Since the late twentieth century, local culture has gained prominence in the Japanese society in several ways. Not only is local culture closely related to national and regional policies in terms of cultural properties faced with crisis but is also utilized in several realms such as agricultural politics, tourism, economic revitalization, and ideological formation. Moreover, the commercialization of local cultures has become widespread, and cultural management has emerged as an issue of growing concern in recent years. We can no longer discuss and theorize local culture in isolation from the current social conditions. On the contrary, it is indicated that although essentialist arguments regarding the notion of culture are considered to have little credibility in present academism, they have a strong presence in society.
One of the purposes of this paper is to clarify the cultural conditions in Japan from a point of the gazes toward local culture. The other objective is to outline the current studies on local culture and review the possible directions of cultural geographical studies. In doing so, this paper focuses on the perspectives from which local culture has been investigated, the manner in which it has been defined, and the stance taken by these studies toward current social conditions.

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Many studies about migrants in Japanese urban settings have been written by using qualitative methods and ethnographical descriptions to search for the complex social power relations and various practices as resistance against severe discriminative situations in detail. These studies have been presented some research objects and areas, for example the once colonized areas like Korea and Taiwan and the peripheral areas in modern Japan. Okinawa and Okinawans in the mainland Japan have become important issues for geographers, sociologists and historians. We can see fairly large number of studies about the history of integration the Okinawa archipelago into Japan as a modern nation state, the resistant movements of Okinawans who resided in the mainland Japan, and so on. However, there have remained some issues to solve even now.
This paper shows the relationship between Okinawan identities and their each individual practices for everyday lives in a certain concentrated place of Okinawans in Osaka metropolitan area. The notion of place here is related not to the monolithic site for resistance but to the intricate realities that are hoeld by each inhabitants who have expanded their own personal networks within and without their place in their survival practices, even if others represent the place as a single negative. At least in this case study, because each vulnerable people has need to use various means for there lives, it has been difficult to express Okinawan ethnicity as a political tool against the discriminative situations.

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The aim of this paper is to explain the relationship between youth problems and urban social control in contemporary Japan, taking into consideration my previous research about adolescent social problems in the 1990's and the recent direction of neoliberal social control. The author discusses moral panic derived from particular issues in Japanese social context, making reference to studies on crime and social control and the social construction of problematic youth representation that flourished in Anglophone critical geographies. While there are a lot of other reported problems related to young people in Japan, this paper specifically focuses on social problems concerning the regulation of Telephone Dating Services, which were seen as a new "harmful" environment for juveniles by neighborhoods in Toyama prefecture, Japan, from 1993-1998. There is widespread public concern about this problem in almost every prefectures of Japan and many people support the call for the enactment of a regulation act. It became necessary for the local government to protect these juveniles from such a "harmful" environment and to interfere with more sound education. The author considers "moral geographies" with reference to the policing and surveillance of offenders against the background of the protection act for juveniles, and suggests that this local process relates closely to the recent direction of urban social control from a regional to national scale. It is considered to be a precursor of the conservative youth policy in recent years, and continues with community-based social control in contemporary Japan.

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This paper argues the impact of Japanese colonialism in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) by examining the everyday life of indigenous people and their response to the colonialism. Under the assimilation policy, a new urban social regime was imposed in colonial Taipei, and the city was transformed according to the desire and power of the colonizer. This forced the Taiwanese people to find ways of negotiating, compromising with, and resisting the Japanese colonialism. In this paper, attention is focused on Taiwanese women who were born at the beginning of Japanese colonization. While Taiwanese people and space were forcefully assimilated into adopting a Japanese influence, the Taiwanese women adhered to their Chinese lifestyles. Having established their own social and private space in colonial Taipei, Taiwanese women used it stubbornly to maintain an independent sense of self and her own place in the world. While young Taiwanese were closely involved in the assimilation process and they became Japanese-oriented through Japanese education, Chinese women preserved their 'Chineseness' inside their neighborhood as, without a Japanese education, they were excluded from colonial society. They escaped from being 'colonized' by exercising quiet but eloquent resistance towards Japanese influences.

