspective, which emphasizes networks and their connectivity. For this perspective, regions are considered as "nodes" of various relations that transcend territories. The reason for the frequent use of the word "network" is the rise of organizations and networks going beyond territories (e.g., multinational corporations); in short, the reason is globalization. Overemphasizing the roles of territorial institutions may lead to downplay the importance of organizations transcending territories and of the mobility of people, money, and knowledge. Examples of network perspective in economic geography are global production network approach and world city network analysis. Network perspectives are concerned with knowledge creation, innovations, and creativity. Homogenization or isomorphism of the way of thinking among actors in territories can often cause territorial negative lock-in. Avoiding such situation requires access to novel knowledge through organizations and networks transcending territories. The third and concluding chapter discusses relational perspective, which includes and integrates institutional-cultural and network perspectives. From the relational perspective, economic behaviors are neither reduced to rational choices of atomistic actors nor determined by macro socio-economic structures or systems. Instead, actors are considered to be situated in contexts of social and institutional relations; the dialectical relationship between territorial institutions and networks is recognized as transcending territories. As Dicken (2000) suggests, "places produce firms while firms produce places."

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The author regards the emphasis of relationalism in economic geography as the proliferation of ecological epistemology. Vidal de la Blache adopted the concepts of ecology to establish human geography as a rigorous science, however, he and his school self-restricted the objectives of the discipline as uncovering natural and physical relationships between human being and its environment, with the result that the investigations of agents-environment systems and quests for the general and universal relationships have been left for other disciplines' mission. The regional structure theory of national economy whose foundation was set by Toshifumi Yada, a Japanese economic geographer, was developed from almost the same ontological basis as Vidal's "terrestrial organism". The explanatory flame of the theory is that the industrial locations determine both the regional structure of national economy as a whole and the configurations of each economical region as a part. Now that the theory is confined its explanatory power for the corfiguration of contemporary economic landscape, the evolution of the theory is due: the spatial organization theory, taking the growth of service economy into account, seems to be a potent procedure of refinement. "Embeddedness" is one of the important keywords to depict a trend of contemporary economic geography. When we critically review and develop this concept, the difference between "Granovetterian embeddedness" and "Polanyian embeddedness" should be strictly identified. The transplant of the former into economic geography has yielded the countless empirical studies that treat the actions of agents as being situated within the social context under the relational perspective. Analytical perspectives which are innovated with the concept of "Polanyian embeddedness", on the contrary, are yet to be developed. Elaboration of such perspectives should enable as to understand the macro conditions which variegate specific types of agents-environment systems, and to detect the general and universal relationship more precisely. With an awareness of the problem of "embeddedness", the author presented an analytical focal point of the labor market at macro level; to identify the condition of spatial, temporal and skill mismatch of demand and supply of labor force geographically and historically, and to investigate the mode of institutional overcoming of the three mismatches. The presented perspective was applied to an analysis of the labor market of postwar Japan.

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