DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS FOR SUSTAINABILITY OF GEMMEINSCHAFT-TYPE OF RURAL COMMUNITIES IN DEPOPULATION ASSOCIATED WITH AGING IN NORTHERN KYOTO AREAS, JAPAN

Like other mountainous areas in Japan, the northern areas of Kyoto Prefecture have been experiencing serious depopulation with aging. The demographic phenomena have directly impacted the sustainability of rural communities. The impacts of depopulation with aging are exhaustive and on almost all aspects of rural life in the case of Gemmeinschaft-type of communities: irrigation management, co-work for agricultural road maintenance, co-work for common property such as pond and forestry, and other many functions related to daily life. Thus, the impacts of depopulation with aging are much more serious for the sustainability of community in the case of Gemmeinschaft-type of rural communities in Japan. The research used Survey Method on forty-five (45) rural communities in the areas which was done in 2011 to identify demographic factors of rural communities for their sustainability as a community. These rural communities were located in hilly and mountainous areas which generally have disadvantageous position for socioeconomic development and have small population with high percentage of elderly people who are older than 65 years old. The rural community, whose elderly people share higher than 50% of the total population, is called “a marginal village” indicating a difficulty of maintaining community activities. However, despite the similar circumstance, those communities demonstrated different dynamism of community activities

HISTORICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EMIGRATION FROM RURAL JAPAN IN THE PRE-WORLD WAR II ERA

Spatial mobility like rural–urban migration is an important social phenomenon to measure the degree of freedom and dynamism of a society that is directly related to industrialization. The same applies to spatial mobility of emigration, which is permanent or long-term transmigration from a nation to another nation. Compared with Europe after the Industrial Revolution where emigration was a major social mobility, Japanese emigration after the Meiji era until World War II, was an exceptional social mobility in its industrialization process. This paper aims to clarify the historical characteristics of Japanese emigration during the prewar period. Three approaches were introduced. The first was to extract periodicity from the trend of migration, finding four medium-term cycles with 15-20 years; shifting the destination from Hawaii, North America, South America and China; and changing their intensions from tentative emigration of contracted labor for remittance to permanent emigration for settlement of agricultural firm in the receiving country. The second is to clarify the Japanese government framework which created institutionalized marginality to the emigrants, causing a discrimination structure within the emigrants society. The third is to identify push and pull factors of Japanese emigrants, finding seven factors: natural environments and natural disasters, increasing population and surplus people, commercialized agricultural products and faded crops, poverty and income differences, accessibility to external society, value of performance orientation, and emigration encouraging agency. Although the situation of emigration is directly affected by the international relations around Japan as well as tense relations between the value and behavior of Japanese emigrants and those of the receiving society, emigration itself results from the personal initiative of an emigrant and thus its mechanism is complicated and diversified, requiring multidimensional framework of ordinary income opportunities in the sending community in which emigration is positioned as one of their income opportunities

SOCIOECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF EMIGRATION IN THE EARLY STAGE OF MODERNIZATION: PATH ANALYSIS BASED ON THE VILLAGE DATA IN JAPAN

International mobility of human beings is an important social phenomenon that demonstrates the degree of dynamism of a society. However, unlike many of European countries, Japanese emigrants to Hawaii, North America, South America and other Asian regions during the modernizing stage from the Meiji era to World War II were estimated as about one million at most; it might be said that the emigrants were exceptional as an illustration of labor force mobility. One characteristic fact of Japanese emigration is that home villages of emigrants are distributed very unevenly geographically. The paper deals with this geo- graphically skewed distribution of villages inducing emigrants, clarifying what conditions of socioeconomic factors affect the emigration at the village level in the early stage of Japanese modernization. For the analysis, the dimensionality test by component factor analysis and path analysis are introduced, based on the secondary data which was published by the government in 1880 (Meiji 13) and then. The analysis clarifies that no single factor but several factors simultaneously affect the emigration at the village level, constructing the complex structure formed by three basic components: natural environment, accessibility of external resources and. socioeconomic characteristics.

ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT FROM FORDISM TO NICHISM FOR ASIAN AGRICULTURE IN GLOBALIZING ERA

The 21st Century has become a more globalized society which is directly associated with very quick development of high technology in the field of information science. Any country has to face the problem to develop itself under this international environment. Especially agriculture is the most difficult industry to adjust this change because of its peculiarity which is directly determined by the natural and social environment within the country. This paper deals with a basic strategy for agricultural development in the globalizing economy, based on its socioeconomic characteristics. The paper argued that the relationship between industries and economic globalization is directly determined by the combinations of mobility of inputs (resources) and mobility of outputs (products). Most of industries have a significant positive correlation between these mobility but agriculture is placed in a peculiar position: land, which is the most important and basic input for agricultural production, has no mobility and can be supplied only locally, while its outputs, farm products or food, are traded commodities with a relatively high degree of mobility and are demanded globally across national boundaries. For this reason, agriculture is the industry for which it is most difficult to cope with globalization. This paper clarifies the peculiarity of agriculture by socioeconomic approach to get a sustainable development in globalizing economy.

