This article seeks to explain the circumstances of homeless people in Osaka City and their temporal change using the concept of the social space in an urban area. The special concern here is Kamagasaki District, a typical and nationally well-known yoseba (the space served as a catchment place of day laborers for jobs regarded as relatively unskilled). Such places generally have a large number of cheap lodging houses (doyagai) for them. The homeless people in Japan, mostly single man, were called formerly runpen or furosha, and currently are known as nojukusha. They correspond to day laborers in a substantive sense.
Kamagasaki is a commonly-used place name of the neighborhood, located in the northeastern part of Nishinari-ward, Osaka City, and its extent is almost identical to that of Airin-chiku (Airin District), as is has usually been referred to by the administrative authorities, police and mass media. There is a huge day labor market centered on Airin Multi-purpose Center in this area and it is generally said that the district has more than twenty thousand day laborers, about two hundred cheap lodging houses and numerous eating houses, resulting in a distinctive landscape segregated from surrounding areas.
In the second section, previous research of yoseba is reviewd. This district has been studied as a disorganized area mainly by social pathologists in the existing literature of social science. But it mirrors a negative and passive understanding of this social space in urban area. The author here, putting emphasis on the social structural context, would like to identify a certain social space focused on the district. On this occation the actual situation concerned with the homeless is a very good indicator of the social space.
The third section is devoted to a historical explanation. In the period immediately after World War II, Osaka City's governmental measures toward the homeless was to settle disorder due to the influx of sufferers and returnees in and around Osaka Station. Nevertheless, as the district served as the place for single male day laborers during the period of fast economic growth in the 1960s, the homeless within the city tended to be accounted for primarily by Kamagasaki's day-laborers. Then, the measures were developed in the Airin regime (Airin taisei) which was established in the beginning of the 1970's, motivated by the‘riots’and still continues. The survey of occupational careers conducted in 1988 indicates that, the numbers of homeless persons rise occur in the season or months when jobs are unavailable, whereas they become laborers in the remainder.
Specific attributes are discussed in the fourth section. According to the records of the Thursday Night Patrol Party within the Kamagasaki Christian Society, there is a general tendency to seasonal size change in incidence of the homeless: they expand from April to summer and then contract. Such change is due to the job offering variation concerned with the labor force through the Nishinari Labor and Welfare Center as well as climatic condition such as temparature. Moreover, the records suggests that this change has been less remarkable within the district, while now obvious outside it. Also worthy-of-note is that, as the number of the homeless as a whole tends to decrease, the inside-the-district proportion has been lower.
In the 1988 investigation, the homeless persons are grouped into the following three length types: the long type (more than one year), the short type (less than one year), and the cyclic type, which implies repeatedly homeless and non-homeless conditions seasonally over the past years. Furthermore, such types are cross tabulated with income source and reason for becoming homeless. With regard to the source, many of the long and short types work as junk dealer (yoseya), while most of the other type are day laborers.

