This paper examines the geography of delivering social services for the elderly in Japan. Recently, the aging of the Japanese population has become a serious issue, and it is estimated that the rate of the population aged 65 and above will continue to rise. Accordingly, the necessity of providing a wider range of long-term care for the elderly has grown in Japan. With this in mind, the central government initiated a national strategy of promoting social services for the elderly in 1989-the "Gold Plan" -until 2000. Then, in 1990, the Diet revised the Law for the Welfare of the Aged. It requested that local governments elaborate their own regional plans by 1993 concerning the expansion of services throughout the 1990s. The revision also specified that municipalities would be responsible for providing the services. These changes raised the possibility that social services for the elderly would vary in both quantity and quality among municipalities. In 1993, under this law, local governments drew up their own regional plans specifying their level of service goals by 2000. Since the sum of the services of all local governments exceeded the previous goal of the "Gold Plan", the central government revised its previous plans and created a "New Gold Plan".
This paper focuses on the spatial development of nursing homes, which represent a typical form of institutional care in Japan. In 1963, the Law for the Welfare of the Aged institutionalized nursing homes. Under this law, a nursing home is a residential accommodation for elderly residents aged 65 and above who depend on other persons' help because of physical disability or dementia. In Japan, the construction of new nursing homes requires government approval.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW) established guidelines for the promotion of services for the elderly and notified local governments in June1992. Regarding nursing homes, the guidelines state that the number of beds shall be a little over 1% of the population aged 65 and above. However, the MHW instructed small municipalities to jointly build nursing homes after establishing that a home that is too small will be inefficient. To avoid the spatial concentration of nursing homes in a particular area, the MHW ordered Prefectural governments to divide the area into several planned areas and to determine a target figure of beds for each area. By this approach, the MHW attempted to equalize the ratios of beds per older population among planned areas.
The results of this paper are summarized as follows:
The numbers of nursing homes and their beds have increased consistently. It was estimated that the number of beds amounted to 300, 000 in 2000. This increase was the result of the national strategy pursued since 1990. The construction of nursing homes was considerable in the late 1990s because of the 2000 time limit. The degree of growth was especially remarkable in metropolitan cities and very small towns.
The level of service provision (LS) is measured by the number of beds per 100 people aged 65 and above in an area (for example, municipality, planned area, or Prefecture). Among the 346 planned areas in Japan-the spatial standard for the location of nursing homes-there was a five-fold disparity in LS in 2000. This high LS was especially obvious in the planned areas- that is, areas located in the periphery of Japan or its islands. The extent of this disparity, however, was eased when compared with 1993, the year the local plans were drawn up. Consequently, it was concluded that the policy target aiming to equalize the level of service provision among planned areas on the whole succeeded during this period. From a regression analysis, it was also significant that the degree of improvement varied among Japan's 47 Prefectures.
The author considered that it was too broad to regard a planned area as a spatial standard for the location of nursing homes.

