This paper presents the results of a case study of a mountain village in northern Laos. The focus of the paper is on the change in its occupational structure after the introduction of nonagricultural activities.
In 1986, after 11 years of communist-based policies, the government adopted the Lao version of Perestroika or 'Chintanakan mai'. These policies appear to be having an impact even in remote, mountainous villages, as evidenced by an increase in non-agricultural activities in rural areas.
The village taken up in this study is Phonsavang, a mountain village in northern Laos that has moved its location twice in the last 25 years. With each change of location, the village has diversified its economic activities. To begin with, the village was located in the mountains and traditional activities such as swidden agriculture played a central role in its economy. However, in the mid-1970s, the village moved to Nam Beng riverside where the villagers tried to develop paddy fields and began the shipment of forest products under the influence of neig hboring villages. After the introduction of the 'Chintanakan mai' policy, in 1988, the village moved to its current location, based along the No.2 national road. Since this move, many households have introduced non-agricultural activities such as general shop management, sawmill labor and teak plantations. Despite these changes, the village is still self-sufficient in rice production.
A multivariate analysis using 'Quantification Theory Type II', a type of discriminant analysis, was carried out to describe the characteristics of households in the village. The criterion variable is the introduction of non-agricultural activities, and the predictor variables are types of rice field holdings, teak plantations and various types of agricultural capital goods. As a result of this analysis, households that introduced non-agricultural activities can be characterized as not holding any rice fields, or cultivating only paddy if they hold rice fields, and having expensive agricultural capital goods such as a thresher and a tractor. Ordinary households, on the other hand, can be characterized as specializing in rice farming using swidden methods.
After characterizing the different household structures, the study examined the economic activities of households that introduced non-agricultural activities in detail. These households have accumulated a variety of capital goods- for example, cars, threshers and tractors. Most successful households that have many capital goods achieve success through the brokerage of forest products. However, not all households have been able to accumulate capital goods by themselves. Instead, they have relied on remittances from relatives who now live in a foreign country.
This study suggests, therefore, that a diversification of the occupational structure has occurred with each village relocation. This diversification intensified after the introduction of 'Chintanakan mai' and an increase in non-agricultural activities was observed. In fact, a quarter of the households in this village had introduced non-agricultural activities by 1999. Nevertheless, the village is still producing a rice surplus as well as continuing to develop new paddy. Thus, it would seem that despite a diversification in occupational structure and the introduction of non-agricultural activities, rice farming remains a very important economic activity in rural villages.

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L'Ecole des Annales (the Annales School) is designated as a French study group of socioeconomic history, publishing its trimester journal, Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. This journal, founded in 1929 under the title of Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, by two historians with a profound knowledge of geography-Lucien Febvre (1898-1956) and Marc Bloch (1886-1944)-often changed its name-Mélanges d'histoire sociale and Annales d'histoire sociale during the World War II, and Annales d'Histoire-Economies-Sociétés-Civilisations in 1946, before it obtained present name in 1994.
One of the two founders, Lucien Febvre, is well-known to Japanese geographers because of his fine work, La terre et l'évolution humaine: Introduction géographique à l'histoire, translated into Japanese by K. Iizuka and Y. Tanabe. That was not the case, in contrast, with Marc Bloch, whose work Caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française was also translated under the direction of K. Kawano.
Fernand Braudel (Luméville-en-Ornois, Meuse, 1902-Cluses, Haute-Savoie, 1985) was a member of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1937 (fourth section, history and philology). He succeeded Lucien Febvre in 1956 as a Professor of the Collège de France and then was appointed Director of the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes which published the journal Annales. While Professor Braudel was a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal from 1947 to 1968, I had the honor of meeting him in the fall of 1958 through the recommendation of Professor Roger Dion, his colleague in the Collège de France. This gave me the opportunity to publish my monograph entitled "Systèmes agraires, le Jôri dans le Japon ancien" in the journal Annales, 14th year, No 4, in 1959.
Fernand Braudel was a historian who took such a great interest in geography that, in his famous work, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II in 1949, he proposed to incorporate into it a historical research to found a new discipline "geohistory". Unfortunately, this new discipline, which he proposed to call "super social science", was neither accepted by the world of history, nor that of geography.
On the contrary, applying the geographical method to his homeland in his posthumous study in three volumes L'identité de la France, he affirmed that geography was unable to rejuvenate French history.

