In this paper we focused on the settlement process and mobility after the Great East-Japan Earthquake 2011. The experiences of people affected by the tsunami just after the Great Earthquake which attacked especially one of the most depopulated areas in Japan show a lot of problems of evacuation for aged and/or handicapped people.
    There the percentage of aged people over 65-year-old was much higher than the average throughout the country, and the death rate of aged people caused by the tsunami was much higher. This meant that the devastated situation after this disaster symbolize the future of disaster impact in Japan.
    Based on the analysis of the evacuation process we can find what we ought to prepare in advance for natural disasters. In order to find the way to cope with the situation we have to pay more attention to the long-term forming processes of vulnerability and resilience and to the reduction cycle of the effects of natural disasters in the areas. That is because the difficulties of their evacuation processes are closely related to the difficulties they experienced in their everyday lives, their familyʼs living conditions and their social vulnerability. They might be reluctant to evacuate to the place where they didnʼt think they could keep their health and feel relieved. So we have to consider in advance what kind of care we could do and what situation would develop there. In regard to this point we may well think about the lifestyle of multi-habitation as one lifestyle people can choose pre/during/after the severe event.

    This paper examines the case of Tomioka, a town in Fukushima Prefecture, to determine how nuclear evacuees are reorganizing their lives and how municipal governments are addressing the local revitalization task. Although the earthquake occurred five years ago, the entire population of Tomioka remains evacuated, with some residents living within Fukushima Prefecture and others living elsewhere.
    The people of Tomioka need to work in collaboration with the local government to address the issue of long-term revitalization. They want to live ordinary lives as local community residents in their host communities, simultaneously, regardless of the place where they live, they are clearly aware of themselves as belonging to their original community of Tomioka.
    From their external living bases, the townspeople are establishing networks, visiting the town, and exploring ways to address the revitalization challenge. In this process, it is crucial for widely dispersed evacuees to share their problems through face-to-face discussions and take initiatives to move towards self-sufficiency.

    This paper aims to review gentrification studies from the 2000s. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the number of articles on gentrification has rapidly increased, rising in tandem with the increase in urbanology studies. The governments of advanced capitalist countries generally aim to revitalize deteriorated inner city areas. These policies caused gentrification. A fact was studied in many scholarly articles examining the relationship between urban policy and gentrification. Such studies on gentrification focus not only on Western cities, but also post-socialist cities in Eastern Europe and cities in East Asia and South America.
    This paper also clarifies three points regarding the case of inner London in the 2000s. First, London demonstrates the phenomenon of shifting gentrification frontiers. In 1964, Glass mentioned that the East End had so far been exempted, but gentrification nonetheless occurred in East London in the 2000s. Second, London demonstrates the changing state of gentrification. In Burnsbury, Islington, where gentrification occurred in the 1960s, newcomers to the area engaged in super-gentrification. On the other hand, new-build gentrification altered under-utilized lands along the River Thames. The third point involves the effects of urban policy on gentrification. The London Plan's “Blue Ribbon Network” affected gentrification in the under-utilized land along the old canals in Tower Hamlets and Hackney.

    Since the mid-1990s, Tokyo has been undergoing extensive reurbanization, and a lot of gentrification projects are currently being undertaken in the central area. This study aims to examine this transformation of socio-spatial structure of the Tokyo metropolitan area from the perspective of gentrification studies.
    Recently, urban policy has been the foundation of gentrification in gentrification studies. These studies introduced the idea that the wide variety of urban policies, which were framed according to the political situation of each county or city, affects the characteristics of gentrification. Consequently, in this study, I trace the urban policy implemented by both the national government and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) since the mid-1990s. I choose to focus on urban renaissance policy and housing policy out of the many fields of the urban policy.
    I find that the aim of the nation's urban renaissance policy is to escape from recession after the economic downturn, and the TMG's policy corresponds with this goal. Furthermore, I discuss the inclusion of “neoliberalism” and “entrepreneurialism” in the urban renaissance policy, with gentrification in the central Tokyo area in the early 21st century being the spatial expression of this inclusion. Moreover, I recommend that housing policy be incorporated into the overall urban renaissance policy thereby regarding as a tool for gathering the elite who are suitable for urban economic growth strategy rather than responding to residents' basic need.

