Taiyo YAGASAKI

Darkness in the night brings about the feeling of fear and a sense of liberation for human. Japanese ghosts called yokai and yurei were the creation of fear of darkness, while the fear continues to exist today being manifested as urban legends and the occult. Urban legends and the occult are consumed as a result of human curiosity in the form of ghost tours. This study attempts to examine the relationship between the human feeling of fear and the feared places in Japan. Haunted places and ghost tours are thus studied, by analyzing human fear of darkness in the night and ghost tourism based on the curiosity of fear. Reflecting the local characteristics of places, haunted places vary in terms of the source of fear, and many types of ghost stories are told. Ghost tours operated by a company examined in this study are not for the purpose of profit but for the means of advertisement, thus ghost tours are ethically considered. The routes of ghost tours, visiting haunted places in the suburbs, do not reflect the overall distribution pattern of hauted places.

日本の高度経済成長期に「ニュータウン」と呼ばれる新興住宅地が郊外地域で多数形成された．今日，ニュータウンの課題として住民の高齢化や空き区画の増加などが指摘され，ニュータウンの再開発や再生が求められている．そこで本研究は，土浦協同病院の移転によって発展が加速する茨城県土浦市おおつ野を対象に，ニュータウンの再開発について考察した．聞き取りおよびアンケート調査を実施して，おおつ野の開発史，土浦協同病院の移転経緯，住民のライフコースと日常生活の変化を明らかにする．茨城県南部におけるニュータウンは，バブル崩壊後の都心回帰の傾向が強まる中で，東京大都市圏の郊外としての機能が低下し，地方都市の郊外として戸建住宅の用地を供給する役割を持つように変化した．その結果，おおつ野では空き区画が増加したが，土浦協同病院の移転により，商業施設が立地し，生活環境が改善され，ニュータウンとしての再発展が始まった． New residential areas called "new towns" have developed in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, since the 1960s. These new towns are now faced with such problems as an increased elderly population and growing numbers of vacant lots, and redevelopment is required. This study examines the redevelopment of the new town in Otsuno District, Tsuchiura City, Ibaraki Prefecture, where the relocation of the Tsuchiura Kyodo General Hospital triggered a new residential development. Interviews and questionnaire surveys were conducted in order to clarify the development history of Otsuno District, the reason for relocation of the hospital, and the changes in daily life for the residents. The characteristics of the new town changed from that of a bedroom community of the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area into a commuter town of Southern Ibaraki Prefecture after the collapse of Japan's overheated stock and real estate markets, leaving Otsuno District with many vacant lots immediately after the collapse. However, the new town has been redeveloped since the relocation of the Tsuchiura Kyodo General Hospital, and the living environment has improved.

<p> A tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, devastated coastal areas of Sanriku in northeastern Japan. Because Sanriku had been damaged repeatedly by tsunamis in the past, local governments and residents attempted to protect coastal communities by building large tide embankments, raising the ground, and relocating houses to higher ground. Geographical studies on the disaster mainly focus on the vulnerability of regional communities to disasters and on measures taken to reduce hazard risks. Recently, geographers have begun to use the concept of resilience to examine the process of reconstruction. This study examines factors that contribute to the high level of resilience of a local community impacted by the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 by presenting the case of the Moune district of Kesennuma City, Miyagi Prefecture. An adaptation process model of local communities is proposed to examine a local community impacted by a disaster. Three time-series phases consider the pre-disaster period, evacuation and refugee period directly after the disaster, and the planning period of the group relocation project. Resilience in the context of geography is an adaptation process in which a local community is reconstructed after a disaster to achieve a new phase of low vulnerability. The Moune district is examined from interviews and document surveys carried out from 2012 through 2016. It is suggested that resilience functioned successfully: people in the local community quickly agreed to resettle to a new residential quarter on higher ground and the resettlement project was completed successfully. The social capital formed in the context of local history and community based on the traditional culture and the economy contributed to forming a high level of resilience to the tsunami disaster. Geographical studies on resilience may facilitate an accurate understanding of tsunami-prone areas.</p>

Biomass is a renewable energy source that is produced from living or recently living biological material. Vegetation type and biomass are considered important components that affect biosphere-atmosphere interactions. The ground assessment of biomass, however, has been found to be insufficient due to the limited spatial extent of surveys. This study aims to integrate field measurements with satellite remote sensing data for regional biomass mapping in Fujiyoshida City, Japan. Fujiyoshida City is situated on the northern slope of Mt. Fuji and includes a large area of forest land, named "Onshirin Forest". From 2011 to 2012, a field survey was conducted to calculate the biomass potential in situ as ground-truthed data. After fieldwork, ortho-rectified ALOS data with an AVNIR-2 scene (22 May 2008) was used to map the vegetation cover types. Japanese larch, Japanese red pine, mixed forest, other forest, grass, bare soil and roads, and buildings were identified using supervised classification. The total plant biomass was 163,252 tons. The biomass potential estimate from field measurements was extrapolated to the large forest area in Fujiyoshida City to estimate the potential plant biomass of specific vegetation cover types.

This study attempts to find out the regional memory and image shared by residents before the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. Oral histories were obtained by conducting interviews in a small community of Moune in Kesennuma City, Miyagi Prefecture from March through December, 2012. Two analyses, the correspondence analysis based on text mining and the spatial analysis using GIS, were applied to the oral histories of seventeen residents. The regional image and memory before the earthquake were thus extracted, which help local residents to plan and implement community-based reconstruction.