[in Japanese]

View full abstract

Before World War II, mass communications media had penetrated little into Japanese rural areas. So the rural populace had little access to a quantity of political, economic, social and cultural information, except for those belonging to the upper classes of rural societies. However, monthly community newspapers, called sonpo, were published in some villages of Nagano Prefecture and Ehime Prefecture from the 1920s to the 1930s.
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the regional development process of sonpo publications and the spatial agenda-setting functions of the community media from the case study of Kita-uwa District, Ehime Prefecture. These agenda-setting functions are clarified by content analysis of the articles.
The following results were obtained in this inquiry:
1. When sonpo appeared in some villages, because of their periodical publication and delivery to all villagers, they occupied the main position in the rural information system. However, the distribution of these media was rare and regionally biased. We can explain the reasons of locational development of sonpo in terms of the political connections among village authorities but cannot find the reasons for the absence of sonpo in many regions. The editors and publishers of sonpo were village authorities or leaders belonging to the upper classes of rural societies. It seems that the composition of those members had an effect on the contents of the community media.
2. We analyzed the contents of Aiji Sonpo published in Aiji village, Kita-uwa District, Ehime Prefecture, by means of two approaches. One is to assess the regional characteristics of sonpo based on the aggregation of the number of news-originating places in articles. Another approach addresses the press comments of sonpo. The comments indicate whether the medium depends on the ideology of the centralized state-nationalism, or the regional ideology-regionalism. So, we tried to divide the articles into two spatially characterized groups: the central-oriented articles and the regional-oriented articles. In the former approach, it was found that the community media contents were mainly composed of local news from Aiji village and partly of news from the upper political central cities in the urban system: the district center (Uwajima), the prefectural center (Matsuyama) and the national center (Tokyo). This result suggests that sonpo were in close contact with the local community. The latter approach clarified that the central-oriented ideology dominated the arguments of the community media. Thus we found that sonpo played the role of organizer which related many villagers to the national authority (the central government in Tokyo) beyond the spatial constraints of distance.

View full abstract

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework through which recent social change of suburban communities in Japan might be viewed. For this purpose, the author reviewed the literatures on rural communities studies of some British geographers and Japanese sociologists.
As a result, the author emphasizes the neccessity to understand social changes of suburbs from the view of reorganization of the communities brought about by konju-ka and to discuss the issue relative to the current differentiation of rural areas. The konju-ka village is a type of dormitory village unique to Japan which is composed of fram and non-farm households in the suburbs. He also suggests that the following points should be considered in geographical studies on rural communities:
1) Rural areas, characterised by low population densities and extensive land uses (H. D. Clout, 1972), are considerably affected by the natural environment and the friction of distance. This fact creates different hardships in rural areas than in urban areas.
2) The assimilation of a traditional rural community into the whole society's socio-economic system results in spatial differentiation of the rural area (G. J. Lewis, 1979). The mechanism of national systematization has to be studied and clarified from a geographical point of view.
3) The Japanese village community functions not only as a neighbourhood association, but also as a geographical unit of a conserving system with a spatial territory (A. Kawamoto, 1972). Based on this definition, a village community can be viewed from three perspectives-locality, local system and human communion.
The konju-ka, the new cleavages and conflicts within the suburban community, is attributed to its geographical nature, accessibility to urban areas, and the socially and spatially complicated structure of community organization caused by a diversifying population in the village territory. Therefore rural social geography needs to conduct quantitative analyses of the differentiation of rural areas and field surveys mainly focusing on investigation of social intraction of each group within the village community located in the suburb.

View full abstract

Most cities in Japan have developed under the influence of motorization since 1960. Many downtown travelers come from auto-oriented suburban areas, and thus the need for downtown parking spaces arises. In the central part of the cities parking lots have increased in number and have become an important complementary land use which stimulates other activities. Also they are an integral part of the urban transport system.
The author investigated the distribution and the process of formation of parking lots to explain the change in the central part of a local city due to motorization taking Kofu city as an example.
The results of this study are as follows:
1) Approximately eleven percent of the land is now off-street parking lots. Parking lots tend to encircle the central commercial area and constitute a parking zone there. The pattern of parking lots can be shown by their form and structure. Short-term parking lots or multi-deck parking lots are located in the downtown area and long-term or surface parking lots are located on the fringes.
2) The study area had 526 parking facilities in 1987, compared with 162 in 1971. Parking lots show a recent tendency to be developed in the transition zone and not to be developed either the central commercial area or the fringes.
3) The conversion of residential land uses to parking lots are the greatest in number. However the conversion rate of official land use into parking lots is high as compared to other land-use categories.
4) The expansion of parking spaces has caused the relocation of the existing facilities. The places where the existing facilities are relocated change according to the period. Wholesale and industrial facilities tend to relocate along the main roads outside the study area and official facilities tend to relocate inside the study area.
5) Parking lots provide an interim use of land and have often been replaced by more intensive land use such as office buildings of three or more storeys. Among the types of parking lots, the surface type easily becomes the subject of conversion into other facilities. That is, large scale surface parking lots offer a possibility of changing the urban structure.

View full abstract