The Americas have changed since the arrival of Columbus, and interpreting these changes is a challenging task for geographers. This paper attempts to propose the framework for investigating the overall development and the regional characteristics of the Americas from the cultural-geographic viewpoint. An examination of geographers’ published works reveals that four approaches are important in scrutinizing the Americas as a whole: “man and nature,” which emphasizes the human impact on the environment; “origin and dispersal,” which examines transcontinental exchange and its impact; “region and landscape,” which identifies culture regions and cultural landscapes; and “time and change,” which depicts the process of regional changes. Three economic-cultural regions are then identified; these regions emerged with the introduction of different systems of development from Europe. The three regions are the northwestern European peasant economic-cultural region, plantation economic-cultural region, and Iberian cattle ranching economic-cultural region. The development of the United States is interpreted in the context of the three economic-cultural regions as a process in which the northwestern European peasant economic-cultural region expanded to the south, west, and southwest, eventually expanding across the entire territory. In order to substantiate this thesis, the cases of the Great Plains, southern California, and California’s Central Valley are presented with reference to the regional changes that took place in the late nineteenth century. The proposed economic-cultural regions also provide the basis for comparative studies of immigrant communities in the Americas, as the differences in the Japanese immigrant communities are successfully interpreted in the context of the host society inherent in the economic-cultural regions.

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The present paper provides some ideas on the potential development of geographical studies on rural tourism in terms of rural geography. Rural geography approaches to rural tourism turned from the static analysis of actual conditions towards the dynamic analysis of regional changes in relation to characteristics of rural areas. In recent years, with conservation and sustainable use of rural environment becoming leading themes of rural tourism studies, the framework of sustainable rural systems plays an important role in approaches to rural tourism. These trends in rural tourism studies correspond to a shift in the geographical debates on rural areas, away from the framework of productivism, towards that of post-productivism. While economic profit is the driving force of rural development within the framework of productivism, the central elements of sustainable rural development within the alternative framework of post-productivism are the multi-functional use of rural environment and diversity of resources. Geographical approaches to rural tourism, therefore, use the framework of post-productivism for general discussion on multi-functional use of rural environment and resources. The present paper suggests the use of the framework of food tourism as a synthetic approach to rural tourism, which is based on diversity of rural environment and resources. Within the framework of food tourism, the focus is on spaces of rural, agricultural, market, slow food, and gourmet landscape and their respective hierarchy; each space is nested within multilayer structure from the broad rural space to the specialized gourmet landscape. The space of food tourism is based on traditional, cultural, ecological environments in addition to socio- and economic environments, and is mutually connected with others. As a result, the sustainable development of the whole space of rural tourism is possible, based on the multi-layer structure of spatial contents such as rural, agricultural, market, slow food and gourmet landscape.

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Adopting a viewpoint informed by action theory－ i.e., interpreting people’s behaviours from their purpose of actions－ the author hypothesizes that the main purpose for Meiji-era adventurers and explorers in exploring the seas south of Japan was to hunt albatross . From this premise, he argues that the profit-driven advancement into the southern seas in pursuit of the albatross contributed to the expansion of the southern boundaries of the Japanese Empire. Albatross were know from early times to some inhabitants of the Ogasawara Islands, and starting around 1885, the birds’ plumage was exported to some foreign countries. The industrialist Hanuemon Tamaoki became involved in the albatross industry on Torishima (Bird Island), profiting greatly from it. Being a successful entrepreneur, he became involved with such pioneers of the South Sea exploration as Takeaki Enomoto and Shigetaka Shiga. In those days, when newspaperrun serialized adventures about developing uninhabited islands were widely read, Han-uemon was often featured in many newspapers and books, and the stories featuring his exploits contributed to an upsurge in expeditions to deserted islands. In this flurry of exploration, people who realized the potential profitability of the albatross industry started competing in a quest to locate and explore the numerous islands that were assumed to exist, and were marked as E.D.(Existence Doubtful) on the maps of the South Sea in use at the time. Consequently, this competitive hunt for imagined South Sea islands led to the discovery and appropriation of actual islands such as Minami Torishima (South Bird Island) by the Japanese Empire. And, to cap it all off, this excessive spirit of exploration resulted in the“ Ganzis Island problem” in which the Meiji Government claimed a non-existent island, Ganzis, as their own, renaming the phantom island as Nakanotorishima. In this paper, the author has clearly shown that the actions of those such as speculators involved in schemes to make fast, lucrative profits from the albatross plumage industry contributed to the expansion of the territory of the Japanese Empire.

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