Visualizing through a text-mining approach for continuous foresight survey reports revealed chronological trends of experts' consciousness over 40 years. The direction of their consciousness largely changed after 2000 onward having stronger relationships with society, following subdivided and relatively incremental decades before 2000. Their consciousness to society has spread widely after 2000. The chronological changes of some frequently occurring words revealed some emerging fields and their necessity of societal embeddedness. However, there has still been a large inclination among the fields, which suggests an insufficiency of their consciousness to society. This has led us to have fears of essential seeds-needs incongruency in innovation ecosystems in Japan.

View full abstract

Nowadays, despite the fact that researchers are wanted to create performance that solve the problems of society and the word "implementation" is beginning to spread among people, the definition of the word itself cannot derive a uniform expertise. This paper makes an attempt to describe performance of research and development that are recommended to be implemented. In consequence, it becomes clear that four out of ten projects attain the phase of implementation. Concept of implementation must be more widespread than initially envisioned. In addition, this paper also examines the correlation of novelty in implementation and research technique together with that of general versatility in implementation and performance.

View full abstract

In recent years, an individual duration of out-home activity is staggered due to the diversified lifestyle. On the other hand, the business or retail activities extends the business hours so that the energy consumption of those sectors have been increased. The purpose of this study is to clarify the effect of temporal concentration of out-home activity on sector energy consumptions. This study uses the Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities conducted by the Ministry of General Affairs in 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2006. The analysis of covariance structure showed that home sector energy consumption was significantly influenced by regional climate, and business and transport sector energy consumption was significantly influenced by the temporal concentration of out-home activity.

View full abstract

Existing Life-Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) approach has looked around only the impact on land area by acquiring feedstock and occupation of factories without sufficiently addressing the importance of assessing ecosystem services. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to propose an assessment method for ecosystem services using assessment results of existing studies through a case study of wooden and steel framed house used domestic lumber. Thus, firstly we estimated the total impacted land area by each land use type throughout the lifecycle of both a wooden and a steel-framed house. We then made an inventory to quantify the economic value of ecosystem services by each impacted ecosystem type. As a result, we could indicate the basic outline of a future direction for evaluating ecosystem services comprehensively.

View full abstract

In this paper, the impact of media affects the form of local earthquake disaster prevention (LEDP) behavior in younger generations is discussed. Both infrastructure and local disaster prevention by residents are important for earthquake disaster prevention. Moreover, residents collect and distribute prevention information by using various media sources. Therefore, developing LEDP behavior in younger generations by using media sources would be useful, because it can support local disaster prevention in the future. This study used questionnaire investigations, of which, 675 valid samples were gathered from students of elementary schools, junior high schools and universities. Both a logit model and structural equation modeling were used as the analytical methods. From the results, it was shown that local media affected effective cognition, and it promoted LEDP behavior intention. Moreover these structures were stronger with growth. Finally, this paper discussed several recommendations to promote LEDP behavior using media.

View full abstract

The East Japan great earthquake disaster brought serious damage, and a lot of people died. We studied the effects of disaster prevention measures for Ishinomaki City that suffered big damage by East Japan great earthquake disaster. We should get knowledge to examine a regional plan with a little damage caused by the tsunami. At first we analyzed the refuge behavior and a refuge action characteristic based on the questionary survey data in Ishinomaki City. Secondly, we performed the simulation based on refuge behavior data. This study showed the effects of the disaster prevention measures in the revival plan that Ishinomaki City planned.

View full abstract

Foreign tourists would need support in a time of disaster due to a lack of the knowledge for disaster risks and communication skill in Japanese. This study aims to clarify differences between the spatial structure of regional disaster prevention and tourists' activity areas and to find effective way to guide their evacuation. Target area is central area of Tokyo and the activity areas were extracted based on the tourist guidebooks and tourists' activity logs captured by GPS device. When the activity area extends across wards or doesn't contain evacuation site, it would be difficult for tourists to know more accessible evacuation site. Meanwhile, since many of evacuation sites are sightseeing spot itself, it would be landmark to guide even when it is not designated site for the location. Local government and communities should know these differences, and offer proper information to tourists.

View full abstract

The present paper aimed to identify municipal governments' measures to promote the household adoption of reinforcement of wooden house against earthquakes. Data were collected via interview surveys in the seven cities in Osaka prefecture. In the qualitative analysis, it was revealed that officers of different cities have a variety of views on the impacts of the measures they have adopted. On the basis of the findings, a quantitative analysis was performed. A major finding was that whether to take a new action for the promotion of seismic reinforcement in a fiscal year was significantly associated with the number of households adopting seismic reinforcement in the same year. Practical implications of the findings are also discussed.

View full abstract

We analyze trends in attitude of nuclear experts toward the use of nuclear energy for three years before and after the 2011 nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant by using the result of the opinion survey to have a full grasp of the attitude of member of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan (AESJ) toward nuclear energy. Members of AESJ had been positive for the use of nuclear energy before the Fukushima accident. They had the low susceptibility to risk of an accident of nuclear facilities. After the Fukushima accident, some of them had been negative for the use of nuclear energy. Then, their attitudes to the use of nuclear energy show oscillatory changes.

View full abstract

The Japanese government has implemented measures to reduce volatile organic compounds (VOCs): voluntary management plans for hazardous air pollutants and a combination of regulations and voluntary initiatives. The aim of this study is to estimate the effects of these measures on reductions in VOCs emissions and in the health risk of VOCs. We use propensity score matching to control for selection bias. We find that firms participating in a voluntary program to reduce hazardous air pollutants are more likely to reduce the health risk of VOCs.

View full abstract

In many cases, multiple organizations and professionals are concerned with an operation to provide value through products and services. When multiple organizations and professionals provide a series of services, with switching main providers, appropriate scheme for alliance among those service providers are essential to ensure the benefits of recipient of services and the society, from the viewpoints of quality assurance and optimum utilization of resources.
This study proposes a comprehensive model for alliance among organizations and professionals, in case that multiple independent service providers, who have overlapping expertise each, provide highly-professional services without facilitators. Also, an applicability of the model is demonstrated for regional healthcare alliance as case study.

View full abstract