Six years have passed since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and at present collective relocation projects are being completed all over the tsunami stricken area. While safety is much improved it is considered that the lifestyle of migrated residents is to be affected due to steep slope topography and out of previous living area. In this research, the effect on the lifestyle of migrants was analyzed in Kesennuma City by looking at the walking accessibility of elderly people with their physical burden. The accessibility to be nearest living facility, including bus stops of public transport, shops and hospitals, from each collective relocation site including topographic aspect was assessed. The result shows that 60% of collective relocation sites are located out of walkable distance from the closest public transport and 15% of collective relocation sites are located extremely far from any closest living facilities. This research is expected to raise knowledge that will aid other collective relocation in the future.

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 Against heavy-rainfall disasters, residents are required to acquire various information that a threat is approaching and take evacuation behavior. Information about a trigger of evacuation includes not only the one issued by governments but also the calling from neighbors and the notice of neighbors' actions. Residents are capable of making a robust decision on evacuation by relying on multiple information sources. As results, it became clear that increasing the perceived seriousness of damage and the perceived effectiveness of evacuation, and alleviating the troublesome about evacuation would contribute to enhancing evacuation intention. In addition, as for the factors specific to information, fostering trust of the information, enhancing the relationship among neighbors, increasing the recognition of an importance of cooperative actions for disaster risk reduction are important to foster evacuation intention of evacuation advisory, callings from neighbors, callings from people living in their upper stream, respectively.

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 Since 1970s, psychological and social effects of thinking and communicating in 'narrative form' have been empirically studied across the fields of psychology and social sciences, and implications from those studies are expected to be applied to the process of consensus building on public policies. In this study, we defined a procedure of composing information in narrative form, and then we conducted an experiment to compare the effects on participants' attitudes caused by reading strongly-narrative-formed scenarios and reading moderately-narrative-formed ones. The results showed that strongly-narrative-formed scenarios cause stronger attitude changes, and the changing process is affected by some psychological factors such as 'narrative-orientedness', 'narrative transportation' and construction of 'situation models'. In addition, through defining the procedure of narrative composition and testing its effects, we found some practical implications for developing techniques of narrative-formed communication.

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 It is necessary to construct an evacuation plan against tsunami disaster considering the requirement of each region. The investment plan of evacuation-related facilities and transport network should be efficient depending on geographical conditions and the expected arrival time of the Tsunami. However, concrete and effective planning methods to discuss such plans have not been established yet. Hence, this paper attempts to constructs a optimal evacuation planning model on bimodal that minimizes time to finish evacuation. This model is able to propose the optimal evacuation method as the whole region. In addition this model is extended to a network design problem where the objective of the upper-level problem is to mini-mise the total investment cost while ensuring that the evacuation time is smaller than a predetermined value, which is formulated as a lower-level problem. Moreover, the proposed models are applied onto the practical network to seek for an optimal evacuation plan considering the conditions such as the population of each area, the arrival time of the tsunami, the situation of the evacuation facility.

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 This study formulated a general equilibrium model of a developing country where the major exported goods are produced by foreign-capital firms. With the model, this study analyzed the impacts of transportation infrastructure on the industrial structure of the developing country. The country is an open-economy with two sectors. The first is the sector of traded goods owned by foreign capital. The second is the sector of non-traded goods owned by domestic capital. The analysis showed that transportation infrastructure to reduce the trade cost with the world market will expand the sector of traded goods while reducing the sector of non-traded goods. This results in the reduction of the number of domestic firms and entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the transportation infrastructure to reduce the trade cost within the country will expand the sector of non-traded goods. Based on the result of the analysis, this study discussed its policy implication on the long-run growth of the developing country.

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 Number of accidents during riding electrically assisted bicycles has increased, especially by older adult cyclists. It's pointed out that they don't stop at intersections during riding them. So in this study, we investigated behavior and awareness by older adult cyclists, through 3 methods – video observation, route choice survey by GPS, and questionnaire survey, in order to know the reasons of running out or jumping the light at intersections. As the results, it was revealed that older adult cyclists didn't pay attention to the waiting behavior at intersections and the speed which are different from the ones by conventional bicycles, and they preferred to the routes where they could ride electrically assisted bicycles faster.

