The restructuring of the Japanese economy in the 1980s caused serious economic depression in single enterprise communities based on industries such as mining, steel and shipbuilding, particularly in those communities located in the peripheral regions of Japan. Takashima is a small island (with an area of 1.2 square kilometers) located in one of Japan's peripheral regions, where a coal mine operated by Mitsubishi interests shut down in 1986 in response to Japan's economic restructuring. In this article, the author examines the collapse and subsequent reorganization of the single enterprise community on Takashima over the ten years since the closure of the mine.
Takashima mine was the first coal mine in Japan to make use of European mining techniques and machinery. Full-scale development of the mine commenced in 1868, through a co-operative agreement between the Scottish merchant Thomas Glover and the local feudal landlord. Control over the mine eventually passed to Mitsubishi interests in 1881. Thanks to the success at Takashima, Mitsubishi then developed other mines elsewhere in Japan and extended its activities into other industrial sectors such as shipbuilding.
In the 1960s, when the Takashima coal mine enjoyed its most productive period, 80 percent of all the workers on Takashima were employed by Mitsubishi's mining divisions and its affiliates. As a result, Takashima assumed the characteristics of a typical single enterprise community, with a three-tiered social structure based on the distinctions between “managerial staff and technicians”, “miners employed by Mitsubishi” and “miners employed by small subcontractors”.
In those days, 75% of total revenues received by the municipality of Takashima were derived from Mitsubishi in the form of property taxes, mining taxes, corporation taxes, etc. Moreover, the mayor of Takashima was a former leader of Mitsubishi's labor union, and of the 24 members of Takashima's municipal assembly, 21 were either managerial staff from Mitsubishi or members of the company's labor union. As in other single enterprise communities, the power of Mitsubishi dominated all aspects of the community on Takashima.
With the closure of the mine, the community lost 2, 000 jobs directly, and at a single stroke, in the coal mining sector. As a result, the population decreased from 5, 491 at the point when the mine closed to 2, 568 six months later, to 1, 554 two years after the closure, and eventually to 1, 063 10 years after the closure. Over the same period, the ratio of the population aged 65 or over increased from 9 percent at the time of the closure to 37 percent 10 years later. The severity of Takashima's depopulation, and the rate of aging of the population, were both unprecedented in Japan.
After the closure of the mine, the municipality of Takashima failed to revitalize the local economy, despite generous assistance from the national and prefectural governments. Mitsubishi interests made little contribution to the recovery effort either, beyond a couple of joint investments with the municipal government in new small businesses. As a result, over the 10 year period following the closure of the mine, 115 new jobs were created by revitalization projects on the island, however, only 23 jobs are available in 1997. The reasons for this failure are as follows: 1) Takashima's poor locational conditions as an object for investment, 2) the hasty emigration of young and middle aged ex-miners with above average skills and educational backgrounds, 3) the recession associated with the restructuring of the Japanese economy, 4) the low wages paid by these new enterprises and by other businesses which were enticed onto the island, 5) the inability of ex-miners to adjust to the manufacturing sector, and 6) a lack of the entrepreneurship required among managers in other sectors other than coal mining to set up new businesses.

