In Japan, the problem of large companies depriving small and medium-sized firms of production value (exploitation problem) has long been pointed out as a source of exhaustion for small and medium-sized firms in various industries, including the construction and civil engineering industries. In this study, we measured the purchasing attitudes of purchasing managers of large firms, who are the actual participants in the exploitation problem, and analyzed the relationship with the personalities and moralities that exist in the background. As a result, it became clear that authoritarian organizations and anti-social personalities of purchasing managers decreased consideration for suppliers. In addition, when authoritarian organizations and purchasing managers have weak anti-social personalities, there is a possibility that there is a structure in which, while consideration for suppliers increases, compliance with company manuals and heightened awareness of cost improvement promotes exploitation was shown.

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With the development of ICT technology, human resource development is becoming increasingly important and requires an individualized and optimal learning system. This study aims to expand ICT human resource development in a grassroots manner, facilitating collaboration that is utilized online, and contributing to personalized optimization learning through effective ICT-driven content delivery and community collaboration. We examined ICT human resource development with a view to individual optimization through the construction and practice of learning systems in online and offline communities concerning the environment for professional development in the information technology field and the development of institutions and systems. In addition, we attempted to discover the effects of hands-on learning using actual ICT technologies and the issues of disseminating and sharing existing learning content by providing ICT learning content on an ongoing basis. In the future, locally driven initiatives may serve as platforms for showcasing tailored ICT talent development.

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The Great East Japan Earthquake and recent major floods have revealed the limitations of gray infrastructure and point-based thinking in disaster prevention. In response to this situation, green infrastructure is being promoted at the national level, including its use in watershed flood control. However, the number of developments is not large at this time, possibly due to the fact that it is not clear how to develop a wide variety of green infrastructure. Therefore, this study investigated the maintenance of rain gardens in Kumamoto Prefecture, with the aim of clarifying the characteristics of rain gardens and how they should be maintained with a view to expanding their maintenance in the future. As a result, it became clear that rain gardens are in line with the concept of “green watershed flood control” triggered by the torrential rains in July 2020, and that they are currently being developed in cooperation with industry, academia, and government. In addition, it became clear that rain gardens have variable characteristics, that their form is determined by policy issues other than flood control, and that even in public-private partnerships, there are differences in the stage of participation of the entities in each case. Focusing on the process from introduction to maintenance and management, it is necessary to first clarify policy issues and position rain gardens as a solution to these issues in higher-level plans, to have key persons take the lead, and to have the participation of entities that have a close relationship with the companies. Next, at the maintenance stage, it is necessary to lower costs through the participation of local residents and establish a subsidy system, while for maintenance and management, existing systems should be utilized is needed. Since these are highly versatile initiatives that could be implemented in any municipality, it is believed that the analysis in this study has provided an understanding of some of the effective methods for rain garden maintenance.

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With the rapid spread of shared bicycles in recent years, there have been many examples of shared bicycle ports on university campuses, but there have been few quantitative evaluations of how much the introduction of shared bicycle ports improves student mobility and how much demand can be expected. On the other hand, quantitative evaluation of the effects of introducing a shared bike port would be useful for university campus planning and transportation planning in the vicinity of the university. In this study, we investigated the mobility disparity between students with and without bicycles at Chiba University’s Nishi-Chiba Campus, and identified the issues involved in installing a shared bike port on campus, as well as the changes in student mobility and demand for use if a shared bike port is installed on campus. The methodology used was to identify the actual conditions of mobility and the demand for use of the shared cycle ports on campus. The method used was a questionnaire survey to assess changes in students’ mobility and their intention to use the shared bike system. The behavioral intention method (BI method) was then used to predict the demand for shared cycle port use. In addition, issues related to the introduction of shared bicycles were identified through interviews. As a result, we found that students who do not own bicycles in the vicinity of the university find it more inconvenient to move around the campus than students who commute by bicycle, and that the installation of a shared bicycle port on the university campus would improve the mobility of students who do not own bicycles. The study also found that the installation of a shared bike port on Chiba University’s Nishi-Chiba Campus is expected to generate more use than other ports.

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In order to ensure the safety and security of users of parks and roads, Osaka City has been implementing a safety project involving park and street trees from FY2018 to FY2024, and plans are to cut down about 19,000 tall trees in those 7 years. The current paper uses publicly available project data from FY2023 and information obtained through field observations to explain the details of this project. This paper then notes the issues with this project from four perspectives: tree cutting standards, the state of replanting, the effects of the project, and public awareness. Next, this paper analyzes tree management data from Osaka City for the period from FY2017 to FY2021, which includes both the normal maintenance of park trees and street trees and the safety project. Results revealed that pruning costs accounted for about 70 % of tree management costs, that the number of trees pruned and the pruning area decrease if annual pruning costs are constant, that less than 20 % of trees that were cut down were replaced with tall trees in either normal maintenance or the safety project, that the number of tall trees decreased by about 16,000 trees in 5 years since FY2017 as a consequence (this does not include the clearing of trees toppled by Typhoon Jebi in 2018), and that tall trees, if they are replaced, are replaced with smaller trees. Based on these findings, proposed improvements to the management of park trees and street trees in Osaka City include: having an arborist diagnose the health of trees and respecting his or her findings, clearly stating the cutting criteria, reducing cutting due to root growth to the extent possible, stopping the cutting of healthy Himalayan cedars and Abelia shrubs, properly pruning street trees, increasing the rate of replacement of tall trees when tall trees are cut down, improving the information given to the public and the way in which they are informed, publishing data such as the number of tall trees, adopting canopy cover as an index, and explaining the secondary aim of the safety project.