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In recent arguments about fisheries management, the community-based approach has attracted more attention. The aim of this paper is to investigate the content and meanings of the fisheries management carried out by a coastal community with various fisheries, and moreover to examine the dynamic aspects of the management, considering changes in the environment and changes in its use. The study area is Himeshima, Oita Prefecture, an island whose economy has been highly dependent on small-scale coastal fisheries. The fishermen there have constituted the 'Gyogyo-kisetsu', a written code of fishing activities, under a fisheries cooperative association.
The case studied in this paper is the fishing ground regulations, that is to say, the spatial restrictions of fishing ground use on the offshore fixed gill net fishery in the Gyogyo-kisetsu. The fishery became popular in the late 1960s and detailed fishing ground regulations have been applied to it as the fixed nets occupy the sea widely.
Examination of the contents of these regulations reveals that they have been constituted and carried out mainly for adjustment between the gill net fishery and other fisheries. The operations of 'weaker' fisheries or conventional fisheries, such as the angling fishery, the longline fishery and the surrounding seine fishery, on important fishing grounds, have been protected by the adjustment. In introducing the modern gill net fishery, it was crucial for the community to develop regulations too enable the coexistence of old and new fisheries and to avoid conflicts. In addition, such adjustment has been sometimes related to the conservation of fishery resources and important fishing grounds.
On the other hand, the environment and the use of the fishing grounds where the gill net fishery is regulated have not remained static but have sometimes undergone big changes up to the present day. Distinct examples are the sharp decrease in sand lance and the decline of some conventional fisheries, influencing the state of fishing ground use.
Despite these changes, each fishing ground regulation on the gill net fishery has been kept in the Gyogyo-kisetsu up to the present day since it was established, even though its actual function or meanings can be somewhat flexible and variable. These facts show that the regulations have been maintained and carried out in an imbalanced relationship with the fishing ground environment or the fishing ground use affected by fluctuations. Examination of such dynamic aspects of the regulations indicates some vagueness or ambiguity inherent in the management carried out in the relationship with an uncertain environment.

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As a result of the aging population in Japanese mountain villages, elderly persons have been forced to take on the burden of production activities. In the Gohoku Region of Kochi Prefecture, which is the target of this study, there are many communities comprised mainly of elderly persons who bear the burden of production activities.
The purpose of this study is to clarify the characteristics of production activities undertaken by elderly women in mountain villages where the aging population is increasing, and the conditions under which these women undertake production activities. In our analysis, we focus specifically on "agri-processing" by elderly women.
Following is a summary of the results of this study.
In mountain villages where elderly men are in a position of superiority, elderly women undertake many activities related to agri-processing. In order to avoid friction with the regional community, women have formed agri-processing groups under the umbrella of existing settlement organizations, and have shown the elderly men that they have the support of public institutions in higher positions of authority than those settlement organizations. As the elderly women continued to demonstrate positive economic results, the elderly men-often the spouses of the women involved-have come to understand these contributions, and now provide assistance in the women's activities. The agri-processing workplaces, in addition to promoting stronger social ties among the elderly women, have become a new venue for settlement activities in which the elderly men have also become involved.
It became clear through this study that the women participate in agri-processing while effectively coordinating the use of space and time in the context of their own lifestyle activities. Among the elderly women participating in agri-processing, women with family members living in the same household participate in agri-processing while coordinating the use of space and time in their own lifestyle activities because they must overcome the limitations placed upon them by their household activities. Elderly women living alone, on the other hand, can allocate time and space to accommodate the group's activities.
In this way, the elderly women of mountain villages have created a unique venue for production activities, and it would appear that in many cases, these women must at the same time overcome the limitations placed upon them by their households and the regional community in order to maintain these activities. Elderly women maintain the agri-production workplace by creating cooperative relationships with the elderly men who are the heads of the households and the regional community.

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