How can we recognize this world with finite extent as a globe? This question is the starting point of this study. This question leads us to another one: how do we represent the world? In this paper, I examined some cultural texts which seem to contribute to our view of the world. The texts which I chose here are exhibitions or collections which consist of several hundred photographs taken all around the world, specifically, from The Family of Man held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1955, through photos with a similar theme, to Takeyoshi Tanuma's works produced with the theme‘children in the world’. In order to analyze such geographical representations, I adopted the method of literary criticism. Especially, I paid attention to the ‘order’of each text.
The feature of texts which I analyze in this paper is that while each photograph recorded the local context in which it was taken, these works themselves represented the global world. The globalist intent of these photographs was to promote cosmopolitanism, universalism, or humanitarianism, but it is sentimental and not persuasive. For example, photographs taken in the USA were 45% of all photographs carried in The Family of Man, and photographs of the Third World were distributed into specific sub-themes: labor, death, and war. The insistence of universality was asserted under the biological commonality of Man. Man is born, works, gets together, takes pleasure, feels sad, consists of male and female, belongs to a family, eats, talks, plays, suffers, and dies. Such a life path became a commonality among photographs of people around the world. On the other hand, in one text produced in 1994 by Tanuma' who has created many works in a Japanese context, photographs were arranged in order by region. I found a significant structure in the arrangement of this text. Compassion of Japanese on Third World people, identification with two continents, Africa and South America, as others for Japanese, and uninterchangeablity between advanced countries and Third World were found in the structure of this text.
From this analysis, I gained the insight that the World Order is a projection of‘a world’which is a logical unity consisting of whole objects and events in‘the world’ which is a concrete geographical space with finite extent. We can locate each event in a world informed by journalistic media about our world order as an idea which was formed by a world representation including the photographic texts selected here.

View full abstract

Hogen-kukaku-ron, the theory of the 'dialectal region', developedas a subdiscipline of the study of Japanese language, established at the beginning of this century, by Japanese linguist Tojo Misao (1884-1966). He tried to classify Japanese language into some localdialects, by considering various factors including phones, vocabule, idiomatic usage, and so on, as a whole. He believed it useful to geta better comprehension of the Japanese language.
It was a very unique method to Japan, but the discipline was disputed by Yanagita Kunio, the author of the book Kagyu-ko. First, the criteria of demarcation are neither clear norobjective. Second, the regional differences language exist actually, not in the dialect itself, but in each phenomenon of the language. And third, it was ambiguous whether the standpoint of Tojo's method was synchronic or diachronic.
Since the 1970's, Hogen-kukaku-ron became less popular, and now it only is reviewed in some introductions and anthologies about Japanese language studies. There, some Japanese linguists, particulary linguistic geographers, criticize the idea that the 'dialectal region' is equal to the division of regions, not of language itself. Nevertheless, the language can be divided into some dialects, but never into some regions. Such misunderstanding or abuse hasderived from the fact that Tojo first expressed his idea concerning-division of dialects by using maps.
The dialectal region is not a regional division, because there is not any causal relation at all between the dialects as divided and the region as expressed on a map.

View full abstract

Previous studies of commuting in urban areas mainly in North America and Europe during the past two decades, listed in Table 1, have confirmed that women commute times and distances shorter than men. In Japan, however, there has been few investigation about this topic so far. This paper, therefore, focuses on the differences of commuting patterns between men and women. The study area (Figure 1) is the Osaka Metropolitan Area (OMA). The data used here are obtained from the 3rd Person-trip Survey of the Keihanshin Metropolitan Area conducted in 1990. This data source includes information on age, residence, workplace and trip purpose of every subject trip-maker.
In the third section, the overall distributions of workers' residence and employment in the OMA for both sexes are outlined. With regard to residence of the workers, the rate of employed women shows an uneven distribution pattern and is highest in the CBD and declines toward the suburbs (Figure 2): it presents a great contrast to the one of employed men, whose distribution is relatively high and shows an even pattern across the study area. As for workplace of the workers, it can be seen that a large proportion of women are employed in the outer suburbs as well as in the CBD (Figure 3): on the other hand, a significant portion of the men's workplaces are located not only in the CBD but also in the inner city and the inner suburbs which are basically industrial areas.
The fourth section is devoted to a gender comparison of commuting patterns in terms of time, distance and trip mode. The results obtained (Figures 4 through 8) are consistent with the previous finding: women show shorter commuting times and distances than men. It also turned out that women tend to use walking/bicycle and not to use automobile.
A remarkable feature of female employment in Japan is the M-shaped curve (see Figure 9 for the OMA) for the relationship between labour participation rate and age, and the curve has two peaks for women in their twenties and fourties. These two peaks are thought to imply two different types of labour: whereas the former represents full-time jobs, the latter are part-time jobs, mainly due to the heavy responsibility of housework. When the female commuting trips of the groups in their 20's and 30-40's are selected, it is clear that the commuting distances and times of the former are much longer than the latter and similar to men's (Tables 2 and 3). Hence, a general statement that women commute shorter times and distances than men does not hold when women are subdivided into different age groups.

View full abstract

This paper attempts to review the theoretical framework of the urban restructuring process proposed by M. Castells and D. Harvey, and to examine the effectiveness of their western theories through field survey of restructuring urban space and local communities in Tokyo.
M. Castells and D. Harvey have explained the restructuring process of urban spaces focusing on the mechanism of capital accumulation, but their analytical concepts are different. Castells uses the concept of the Dual City. This concept means that residential segregation and segmentation of spaces do exist among classes according to whether they heve access to a high level of education and culture or not. Harvey uses the concept of Flexible Accumulation, which means almost all new societal systems have the aim of capital accumulation. Castells puts stress on a change of the social structure in the global cities, while on the other hand Harvey examines the urban space, focusing on the relationship between global cities and local communities.
For research purposes, I picked two case study areas in downtown Tokyo. One is Misaki-cho where many residents own their own land and buildings, and the other is Kanda-Tsukasa-cho where almost all residents live on leased land. These two local communities are located near the heart of Tokyo, and they contain many small scale businesses. But the pattern of landownership and community history are completely different.
The conclusions are as follows:
1) The residential space in Tokyo has became more segregated and segmented by the occupation and income of the residents. So the concept of the Dual City is applicable to Tokyo to some extent. Also rapid increase of offices and big changes of land use in Tokyo have been a part of the urban process of Flexible Accumulation at the global level.
During the 1980's, Tokyo was affected by the global changes in more or less the same way as New York and London.
2) At the local community level, landowners in Misaki-cho rebuilt their own buildings before the bubble economy, so they could cope with the structural economic changes during the 1980's individually. On the contrary, in Kanda-Tsukasa-cho, rapid increase of land prices did force changes in the residential land use to offices. So, we may conclude that the global changes did not directly affect local changes, but the history, socio-economic characteristics and social relationship of the local communities was an influence upon the restructuring and transformation process of urban space.
In the next stage of my research, I will try to make it clear how the local community responds to the huge global economic pressure and resists capital accumulation. This is none other than building a new theoretical framework to bridge the macro-global changes and micro-local changes of urban spaces.

View full abstract