This article aims at discussing a variety of socio-technological problems, which may occur at the intersections of R&D scenarios and social change scenarios in the near future. Scientists and scholars in various disciplines used the "scanning" method and generated future social change scenarios from the viewpoint of ordinary citizens, and efficiently encompassed external elements, which other future projection methods do not consider.

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This analysis examines one of the risk communication activities that was implemented in the village of Tokai, Japan. It demonstrates how residents evaluate the safety measures and the safety culture of nuclear facilities through the "Citizen's Inspection" program; an inspection program devised and managed by volunteer residents interested in these activities. The results were determined after three inspections were conducted and suggest that even with a limited knowledge of nuclear safety, a motivated resident's point of view in evaluating the safety measures and the safety culture of nuclear facilities can contribute toward nuclear risk management.

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In Japan, on the back of growing interest in nuclear terrorism and promoting peaceful use of plutonium steadily, there is a growing interest in protection of confidential information in nuclear industry. This paper looks at how protection of confidential information (Safeguards Information) are regulated and handled in the United States civil nuclear energy industry, and extracts its implication for Japanese regulation and practical business affairs. This paper also points out the problems that Japanese nuclear industry would face if the programs at the same level as nuclear industry in the United States would be introduced in Japan.

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Technology assessment (TA), the concept of which was introduced in the late 1960s, revealed the aspect of total system management in Japan. While private sectors expected public sectors to undertake the exercise by reason that stakes at issue are beyond the scope of business world, the government rationalized and legitimized by this concept forecasting and evaluating exercises on a per-project basis. By examining the processes in which TA concepts have been differently interpreted and adopted by different actors like industries, ministries and Diet members and these have been metamorphosed without expression of the essential function of TA, this article follows the methodological transitions from system management to evaluation and foresight and their political contexts.

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One of the ways to treat used fluorescent tubes safely and usefully is to construct the route to take them to recycling facilities without breaking them. An experiment on the collection of them, using economic instruments, conducted in Toyonaka, Osaka, has an implication to the construction. In this paper, the experimental results are discussed to derive the following implications. First, the system in the experiment promotes the collection of used fluorescent tubes. Second, restrictions of the economic incentives in the system do not have such a negative effect on the collection of used fluorescent tubes. Third, the system has a possibility to decrease the management cost, and can acquire a good evaluation from consumers; and we should proceed to consider this system more.

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When unmanned cruising technique of vehicles is developed, new transportation society will be emerged. Given this technique, it is possible to design new system in which vehicles are used as common resources in the society to meet the trip demand without the drivers by automatic controller. However, this system may increase environmental burden. This study constructs the model to evaluate the environmental impact such as energy consumption by mathematical programming methods. Then the model is applied to case study area in order to analyze how the impact is and discuss how the impact is mitigated.

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This paper examines how to design the social decision making process for introduction of renewable energy technologies by analyzing nationwide environmental disputes over wind power siting and regulations of local governments and by analyzing the public's attitudes in host communities. Main findings are summarized as follows. First, an intervention of local governments to a process is significant, and "clapping on" environmental regulations are diffused among local governments. Second, the silent majority "observer" accounts for around 40% in a decision making process. Some of them might oppose technology introduction if local environment conservation is not addressed. Therefore, agenda setting and other factors giving consideration to such people is critical.

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This paper reviews the historical process of the local tourism policy incorporating the community development in Sawara, Chiba and analyzes the factors affecting its successful results. The authors interviews the nine stakeholders related to the local tourism policy and analyzes their perceptions on problem structure. The results of analysis shows the following factors were critical to result in the successful policy making in local tourism policy: the unintended win-win effect between the historical area conservation activities and local festival promotion; the local people's good utilization of city government; and the well-organized role management of city government as the supporter to the local people. Finally, the paper proposes the future direction to realize the sustainable tourism development.

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We analyzed the agricultural policy of Katori City in Chiba using problem structuring methods, highlighting issues and mutual expectation of stakeholders including local governments, farmers and business communities; then identified feasible policy issues. It is clear that most of farmers recognize management improvements as major issues. Then, we identified policy issues in local context such as distribution network, transport network and concentration of agricultural landholdings, focusing on relevant policy targets, that is, medium and small farmer.

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This paper surveys the perceptions of main actors regarding the problems on sustainability in Furano, Hokkaido and analyzes them with the problem structuring method. First, we interview the local actors in agriculture, tourism, commerce, waste disposals and recycle, social welfare and mass media. Then, we abstract the political issues concerning the local sustainability and examine their feasibility through the reciprocal expectation analysis among stakeholders. The results show that the political issues include the improvement of performance in agricultural and tourism sectors, strategic cooperation among different sectors, the effective efforts to increase the local government's revenue, the enhancement of local culture and the new function and human developments for further cooperation among stakeholders.

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This paper analyzes the problem structure in urban transportation planning with the empirical case study of light rail transit (LRT) introduction. First, we review the history of past discussion relating to the LRT introduction in Utsunomiya. Second, we interviewed with the main stakeholders including local authorities, local transport operators, non-profit organization. In the interviews, we utilize the cognitive maps to analyze the problem identification analysis. Then, we abstract the potential policy agenda with a matrix consisting of the driver and the factor. The results show the new policy agenda which have not been discussed in the past debate. We also analyze the interaction among the stakeholders with the retrospective expectation table. Finally, we feed back our results to the stakeholders.

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Mobility environments in rural area have following features which are different from urban areas. 1) There are a lot of narrow roads in rural areas. 2) There are not many highways in rural areas. 3) Public transportation network is narrow. Therefore, it is hoped that road and public transportation networks in rural area should be enhanced. However, Local governments and public transportation companies in rural area do not have sufficient budgets to build them. Under these circumstances, it is expected that ITS will be the possible solution to the transportation issue in rural area that has faced to various kind of problems. We propose the effct structure for rural are in ITS through applying practical cases.

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Unexpected accidents of children happen frequently. Injuries caused by accidents have been at the first place in the death cause of the children in Japan since 1960 until today. Although product accident occupies a large part of those accidents, information of those accidents is not circulated among producers and designers of the products and is failing to contribute to their preventive activities. In this study, the current status of children's product accident is analyzed based on the database provided by the National Institute of Technology and Evaluation (NITE). Comparative study between two product groups, "A world designed for the children" and "A world designed for the adult" is done, and limitations and problems of the present product accident data is discussed.

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A declining birth rate and aging population largely determine the future of Japanese society. Practical skills must be developed to solve problems resulting from ultra-aging by means of scientific knowledge including neuroscience. In this article, we shall review recent neuroscientific studies to explain why many aged people tend to fall prey to deceptions such as bank transfer fraud. Since neural mechanisms underlying deliberative decision making function poorly in aged brain, old people tend to decide automatically. This is why some old people are poor decision-makers. At the end, we shall propose some political treatments to protect old people from deceptions in view of their styles of decision making.

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The new procedure to extract technologically relevant words against societal issues was developed using newspaper articles. The originally introduced indices: 'problem relevancy (pr)' and 'technical relevancy (tr)' enabled to score their importance of the words appeared in the articles and to assign keywords to each article. The F-measure defined by precision and recall of the word extraction was evaluated and showed the higher values than those of the baseline indices (tfidf). As its application, the keywords extraction of technological solutions against medical issues, i.e. the counter measures for cancer and lifestyle-related illness was executed using the articles from Nikkei newspaper. The obtained keywords enabled to construct the co-word maps using Jaccard index, equivalence index and proximity index. The results showed the usefulness of the procedure for co-word analysis.

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