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 This paper discusses the function of a local service platform which enables matching between local potential enterprises and outside customers to realize transaction of local service in the market. The local service platform provides local potential entrepreneurs with consultant services which improve the contents of their service commodities to attach market values in response to the wants of the customers. The platform decides the range of the service types, each of which is characterized by a bundle of horizontally differentiated commodities (menus). A theoretical model is formulate to investigate how the platform determines the best combination of the range of service types and the variety of menus for the respective service types. The paper also analyzes the relationships between the optimal types of service commodities and the optimal fee for the usage of the platform.

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 Although it is important to understand the influence of consumer behavior on regional economy, as far as we know, the number of empirical research is very limited in Japan. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to verify the economic impact of consumer's store choice on local economy. In order to compare the local economic return of consumption, we investigated three types of grocery store in Okayama-city: large chain store, local capital store and personal store. As a result, it was shown that approximately 67% of consumption revenue at a personal store would return to the local economy, however the return rate at a large chain store would become about its half. This result in Okayama-city suggests the same trend as in previous research in Kyoto-city.

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 Franchise retail firms like supermarkets and convenience stores improve the efficiency of goods distribution to franchise stores by locating distribution centers in a city or the proximity of the city. This study discusses that investment in urban road network facilitates the utilization of distribution centers through the reduction in logistics transportation time. For the discussion, this study models the inventory management of franchise retail firms, and identifies that distribution centers have two functions. The first is to aggregate the risk to hold goods inventory, which is faced by individual franchise stores. The second is to increase the lot size of order to transport goods from the outside of the city. Then, this study analyzes how the investment in urban road network affects the location pattern of franchise stores and a distribution center in a city, through the improvement of logistics transportation. Its economic benefit to increase the convenience of shopping for consumers is also discussed.

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 In recent years, increased redeliveries of home delivery parcels have become a societal problem. One reason for this problem is the increased number of households with every member out-of-home (HEMOs). However, few research has shown empirically the temporal rate of HEMOs. In this study, we calculated the HEMO rate as well as the individual-based out-of-home rate using Person Trip (PT) survey data. Specifically, we compare these rates with two time-series datasets from a Kumamoto PT survey and discuss the factors for change. As a result, the HEMO rate rose considerably, though there was no major individual-based rate change over 15 years. We also decomposed the factors of changes in household composition ratios and changes in the HEMO rate for household type.

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 Central place theory¹⁾ envisaged that economic agglomerations form regular hexagonal patterns. A long-standing issue is a lack of quantitative method for assessing emergence of such regularities in the actual data. Ikeda et al.²⁾ introduced a group-theoretic spectrum analysis as the first attempt to develop a quantitative approach to detect hexagonal patterns. However, there has been several technical issues to be settled in their method: (i) How to select domain that crucially affect the result? (ii) How to select predominant spectrum? To settle these issues, we employ several methodologies: an optimization formulation for the choice of a domain, an eigenvector-based criterion for noise reduction, and a permutation test for a significance test of spectrum. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by an analysis of the actual population data of Southern Germany and Eastern USA.

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 In the analysis of many-region spatial agglomeration models, it is practically impossible to find all stable equilibria because the governing equations exhibit complex bifurcation behaviour in line with changes in the level of transport cost. In this paper, a systematic method for finding “trivial solutions,” a special class of equilibria, is introduced. Trivial solutions satisfy the governing equation for any values of the transport cost parameter while retaining their geographical patterns. Trivial solutions can be systematically computed and classified by analysing the group that expresses the symmetry of the governing equations. As a specific example, the trivial solutions on a square lattice economy with boundary is explicitly given. Stability properties of the trivial solutions are studied through numerical experiments employing Forslid and Ottaviano (2003)'s model.

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