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Decentralization of welfare policy for the elderly in recent Japan made local municipalities have responsibility to provide services. This means, however, the varieties in the quantity and the quality of services between municipalities. It is difficult to obtain the land for institutions especially in urban municipalities because of the high price of land. Therefore, the shortage of provision is serious problem in urban administration. Furthermore, the demand for services can not be satisfied in own municipality and affects neighborhood municipalities.
From these problems, the present paper aims to clarify how the institutional care services were provided and the needs for services were satisfied in and out of one municipality. Nagoya City, the study area, is one of the major metropolitan city in Japan, with over two million population and it is divided into 16 wards. The object of this study is nursing home for the elderly, which is the most major service in institutional care in Japan.
The results of the study can be summarized as follows:
1) The locations of nursing homes are remarkable in peripheral than central wards of the city relatively. The capacity of beds by wards is not proportional to the population 65 and above.
2) Each nursing homes bases on a variety of types of the organizations; public, welfare facilities, hospital, religious group, private person and so on. Since 1994, the outer organization of the administration, which had financed half by the administration, had built many homes remarkably. Consequently, the location of homes proceeded also in the central wards, where there were no homes so far. This means that unless positive policy for the provision of homes by the administration is adopted it is not easy to increase homes in urban region, where the availability of land is low.
3) Regarding use of nursing homes, many of migrations to enter homes leave for own or neighbor wards. There are more immigrations from other wards where the degree of congestion of homes (the number of beds per 100 people aged 65 years and over) is relatively loose.
4) Correlation coefficient between the provision of nursing homes (the number of persons entered in homes) and the demand (the number of entered and waiting lists) was not significantly different from zero at the 0.05 level. Therefore, the level of territorial justice on nursing homes in Nagoya City is not high.
5) As a result of the principal component analysis on the migrations to enter homes in Nagoya City, six components (cumulative percentage of the total variance; 73.3%) were extracted. By the interpretation of the components, major patterns of immigrants were to“northeast wards”, “southwest wards”and“eastern wards”.
6) Although immigrations to other municipalities leave for the whole of Aichi Prefecture, municipalities in western region of the prefecture had accepted many people from Nagoya City. Immigrations to the municipalities in the next region, policy for provision of services for the elderly, of Nagoya City is surpassing from the peripheral ward which locates on a line from the central of Nagoya City toward to a municipality of destination.
7) Although by municipalities in the prefecture the degree of congestion of homes doesn't have relations with the number of persons from Nagoya City, by the policy district it was obviously proportional to ones. Consequently, most of eleven cities with populated above 100 thousand people had so congested that immigrations from Nagoya City were not so many, except for Toyohashi and Toyokawa where the degree of congestion of homes were loose.
8) Finally, horizontal intergovernmental relations between Nagoya City and its next municipalities were evaluated through the comparison the number of immigrations from Nagoya City and each of their own demand for homes.

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In recent years, the producers of agricultural processing products in Japan havebeen forced to reorganize their contract farming areas under the influence of trade liberalization and the overproduction of agricultural products. This paper attempts to make clear the changes in the vertical integration of agricultural production under these impacts, taking the case of contract farming of processing tomato, from a viewpoint of economic geography.
Affected by the trade liberalization of agricultural products during the 1960s, the import of tomato raw materials (tomato-paste and tomato-puree) was liberalized in 1972. After that, in addition to the increase of inexpensive foreign raw materials, the excess of raw materials in stock became notable in the latter 1970s, with the declining demand for tomato products. Such a situation forced tomato processing makers (especially Kagome &Co., Ltd. and Japan Del Monte & Co., Ltd.) to undertake drastic reorganization of their domestic producing areas.
Because tomato processing makers were obliged to reduce the cost of raw materials with the increasing inflow of foreign raw materials and the overproduction of domestic raw materials, they purchased inexpensive raw materials from abroad and drastically reduced their dependency on expensive domestic raw materials. At the same time, they reorganized their producing areas in three aspects, that is, the reorganization of (1) processing tomato collecting zones, (2) processing plants, (3) contract price. The spatial consequences of these actions were, (1): processing makers withdrew from the prefectures with low productivity and the prefectures distant from the intensified processing plant, (2): processing makers concentrated processing tomatoes to the main tomato juice manufacturing plants, (3): processing makers introduceds a discriminative strategy in contract price based on the transporting cost to processing plant. In short, processing makers carried out the reorganization high-handedly, attaching great importance to cost reduction. However, at the prefectural level, the Prefecture Affiliated Organs of Agri-Coop-Ass'ns played an important role in the control of organizing contract farming areas.
Against such behavior by processing makers, contract farmers responded to the situation by abandoning processing tomato cultivation. However, there are considerable regional differences in the decrease of tomato producing areas. A quantitative analysis of 41 processing tomato producing areas in Nagano prefecture revealed that processing tomato cultivation tended to be maintained relatively in areas with unstable agricultural producing conditions, and given up in areas with stable agricultural producing conditions. This is attributed to the characteristics of contract farming:“price stability”, “low profit” and“lack of speculation”. The result is ironic for processing makers, since they always desire stable production of the raw materials.
After all, it is shown that the reduction of domestic production by processing makers resulted in production under more unstable farming conditions. In fact, the ageing of contract farmers is very serious and has led to the abandonment of cultivation after the last reduction of producing (carried out in 1988). As a result, domestic raw materials have been short in supply since 1990. Taking this existing situation into consideration, it seems contract farming areas of processing tomato will not be retained over an extended period of time.

