In geography, boundaries have been a very important subject of reseach. The aim of this paper is to consider the multivocality of boundaries with particular emphasis on their religious symbolism. Generally, the word boundary is defined in 2 ways: natural boundaries, without the intervention of man, such as mountains and rivers, and the man-made boundaries, such as administrative districts.
However a new approach to such definitions has developed whereby the boundary is considered as having symbolic meaning in human life; particularly as a liminal space where the profane meets with the sacred.
The Fudoki, written in the eighth century, contains folkores relating, how gods and men decided their own territories and built shrines on or near mountains which formed topographical boundaries.
Mountains and Rivers exist around the living space of the people. They enclose the people but at the same time, constitute a link to the outside world. So the road passing a mountain and the bridge crossing a river are the boundary of the sacred and the proface world.
In ancient palace cities, chimata (crossroads) were very important places, where many people and things came and went. In the same way gods and souls came and went. For example a religious service was performed to ward off unhappiness and disease at the four corners of the palace city. The concept of the religious service is like a concentric circle, with the palace as the core, surrounded by the palace city, and land outside the city limits.
Particularly, oharae has the character of liminality. Because it was done in June and December, during extremes of hot and cold, not only in the capital, but also, in provinces, and along mountain rivers which flowed into the sea.
In archaeology, hitogata (Human-shaped substitution object) are regarded as tools of oharae. They were used as substitutes for people and appeared from the latter kofun and Nara Periods. Many hitogatas have been excavated from waterways in the palace and on its perimeter, the ditches by the streets, and crossroads in the palace city. These places constitute liminal spaces between the sacred and the profane.
Moreover hitogatas have also been dug up from ditches or rivers in the outskirts of some provincial capitals. Thus the same spacial symbolism can be seen in the palace cities and the provincial capitals.
In conclusion, studying boundaries and their symbolism provides an important insight into the cosmology of living space in 7-8 C Japan.

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The main issue in the rural geography of Korea has been the regional impacts of rapid rural-urban migration. In the process of industrialization since the 1960s, rural areas lost more than half of their population during the period 1970-90. Depopulation rates were about 25% in the 1970s and 35% in the 1980s. As a result, almost all of rural Korea, excluding areas near metropolitan areas, have been undergoing depopulation at rates in excess of 3% per year.
In this paper, the current research on rural depopulation of Korea has been reviewed with three sub-themes, that is, its cause, the pattern of rural-urban migration, and regional impacts.
The rural areas in Korea were transformed to scarce population areas as a result of the rapid rural-urban migration since the 1960s. The main cause of rural-urban migration has been the urban-oriented national policy, the so-called growth centre strategy. The national planners selected a few metropolitan areas as growth centres and fostered a regional disparity. This led to the migration of, particularly, highly educated rural youths to urban areas seeking non-agricultural occupations and increased incomes. In addition, remote mountainous areas in which most of the underground resources are found, have been experiencing more severe depopulation since the 1970s, due to the new energy policy, namely, the transfer from a coal-oriented to a petroleum-oriented policy and the restrictions placed on utilization of forest areas. In this process, the most severe depopulated areas in Korea shifted from plain agricultural areas near metropolitan areas (1960s) to remote mountainous areas (1970s and the first half of the 1980s) and agriculture areas remote from metropolitan areas (after the latter half of the 1980s).
With this background, the pattern of rural-urban migration in Korea can be characterized as follows from the current research:
First, single migration and chain-migration has been the mainstream of rural-urban migration in Korea, especially after the 1970s. Seasonal migration is rare. Second, the high selectivity of age and education is conspicuous due to the aforementioned characteristic. Third, rural-urban migrants by reason of educational objectives show a trend towards step migration.
And also, the regional impacts of rapid rural-urban migration on the rural areas can be characterized as follows from the current research:
First, the elderly and the female agricultural labour force have replaced the young generation, owing to the absolute deficiency of the young labour force.
Second, despite the severe shortage of labour force, the use of agricultural machinery har not been adopted by the peasants due to the lack of financial capabilities and low cost-benefit efficiency.
Third, rural-urban migration in Korea has never led to an increase in cultivated landownership of remnant farmers. The migrants' lands were leased for tenant farming by the remnant farmers at high rent (almost half of the harvest). At the same time, a great increase in landownership by urban residents was witnessed.
Fourth, in contrast with Japanese cases, the increase of tenant farms have brought about the standardization of farm size with an increase in cultivated land of remnant farmers. In spite of the increase of cultivated lands through tenancy, those farmers however have never been considered as belonging to the middle class, and their agricultural revenue has more often than not been less than their living expenses during the last thirty years.
Fifth, the lack of labour force in rural areas has led to extensive but partially intensive land use. While the farmers changed their management to less labour-intensive farming, they had to adopt a market-oriented and labour/capital-intensive farming method in order to meet the increasing demands for cash.