REGIONAL DIFFERENTIATION IN AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PATH ASSOCIATED WITH NATURAL AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS: BASED ON 2000-2010 PROVINCIAL STATISTICAL DATA IN CHINA

Agriculture is characterized by its organic manner of production. Thus, the forms of agricultural production are heavily dependent on natural conditions (weather, geographic features, water supply, etc.), which are peculiar to regions or local conditions. The regionally peculiar characteristics of agriculture are also intensified by the social environment, that is, the lifestyle of the people in the region. Land, labor and capital, which are the essential inputs needed for production, vary qualitatively and quantitatively from region to region. The regional peculiarities bring a different type of development path to local agriculture. This is the basic reason why the same development theory or principle cannot be applied to agriculture although it could be applicable in the case of other industries such as manufacturing. This paper deals with the characteristics of local agricultural development at the provincial level of China, based on statistical analyses of two sets of three-years data of 2009, 2010 and 2011 as well as 1999, 2000 and 2001. The analysis showed clear regional differentiation among the provinces between land-productivity oriented type and labor-productivity oriented type of agricultural development.

Web-GIS Based Visualization System of Predicted Ground Vibration Induced by Blasting in Urban Quarry Sites

Blasting is routinely carried out at various resource extraction sites, even in urban areas. As a consequence of this, residents around urban quarry sites are affected by ground vibration induced by blasting on a regular basis. In this study, a prediction and visualization system for ground vibrations is developed for the purpose of reducing the adverse psychological effects of blasting. The system consists of predicting ground vibration using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and visualizing it on an online map using Web-GIS. A prediction model using ANN that learned the optimum weight by taking 50 sets of data indicated a regression value of 0.859 and a Mean Square Error (MSE) of 0.0228. Compared with previous researches, these values are not bad results. Peak Particle Velocity (PPV) was used as a metric to measure ground vibration intensity. A color contour is generated using GIS tools based on the PPV value of each prediction point. The system is completed by overlaying the contour onto a basic map in a website. The basic map shows the surrounding area through the use of Google Maps data. This system can be used by anyone with access to the internet and a browser, requiring no special software or hardware. In addition, mining operations can utilize the data to modify blasting design and planning to minimize ground vibration. In conclusion, this system has the potential to alleviate the worries of surrounding residents caused by ground vibrations from blasting due to the fact that they can personally check the predicted vibration around their locale. Furthermore, since this data will be publicly available on the internet, it is also possible that this system can contribute to research in other fields

Agricultural Development-Marketing Nexus: Is Tengkulak truly Enemy of Smallholders in Indonesian Rural Area?

This paper notes that a serious difficulty of smallholders in Indonesia is improving marketing networks of agricultural products. The marketing network in rural area is dominated by the brokers (called tengkulak). Smallholders do not have options to finance their production except for borrowing capital input from the tengkulak. Then the tengkulaks’ money will be repaid by smallholders in terms of agricultural products. It is true that smallholders get capital input, as well as daily life desires easily, on one hand. However, it also true that smallholders have no choice and they are ‘choked’ by the tengkulak in terms of price discrimination on the other hand. This phenomenon affects smallholder’s income. However, the tengkulak plays an important role in smallholder community. The first role is Financial/Capital Input provider. The tengkulak provides access to capital inputs for smallholders who are not able to get formal credit (banks). The second role is Production Process. The tengkulak facilitates smallholders in providing agricultural inputs. The third role is of Post-Production/ Marketing. The tengkulak enables smallholders to sell their agriculture products easily. The forth is Socio-religious role. Smallholders need money for schooling fees, medical care, donation for socio- religious activity by borrowing money from tengkulak without any administrative procedures. These facts above depicts that tengkulak is not truly enemy for smallholders

Development of a New Geomaterial for Base Isolation Foundations

Design method of rational composite foundation capable of reducing seismic response of structures was studied. Analysis of the effects of damping materials on the reduction of seismic response of a full-scale structure was performed. Shaking experiment and seismic observation for model foundations confirming the damping effects were conducted and development of new damping material are described

Reducing Poverty of Cocoa Smallholders in Indonesia: Is Agricultural Economic Activity Still the Pioneer?

One of the crucial debates arises when finding a solution for reducing rural\ud poverty, is how the causes of poverty should be classified into the agricultural\ud and non-agricultural economic activities. A strong assumption is that,\ud agricultural and non-agricultural economic activities could be expected to reduce\ud poverty, but it is difficult to determine the economic activities that have a strong\ud positive impact on rural poverty reduction. This paper identifies the poverty\ud causes of two villages (hereafter, ???desa???) in Indonesia by interviewing 152 cocoa\ud smallholder households. We employed a (1) Head Count and Poverty Gap Indices\ud for describing the poverty situation, (2) Factor Analysis for constructing\ud representative factors for the dimension, (3) Path Analysis for identifying the\ud direct and indirect impacts of explanatory variables on household income as a\ud poverty proxy, and (4) Paired-samples T-Test to evaluate the degree of poverty\ud differences. It was found that; (1) statistically, there is no differentiation in the\ud degree of poverty between Desa Compong and Desa Maddenra. However, there is\ud a differentiation in income structure, meaning that the causes of poverty are\ud different; (2) the orientation of cocoa production is strong and directly associated\ud with the poverty in Compong, while for coffee, cashew-nut and livestock\ud production are associated with poverty in Maddenra. A major implication of\ud these findings is that encouraging cocoa production in Compong, and coffee,\ud cashew-nut & livestock production in Maddenra can be strongly expected to\ud reduce poverty directly, meaning that agricultural economic activity is still the\ud pioneer to reduce rural poverty directly in the country