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In recent years, the understanding of the processes of the suburbanization of office location has long been a major foci of discussion in urban geography. However, few studies have analyzed why large, high status office buildings have developed in the metropolitan suburbs.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the supply and management of large office buildings in the Tokyo metropolitan suburbs. The analysis is based on a questionnaire survey of tenant offices in Omiya Sonic City, one of the earliest large office buildings in the suburbs.
The paper can be summarized as follows:
Office workers and office space stocks have steadily increased since 1990 in suburban core cities. However, there are regional differences in the temporal fluctuation of the rental ratio of office space. In particular, there has been a tendency for an improvement in the rental ratio of office space following the prominence of the bubble economy in Omiya city, one of the suburban core cities.
Omiya Sonic City is a 'smart-building', which was developed by a joint enterprise of private office developers and the public sector. As this building has attracted many tenants, the rental ratio has kept to a high average since it opened in 1988. The building maintains this high rental ratio by attracting many branch offices of headquarters located in central Tokyo. These branch offices have played an important role in the regional business base of the northern Tokyo metropolitan region.
The reasons why these tenant offices rent their spaces in this building are not only due to its good location and easy access to both the northern region and central business district in the Tokyo metropolitan region, but also to the fact that Omiya Sonic City is the highest status building in the suburbs.
As the building's owners invited many tenant offices, they surveyed office market trends in suburban areas in detail. Based on this survey, they decided to invite branch offices of headquarters located mainly in central Tokyo. As a result, Omiya Sonic City succeeded in inviting many superior tenant offices.
Recent studies have already pointed out that various 'back offices' carrying programmed works using telecommunications have moved from downtown to the suburbs because they do not need face-to-face contact in downtown. However, this study shows that the suburbanization of office locations is caused not by decentralized back-offices but by new suburban branch office locations.
To comprehend the processes of the suburbanization of office location in more detail, future studies must consider examples of large office buildings at other suburban core cities.

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This paper focuses on town planning in Osaka City in the 1920s from a socio-spatial dialectical perspective. When I looked back on town planning at that time, I realized the significance of the relationships between the central urban districts and the peripheral rural districts, between residential suburbs and Osaka City and between the state and Osaka City. Thus, I applied geographical ideas, such as geographical imagination, space, place and scale to the various aspects of town planning history. Through this approach, I make clear the process of the use of politics among Osaka municipal bureaucrats, State bureaucrats and Osaka councilmen. This process is represented in the form of conflicts concerning spatial scales within their geographical imaginations.
In Osaka City during World War I, citizens had encountered capitalistic industrialization primarily dependent upon heavy industry, a mass influx of laborers and serious urban problems such as a housing shortage. In order to cope with those problems, Osaka municipal bureaucrats imagined Osaka City as an organism, dependent on the discourse of the Garden City, and projected the reorganization of urban space.
However, with the establishment of the town planning area, the bureaucrats in the Ministry ent of Interior proposed the Province as an organism, the larger urban range containing Osaka City and some middle central places like Sakai City together, and forced Osaka City to compete with such central places in order to aim at moderating its demands against the state. Thereby, they attempted to maintain Osaka City under their control. Meanwhile, Osaka councilmen strenuously resisted the incorporation of rural districts into Osaka City and tried to scale down the urban range. In this sense, the conflicts between the geographical imaginations of three agents came to surface as the politics of spatial scale.
This politics materialized in the network of the rapid transit system. Osaka municipal bureaucrats regarded the network as a facility to organically link each district within Osaka City. However, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Railways insisted on cutting down the network on the periphery for the benefit of the railway corporations that run along the planned system. Meanwhile, Osaka councilmen wanted to reduce it in the rural districts in the area.
As a consequence of this conflictual process, the geographical imagination of Osaka municipal bureaucrats institutionalized the spatial scale which could come to guarantee the reorganization of Osaka City as an organism, and it has been manifest that their geographical imagination has the capacity to resolve the housing problem, to prevent population spillage and to claim self-government in great cities against the state. The material facilities established in town planning such as the rapid transit system were initiated in the context of the politics of the geographical imagination such as the one which has been outlined above.

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