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The purpose of this study is to identify the nature of forest management in common lands. In post-war Japan, a significant expansion in the area of conifer plantations has taken place and today these account for half of Japan's total forest area. However, many of the plantations now suffer from complete or partial neglect, which leads not only to their commercial devaluation, but also to environmental degradation. Common lands share a similar problem.
Villagers previously used common lands as a source of green manure, charcoal and firewood. At the same time, they planted timber trees for harvesting and sale when they needed money. Plantations were especially expanded during the 1950s and 60s when the demand for green manure, charcoal and firewood diminished and timber could be sold at a high price. In addition, in order to promote timber plantations in common lands, in 1966 the Japanese government established an Act for the Modernization of Common Lands. This Act aimed to make common lands more productive by disbanding their pre-modern and obscure ownership system and by introducing a clear and modern system. As a result of the implementation of the Act, the common lands have usually been divided among villagers or transferred to forest producer cooperatives (seisan-shinrinkumiai) whose members are usually the same villagers with former access rights to them. However, even now, more than one million hectares of common lands remain unmodernized.
In this paper, I first undertake an overview of forest management practices in the forest producer cooperatives in Kyoto Prefecture. Then I examine the cases of cooperatives in Ujitawara and Wazuka Municipalities and investigate their forest management in detail in order to identify key influencing factors. For comparative purposes, I have also investigated the forest management of seven villages in Wazuka Municipality which leave their common lands unmodernized.
The conclusions are as follows.
Today, villagers cannot adequately tend common lands only through collective work which is carried out a few times a year. For adequate tending, cooperatives and villages must hire skilled forestry laborers who can properly thin or prune trees. Most cooperatives in Kyoto Prefecture, however, have insufficient funds to hire them and cannot help but neglect their forest.
Nevertheless, there are some cooperatives and villages which have special income such as compensation for land uses under power transmission lines or profits from land sales for residential areas, factories, and so on. Some of these cooperatives allocate much of their income to forest tending.
The forest management of cooperatives and villages is often influenced by the particular histories of plantation forestry in a region. Active cooperatives tend to be in regions where plantation forestry has been traditionally practiced and where many villagers are interested in forestry.
Villagers' management of common lands has been influenced by their modernization in the following ways: some villages that were prosperous and had long traditions of plantation forestry have come to be more modernized in forest management through the establishment of cooperatives. On the other hand, many poorer villages which established cooperatives only for the clarification of property rights are experiencing difficulty with increased expenditure including corporation taxes, which might lead to further neglect of their forests.

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British retailing has experienced a dramatic restructuring since the 1960s. The 1980s is referred to as 'the golden age' of large retailers, since the central government planned the deregulation of large store locations. Large retailers aggressively located superstores in suburban areas. As a result, the top three retailers, Tesco, Sainsbury and Safeway, achieved over 50% of market share in the British grocery market. In addition, large retailers have actively introduced their 'own brand commodities' to sell high quality commodities. In this way, huge retailers have altered not only urban retailing but also the distribution system in Britain.
The present study aims to present and summarize British geographical studies on these issues which are widely applicable in Japanese geographical studies. Wrigley and Lowe (1996) constructed a 'new retail Geography' to analyze recent trends in British retailing. This framework pays particular attention to changes in the corporate structure to understand structural change in British retailing. Other British geographers have followed and developed this framework. Thus, the present study reviews mainly British geographical studies to obtain a new framework for analyzing retail change.
Some economic geographers have paid attention to the retailer's cost structure to understand how they change their location strategies. A few geographers, for example, Clark and Wrigley (1996, 1997) and Guy (1996), paid attention to 'sunk costs' that big retailers have operated unwillingly in the 1990s. Big retailer's properties such as their buildings and land have declined in the 1990s, because their aggressive store development in the 1980s resulted in the oversupply of superstores. Thus, they suggested that large retailer's property operations should be analyzed to understand the change of store location strategies.
Some geographers, such as Sparks (1986) and Smith and Sparks (1993), noted the low-cost delivery operations by big retailers and analyzed their spatial structure. Big retailers constructed their own delivery systems to reduce delivery costs and their store inventory. Big retailers located some distribution centers near highway interchanges to serve their own stores. As a result, big retailers delivered over 80% of commodities via their own delivery system.
Some geographers analyzed the spatial change in the British distribution system of large retailers. Large retailers not only constructed their own delivery systems but also participated in their own brand commodity production and advertising. Some geographers have suggested that decision-making points have changed from the producer's offices or factories to large retail head offices. In this way, large retailers have altered the spatial structure of distribution systems in Britain.
Above all, there are several studies in British geography that have analyzed the spatial structure of large retailers. They focus attention on their cost structure to understand the future direction of British retailing. In Japan, big retailers have gradually become the main players supplying grocery commodities. Thus, Japanese geographers would do well to refer to British geographical studies for the analysis of spatial change in the retailing system of Japan.

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