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze travel behavior of the elderly in Kyoto City, based on data derived from the Person Trip Survey of the Keihanshin Metropolitan Area in 1990 and my own questionnaire survey held at the Golden Age Academy in March, 1997.
Spatial variation of travel behavior rate was examined. Generally, a lower rate of travel was observed in peripheral districts, while a higher rate was observed in central or inner districts. Such a pattern is different from the spatial distribution of the elderly population. A correlation analysis exhibits that the decision not to travel is related to variables such as cohabitation rate with a son/daughter and rate of retirement.
Characteristics of intraurban trips by the elderly are clarified. If we select only the elderly people who went out for purposes like shopping, their mean distance between residence and destination was actually longer than for their non-elderly counterparts (specifically, housewives and persons without an occupation and under 64 years old). Therefore, the proposition that the distance elderly people travel is shorter than that for non-elderly people is not necessarily the case.
Looking at various activities and trip destinations by the elderly, the results of the questionnaire survey show that within Kyoto there are many recreational places that the elderly enjoy. In particular, monthly fairs held at well-known shrines and public facilities for the elderly were investigated as examples. The fair had appeared before the period when population ageing began to attract attention in Japan. Public facilities, which appeared as a response to the ageing of population, are not very popular.
Finally, I suggest, based on these findings, that current social services are somewhat inappropriate.‘Soft’support is needed more than‘hard’support. It would be more helpful to the elderly to increase ease of access to existing opportunities and facilities rather than to construct facilities exclusively used by them. Such a consideration, I hope, will lead to the enhancement of the lives of Japan's elderly population.

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On October 23, 1954, Maemoriyama Communal Farm was established by communists who had returned from China a year before. The Farm is located in the national forest in Matsuo-mura, Iwate Prefecture of northern Japan. It is known as one of the Post-War Reclamation Settlement, but there are significant differences between Maemoriyama Farm and other farms with regards to spheres of management, ownership, community life, social and political activity, social organization, and so on. Their uniqueness was largely influenced by the Communist Party of China which made it possible for new farms to be established even under difficult circumstances and situations.
The main purpose of the present study is to explain the uniqueness which exists in the organization and membership of the Maemoriyama Communal Dairy Farm and to analyze its managerial transformation. The author used the following methodology: 1) interview and observation 2) statistical analysis 3) analysis of organisations.
After World War II, Japan was confronted with numerous social problems; among them shortage of food, unemployment, demobilization, and repatriation called for Governmental intervention on an emergency basis. Then the Government declared “The Emergency Outline on the Operation of Reclamation”. Accordingly on November 9, 1945, a plan was chalked out to reclaim 1, 550, 000ha of land and to enable a million pioneers settle therein. Excepting Hokkaido, Iwate prefecture was the most important place, where 100, 000 ha of land was earmarked for reclamation for 10, 000 households. Spreading over almost all of Iwate prefecture, Such settlements were established encompassing 600 meters for each (Figure 1).
In the beginning, Maemoriyama Farm faced a harder situation than any other reclamation settlement. Obviously it was true that their goal was to establish a model communist farm as in China, and for this cooperation between them was considered very important to fight against hardness. This reclamation settlement drew many advantages through their cooperation, such as raising funds, efficiency of the reduced budget, and so on, which contributed to the enhancement of management.
But Maemoriyama Dairy Farm is now finding it difficult to maintain the communal farm, especially the community life. Previously the Farm experienced a crisis and consequently the question of its dissolution arose. The leaders held several general meetings including every member of Farm and to discuss the problems, but everybody disagreed with the notion of dissolution.
To sum up it is fair to say that the first generation of Farm settlers had a democratic character and a strong attachment to ideology and the common goal. The second generation, however, did not inherit the traditions of the earlier, and, in consequence, the Farm transformed significantly and ultimately the community life was dissolved.
On the other hand, Maemoriyama Farm has the character not only of communism but also the Japanese traditional communitys. Unfortunately many of these character strength's have weakened during modernization, but the community will remain the important concept for the future society.

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