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The purpose of this article is, based on a postmodervist perspective to attempt to reformulate the methodological framework for multiple-readings of the messages of picture-maps of manors (_??__??__??__??_, syoen-ezu) in medieval Japan. The author's approach, called‘sociocartology’, is broadly socio-linguistical or semiotical. The summary is as follows:
The syoen-ezu as a socio-legal document in medieval Japan was explored here under five themes: the bibliographical background of each individual syoen-ezu; the cartographic conventions in medieval Japan; the syntax of each syoen-ezu as encoded text; the cartographic discourses in each syoen-ezu; the historico-sociological phase of geographical lore, from the viewpoint of the‘sociocartology’, in which the messages of the syoen-ezu in the context of the linguistic lifestyles and the political behaviour patterns of the medieval Japanese people were studied systematically.
The primary function of the syoen-ezu, was to provide geographical information about various objects that exist cosynchronously in the manorial territory (called‘Function-A’), to represent the paticular events occuring there and the ruler's political attitude towards such (called‘Function-B’), and to convey not only the ideological contents, but also the ethos that were differentiated from the literal meanings which were manifest in these maps (called‘Function-C’). Function-B and Function-C had been neglected by historical geographers.
As to the Function-B, using R. Bartes' methodology, the author considered distortions of the cartographic language which were deliberately induced by cartographic artifice, and reformulated the hidden rules of cartographic distortion (J. B. Harley, 1988) in the paradigm of cultural semiotics. On this basis the highly variegated cartographic discourse, made up from various social dialects among the map makers according to differences of the sociohistorical context, was reconstructed from the standpoint of both map-maker and mapreader.
As to Function-C, the notion of geosophy as ideology of the lord of the manor was equivalent to that of fusui (_??__??_, geomantik) and inyo-gogyo (_??__??__??__??_) originated from ancient Chinese philosophy. The physical landscape of the syoen-ezu was, therefore, not due to what was seen in itself, but something to be reconstructed ideally in the medieval geosophical field. For the God of Wealth and Longevity of the manorial lord, some ideal landscape types and imagined genius loci types were prefered above all as the physical basis of manorial territory to be depicted.
Reading maps from the view point of sociocartology is to elucidate the politics of meaning according to the manner in which objects and events had been expressed by forms under varying historical conditions. A manorial territory here may be seen as a construction of language as well as a land based novel, of economics, and sociopolitics (Tuan, 1991). Thus every reading of a syoen-ezu will offer us the possibility of challenging received ideas about the politics of place.

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The Japanese automobile industry forms a characteristic hierarchical structure composed of eleven car producers, and many parts-and-components suppliers under them. These suppliers generally cluster round final-assembly plants in order to satisfy the JIT (just-in-time) manufacturing system adopted by the car producers.
This paper examines mutual involvement among Mazda, direct parts and components suppliers to Mazda, and their sub-tier parts suppliers in and around Hiroshima. 86 suppliers located around Hiroshima organize a group of associate companies under Mazda called the‘Toyu-kai’in order to maintain their harmonic business relation. Most of the main plants of these suppliers were built in the Hiroshima metropolitan area adjacent to the final-assembly plant. Many of their branch plants were been eventually constructed in the neighboring rural area since '70, seeking extensive and low-cost plant sites and adequate labour force. Several suppliers built their branch plants in Hofu, Yamaguchi Prefecture, in accordance with the construction of a new Mazda assembly plant there in 1982.
Vertical as well as horizontal business transactions are common among the direct suppliers, and all of the 18 suppliers studied often subcontract production of small parts to the same-tier suppliers.
The shortage of labour at present is acute and a serious problem for these suppliers. As a result, some suppliers employ foreign factory workers, mainly among the second and third generations of Japanese emigrants to Middle and South America.

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Mangrove forest has rapidly decreased in the last 20 years due to many kinds of human impacts. Therefore, a type of“Marine Desertification”is appearing in tropical and sub-tropical areas, and environmental conditions are worsening, despite a growing awareness of the importance of mangrove forest and ecosystem utilization is more at present. We should make guidelines for of the utilization of mangrove forests.
In this paper, we try to clarify the progress of mangrove habitat in relation to their landform conditions, the actual condition of the destruction of mangrove forest by human impacts, and the diversion of mangrove areas to fishponds in the Philippines.
Results are summarized as follows:
1) In the Philippines, the destruction of mangrove forest has been mainly caused by the construction of fishponds which were enlarged since the late 1960's. Consequently, about half the former area of mangrove forest has been already diverted to it as awhole. That diversion, is remarkable in Luzon Island.
2) Milkfish is mainly produced in the fishponds. However, the productivity of aquaculture is at a within lower level compared with other countries in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, however it can be said that productivity in regions with a long old history of aquaculture is generally high.
3) Infanta, our study area, is 150 kilometers east of Manila. Mangrove habitat was widely developed in the margin of backmarsh of the Agos River floodplain and in the interchannel basin (lagoon). This habitat has developed since than 2500 year B. P. and has been protected by beach ridges and bars from the wave action.
4) In Infanta, fishponds have been extended rapidly since about 1970. As a result, about 40% mangrove area of total mangrove forest has disappeared. The decrease has had a bad effect on the lives of local people. They say, for example, variety and quantity of fish they catch than before have decreased. Moreover they suffer more damage from flood tides and typhoons.

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