    Like other major cities in North America and West Europe, Vancouver is now undergoing gentrification. In fact, housing values have continued to rise, and housing crisis has become one of the major social issues in the Canadian city. Gentrification in Vancouver is obviously and rapidly emerging in Downtown Eastside (DTES), a low-income neighborhood.
    In the present-day DTES, many low-income residents have been seriously threatened by the rising rents. In addition, some landlords have renovated and rebuilt their old buildings into condominiums and shops for the middle class, resulting in a decrease in affordable houses in this area and the eviction of tenants. However, some local groups and activists have declared a housing crisis and decried these developments to be a violation of the human rights of the low-income people in this neighborhood, demanding an increase of social housing.
    Furthermore, another phenomenon in DTES related to gentrification is that some local organizations and social enterprises have been trying to develop and support local businesses and create jobs in the community; however, this effort has sometimes conflicted with agenda of activists working on housing issues.
    This paper explains these two kinds of opposing movements concerning gentrification in DTES and their impacts on the community. It also examines the discussions on two locally oriented movements against gentrification to offer suggestions about the interaction between the advance of neoliberalism in global cities and the survival of local communities.

    The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors that have disrupted the healthy eating behaviors of the elderly. We supposed that there were two main factors, which were inadequate access to food and weak ties with family and the local community. In the local city that was composed of urban and rural area, these two factors were expected to cause the elderly residents a poor nutritional condition. An empirical study was conducted in City A that is located in the northern part of Tokyo metropolitan area. Logistic regression analyses were adopted. The dependent variable was “dietary diversity score”, and independent variables were “sex”, “age”, “income”, “family members living together”, “need of assistance”, “spending daytime alone”, “eating a meal with someone”, “the distance to supermarkets”, and “the frequency of participation in some hobby-related groups”. The results of logistic regression analyses showed that the dietary diversity scores of the elderly who lived in the area far from the supermarket were lower. Although controlling this effect, “the frequency of participation in some hobby-related groups” was statistically significant. These results suggested that inadequate access to food and weak ties with family and the local community have disrupted the healthy eating behaviors of the elderly.

    Populism is one of the most critical issues in Japanese urban politics. This case study examines urban populism through an urban regime analysis of the urban politics of Nagoya city, which has experienced populist politics since Mayor Kawamura took office in 2009.
    The most crucial point of this case study is the disintegration of the urban regime of Nagoya in the late 1990s. During the 1980s, this regime restructured itself with developmental and distributive politics. Business leaders supported developmental policies such as the conducting of mega events and building of public facilities. City politicians practiced machine politics and influenced the mayors. Such an urban regime lasted from the early 1980s to mid-1990s.
    However, the regime disintegrated in the late 1990s due to the weakening of machine politics. Politicians lost their power to mobilize voters, making voter behavior unpredictable. This created a power vacuum and made it easy for political leaders to get popular support through populist mobilization. In 2009, Mayor Kawamura was elected with over 500,000 votes (58.57％), and since then, Nagoya has experienced a political confrontation between the mayor and city politicians. This disintegration of the urban regime produced urban populism in the city.
    Populism is often considered to be a driver of political changes. However, in this case study, a rearrangement of the city regime brought about urban populism. This study indicates a potential for studies comparing the urban politics of Japan through urban regime analyses.

    Aioi Street in Hiroshima, also known as “Genbaku Slum”, used to be one of the largest squatter settlements in Japan. This street was never put on the map, but it expanded its scale as “Peace City” Hiroshima was gradually reconstructed. This paper examines the process how Aioi Street was named “Genbaku Slum”, seen as the object of elimination and replaced with the area of high-rise apartments called “New City”.
    In 1964, the term “Genbaku Slum” first appeared in Chugoku Shinbun, the local newspaper in Hiroshima. Tsukasa Nitoguri, who was one of the key players for reconstruction of Hiroshima, invented the term and used it for the issue of the Atomic Bomb Survivors' Assistance actions. At that time, this term was used to describe 6000 wooden temporary houses scattered in the city, and not just in Aioi Street.
    This situation changed in 1967. First, Chugoku Shinbun ran the feature stories about “Genbaku Slum” and defined Aioi Street as the only “Genbaku Slum” in the city. Those stories seemed to bruit tragic life there. Second, from 1966, the afforestation project along rivers was initiated by Hiroshima-city, that involved forcible eviction of residents in the squatter settlements. This afforestation nearly completed by 1967 except in Aioi Street. On the map in the blueprint in1967, Aioi Street was left blank in contrast to the other areas that were marked as the plan completed.
    In conclusion, through both semantic reduction by Chugoku Shinbun, and leaving Aioi Street aside from the focused location of forcible eviction, Aioi Street became known as “Genbaku Slum”.