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There have been iriai-rinya (common forests) in almost all of mountain villages in Japan. They have been owned by each village itself and utilized by almost all of the villagers based on social and cultural norms. Because of its pre-modern ownership system, however, the Japanese government has attempted to redesign it in a modern form since the Meiji Era (1867-1911), that is abolition of the ownership of iriai-rinya and putting it into the category of government-owned forests.
The latest efforts done by the Japanese government was the Act for Modernization of Iriai-Rinya (iriai-rinya-kindaika-hou), which was enforced from 1966. In the act, the viewpoint of iriai-rinya was quite different from the previous policies and acts. The ownership of iriai-rinya was regarded as private property by nature. As a result of implementation of the Act, iriai-rinya have been usually divided into many parts owned individualy or shifted to associated ownership and management.
During this reorganizing process, regional patterns have occurred, namely, the type of individualization in Northeast Japan and the type of association in Southwest Japan. Some factors indicated in the regional patterns can be summarized as follows;
First, historical factors existed behind the regional patterns. Especially, the significance of iriai-rinya differed according to the implementation of to previous different policies on iriai-rinya.
Second, administrative factors existed. The attitude of each prefecture toward iriai-rinya has strongly effected the reorganizing process.
In this paper, however, it is argued that iriai-rinya have been scarcely reorganized by implementation of the Act in many metropolitan-neighboring mountain villages, although it has been done in other categories of mountain villages. With regard to this argument, previous research seems to have been hypothetical or general, but not empirical.
Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the reorganizing process of iriai-rinya in two villages of Fujioka municipality, Aichi Prefecture, as a case of mountain villages neighboring to metropolitan areas, putting the focus on regional factors concerned with the implementation of the Act. The comparison between two villages is adopted as the main methodology, that is, one is a village authorized by the Act and the unauthorized village is the other.
The results are summarized as follows:
First, both villages planned to establish an association for forest management, that is, in both villages, there was intent to continue the collective forest-use by the implementation of the Act.
Second, the previous mode of forest-use, however, was different. Furthermore, the prefecture government policy was to determine the type of reoganization owing to the previous mode of forest-use.
Third, therefore, the Act was scarcely implemented, when the policy of the prefecture government as did not agree with the intent of a village. In other words, administrative factors could effect the type of reorganization.
Fourth, the eventual determinant factor in the implementation of the Act was correspondence between the planning of the forest-use and the spirit of the Act. The reasons for disapproval, for example, wore that there had been alternative land-use planning, such as construction for leisure industry.
From these facts, the following can be argued, that the inhabitants have intended to maintain the traditional mode of forest-use and ownership system, as ever, while the mode of urban land-use has invaded mountain villages. This is also supported by the fact that they have recognized the significance of forest management organization in conservation of the local living environment.

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The purpose of this paper is to classify the typical patterns of daily behaviour of residents within space-time and to consider the relationships between the patterns of space-time use and individual characteristics of the residents. Classification of daily behaviour has been tried in terms of 2-dimensions of either purpose and area or purpose and time. Here I try to classify them considering all 3-dimensions of purpose, time, and area based on the distance matrix indicating the dissimilarity among the patterns of space-time path of each resident.
First, the 3-dimensional matrix of the individual daily behaviour in a time-space dimension involving 5-purposes, 48-times and 17-areas categories is prepared from the person-trip data of the Keihanshin Metropolitan Area in 1990. Then the patterns of daily behaviour are cluster-analyzed by the ward method.
The results of cluster analysis are presented in Fig. 2. In this process of clustering, the most effective factor is existence of a trip and a trip-purpose. The factors of the length of staying at a destination, the multiple-trip and the place of a destination have an influence on the process in turn.
For example, about 40 percent of residents make no trip (CL1) or a private-purpose path (CL2 and CL3), about 17 percent make school-purpose paths, and the others make work-purpose paths. Residents belonging to CL1 are mainly housekeepers or unemployed. Residents of CL2 are also housekeepers, and they have only one private-trip within their own district in a day. CL3, making a very-long private trip at night, includes many college students in Kita-ward. Regarding workers, their paths are classified by their work places respectively (e. g. CL5, CL6, CL7, Nakagyo-workers cluster, CL10, CL11 and CL13). Further, the cluster of workers in Nakagyo-ward is devided into two clusters by a multiple-trip; CL8 making the HWH-path and CL9 making the HWBH-path.
In fact, space-time paths of each cluster are represented in that way is different from each other. Fig. 3 shows typical behaviour patterns of each clusters. The main features of these patterns are as follows: Type CL6 presents the space-time of the employees working in Kita-ward and Kamigyo-ward who go to work at 7:30 and start working at 8:00 and enjoy private activities (i. e., eating lunch) at about 12:00 to 13:00. After that, they return to their business work and work till 17:00. The average of their commuting time is very short (about 30min.). The all workers- cluster contains HWH path and sometimes private D trip. For example, the path of Type CL6 is summarized as HwdBⁿdHbⁿh. Type CL13 is the pattern of the workers in Osaka City, taking about one hour to commute. Because of their long commuting time their paths contain 94% of HWH path. Students less than 18 years old are classified into type CL4. They go to school at 7:30, and most of them go home by 16:00. Their typical path is represented as HSHdh. The pattern of college students, is described as HsdⁿHdh (CL3). They go to school at 10:00 and go home at 14:00, then they enjoy private activities till 22:00. Type CL2 shows the patterns of the housekeepers, who go shopping from 10:00 to 16:00-17:00.
These results lead to the conclusion that behabioural patterns can be inductively classified by the similarity of time-space paths, depending on individual characteristics of residents and their trip-characteristics.

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