In Japan, after a period of rapid economic growth, the migration of the central city population to the suburbs has caused issues related to the decentralization of urban functions and the hollowing out of the central city area. The “Basic Policy and Action Plan for Revitalization” created a compact city that provides a range of functions necessary to facilitate living in the central urban area. A compact city needs to have commerce, government, welfare, hospitals, and transportation. Previous studies have reported that people move closer to hospitals when they relocate from the suburbs to the city center. The reasons for this tendency include “hospital convenience” and “emergency response.” However, a specific investigation has not been conducted. The purpose of this study is to extract the main factors influencing outpatients’ expectations of and satisfaction with hospital care in order to identify and effectively operate a hospital suitable for a compact city. The main factors of patients’ expectations and satisfaction were investigated using a questionnaire survey. A factor analysis revealed that outpatients living near clinics show expectation and satisfaction in “reception.”

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In recent years, the problem of stretched carrying capacity, so-called overtourism, has been pointed out at famous tourist destinations due to the increase in the number of tourists. Then, a trial has been made to disperse the tourists by utilizing regional tourism resources. In this study, a questionnaire survey of participants and owners of cultural properties was conducted through a special open house experiment to understand the problems that may arise in the use of national registered tangible cultural properties as regional tourism resources. As a result, it has been found that these could be a tourist resource of the region. In addition, participants were satisfied with “a tour of undisclosed places” and they expected “an explanation about an architectural feature or material or design”, and so on. On the other hand, we found that the cultural property owners wanted to tell the participants the “history and episodes about their buildings”. We also found that they are very positive about foreign-language services for inbound tourism. This suggests that regional tourism using registered tangible cultural properties may be applicable not only to domestic tourism, but also to inbound foreign tourists in the future.

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The main purpose of this research is to indicate the positive effect of the involvement of local female entrepreneurs in career education on the vitalization of local communities. Recently, self-efficacy has been attracting academic and practical attentions as one of the determining factors in career development planning for women. With low self-efficacy, women are more likely to be indecisive and negative toward themselves. On the other hand, high self-efficacy encourages women to take a proactive stance and to pursue a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in their career. It is expected that career education based on interactions would improve self-efficacy. This research particularly pays close attention to the roles of local female entrepreneurs as mentors in interactive career education. The results of a survey showed the positive effect of such interactive lectures on students’ self-efficacy.

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Ishikawa Prefecture is located in the Hokuriku region in Japan. One of the main targets of the tourism industry in Ishikawa is to increase the number of tourists from foreign countries. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to provide foreign tourists with “language service.” In this study, in order to understand the state of language service provided to foreign tourists, what linguistic characteristics can be found in English guidebooks at Komatsu Airport and Toyama Airport, which are local airports in Japan, were investigated and compared with guidebooks available at international airports in Japan and the U.S. In short, frequency characteristics of character- and word-appearance were investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics were approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary was calculated to obtain the difficulty-level as well as the K-characteristic of each material. As a result, it was clearly shown that English guidebooks available at airports in the Hokuriku region have a similar tendency to literary writings in the characteristics of character-appearance. Besides, the values of the K-characteristic for the guidebooks are high, and the difficulty level is low in terms of the American basic vocabulary.

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In recent years, local tourism has been gaining traction as one of the measures for regional revitalization in Japan. One of the organizations that support these are the sightseeing volunteer guide organizations. These organizations have various kinds of information that are helpful for local tourism and active information transmission is desirable. On the other hand, many organizations face the issue of the information transmission as their aging volunteer guides find it difficult to handle information devices. This study therefore aims to provide support for continuous information transmission by local sightseeing volunteer guides via social media, and attempts to clarify the transmission of sightseeing information that matches the characteristics of social media through proof-of-concept demonstrations with the Historical “CULTURAL PATH” Guide Volunteers in Nagoya City.

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Japan is experiencing the highest aging rate in the world and cannot be expected to manage the sharp increase in GDP due to the population decline. Innovation is necessary to increase GDP in the age of population decline and allocate not only human resources but also physical resources from the centralized Tokyo area to local areas, which is called ‘regional revitalization’. Development of the tourism industry, agriculture and fishery is necessary for regional revitalization. Japan’s hospitality in the tourism industry is said to be the best in the world, however the cost is low and an improvement of labor productivity is expected. It is essential to be able to attract innovation which utilizes artificial intelligence and IoT (Internet of Things). It is also important to fit the thoughts of SDGs and Society 5.0.

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Luxembourg has two distinctive issues in terms of mobility: the highest number of car per capita in the country and 120,000 international commuters per day from three surrounding countries (Germany, France, and Belgium). These issues lead to traffic congestion during rush hour and air pollution. The new initiative aims to give incentive to the residents and commuters to use public transport. Although these programs are mainly intended for these daily users, they could exert positive implications for tourists visiting the country. A new tram system could make it easy to travel from the airport to the accommodations. Also, since the system is easier to understand than bus routes, tourists’ area of activities would expand.

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This paper focuses on online travel agencies (OTAs) as a quantitative data source for tourism marketing. Most research on OTA data has focused on hotel ratings and hotel reviews, and there was insufficient discussion regarding the use of real-time updated data, such as provided plan information. Therefore, we conducted research to characterize such data. First, we constructed a database that continuously collects and accumulates data from OTAs. We verified the reliability of the data by estimating numbers of guests using the data. The results indicate that the reliability of the data depends on the scale of the analyzed city.

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An automobile is a convenient means of transportation for hearing-impaired persons to participate in society because it is less burdensome than public transportation. When driving a vehicle, a hearing-unimpaired person can obtain information from both hearing and vision, however, it is difficult for a hearing-impaired person to obtain auditory information without using a hearing aid. There are many demands, especially to be able to know the approach of an emergency vehicle, while auditory information is not sufficiently obtained. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the actual situation of the siren of an emergency vehicle when driving a vehicle for hearing-impaired persons, and to understand the current situation and problems from the viewpoint of consciousness. As a result of a questionnaire survey, more than half of the people have not noticed the siren of an emergency vehicle. However, about 70 % of the hearing-impaired persons do not think of it as a hearing problem. Also, about half of them feel that it is more difficult to recognize visual information during nighttime driving than during daytime. Hearing-impaired persons may have difficulty in obtaining visual information in the dark, and if the amount of auditory information decreases, it may be more difficult for them to collect information around them, and driving may be difficult.

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