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In recent years, civic tech, in which citizens utilize open data and IT technology to solve problems, has become widespread. This research focuses on Code for Saga, a civic tech community in Saga Prefecture, and aims to clarify the actual situation and transformation of Code for Saga's activities and participants by analyzing the activity content and individual participation status. In this study, holding and participating in Code for Saga events were treated as civic tech activities, and we conducted a web survey and interviews with people involved in Code for Saga to organize the event content and the participation status of event participants. Through analysis, we found that the content of Code for Saga's activities changes depending on the social context, and that changes in the content of the activity also attract participants with different purposes, changing participant attributes. Furthermore, participants are also a factor in changes in activity content, and Code for Saga can be said to be a community that changes as participants and activity content influence each other. It was suggested that the civic tech community is not a community whose members and activity content are fixed like existing town development organizations, but where participants and activity content mutually influence each other, and the activities change. Furthermore, It was suggested that there is a property that it does not have a fixed mission from the beginning, but rather the personal interests and work-related interests of the participants resonate and spread within the civic tech community, and activities that lead to social.

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We held an Advance Care Planning (ACP) training session for medical and nursing care workers. We aimed to clarify their attitudes and behavioral changes regarding ACP after the session. In March 2022, we held an online ACP training session for medical and nursing care workers in A city, Osaka Prefecture. We conducted an anonymous questionnaire survey on the day of the workshop and 3 months later regarding the participants’ attitudes toward ACP and the practice of ACP for themselves, their patients, and their patients’ caregivers. There were 40 participants in the ACP workshop. Twenty-eight participants answered the questionnaire, of whom 21 (75 %) were female. Fifteen (53.6 %) were care managers, six (21.4 %) were helpers, and four (14.3 %) were nurses. Ten (35.7 %) were “not familiar” with ACP, and 18 (64.3 %) were practicing ACP with their patients or caregivers. In the survey conducted 3 months after the workshop, 18 participants (64.3 % response rate) replied, of whom six participants (33.3 %) had practiced ACP with their patients or caregivers after the workshop. ACP training sessions for medical and nursing care workers resulted in behavioral changes that led to an increase in ACP practice by about 30 %. These findings suggest that ACP training sessions are effective in spreading ACP practice.

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In this paper, we first organized the concept of place branding based on previous studies of Western brand theory, place branding theory, and marketing theory. Next, the stages of place branding formation were discussed with reference to the concept of the regional resourceization process. While most of the conventional research in this field has been focused on “external empathy,” which is to gain the interest and empathy of customers outside the region by emphasizing the external brand image, attention should be focused on fostering “internal empathy” within the region in order to refine a regional brand identity that can be evaluated by external parties. In contrast, he pointed out that in order to refine a local brand identity that can be evaluated externally, attention should be focused on fostering “internal empathy” within the community. In order to verify the above argument with an actual case study, the author took up a tourism video production project in FY2023 from among the regional collaborative PBL projects as part of Tohoku reconstruction assistance and regional revitalization and examined the mechanism of “internal empathy” from the perspectives of both university students and local people. The mechanism of fostering “empathy within” from the viewpoints of both university students and local people were discussed and the possibility of new “regional creation” was mentioned based on the above. Finally, we discussed directions for exploring place branding from both theoretical and practical perspectives, including the need for quantitative research on the relationship between regional collaborative PBL activities and tourism promotion, and the importance of developing evaluation indicators.

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The purpose of this study is to identify commonalities and differences in parking area rules and to identify differences in the operational realities and challenges of parking area rules resulting from differences in district goals. The findings of this study are as follows. First, while the regional rules had many points in common, there were also differences in terms of the size of the target districts, parking intensity, consolidation and segregation policies, and operational structure. Second, the objectives of introducing regional rules are diverse, including balancing supply and demand, ensuring continuity of liveliness, and creating a pedestrian-first community, while the issues of regional rules are also diverse, including facilitating separation and consolidation, measures for on-street parking and cargo disposal, the relationship between parking facilities required to be attached and urban planning parking, and the organization and use of regional contribution cooperation fund management. Thirdly, there were initiatives in other areas and their utilization. Third, issues can be resolved by formulating regional rules while referring to initiatives and measures taken in other districts.

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From ancient times to the present, philosophers have debated the normative status of anger in political discourse. However, these debates have predominantly centered on the normative standpoint, and efforts to bridge the normative discipline with empirical evidence remain elusive. This article examines the functions of expressing anger in political discourse using the empirical method, and establishes a basis for the normative debate which is stated above. In the contemporary philosophical debate on anger, there is a conflict as to whether expressing anger has negative functions (revenge function and avoidance function) or positive functions (salience function, enrichment function). Based on these philosophical debates, we pose two research questions: (1) Is the function of anger primarily positive or negative? and (2) Does the salience of social events have a moderating effect? The results of the survey experiment showed that (1) anger has both negative (revenge) and positive (salience and enrichment) functions, and (2) the functions of expressing anger do not depend on the salience of social events.

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