Modern Historical Geographies about Spatial Organization Processes of Nation State and Societies in Japan

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Historical geography of modern Japan has appeared as an independent study area in Japanese academic geography since the late 1980s. We tentatively define the period from the Meiji Restoration in 1968 to Japanese defeat in the Second World War in 1945 as the modern period. Since we have not lived experience of modern Japan, we use not the contemporary geographical approach but the historical-geographical approach to investigate it. Japanese territory in modern times had temporarily extended to the colonial regions of Korea, Taiwan, ‘South Manchuria' (southern area of Northeast China), and Karafuto (southern Sakhalin) as well as the present territory. We intended to explain geographically the characteristics of spatial organization processes of nation state and societies in modern Japan as the maximum time-spatial entity.Main subjects of the research are as follows : 1.Theoretical approaches to modern historical geographies 2.Diffusion process of improved agricultural techniques 3.Symbolic landscape in frontier regions 4.Modernization of hot spring facilities in a local town 5.Activity of local financier in the sericulture region 6.Origins of commutation 7.Development of canal projects in city planning 8.Transformation of a local central place through merchant activities 9.Biography formation and transformation of a port city 10.Development of the fishery processing industry in Korea under Japanese rule 11.Coal mining industry and colonization program in Karafuto 12.Staple goods on exports and imports in ‘South Manchuria'.As the results of those studies, we reached the following conclusion. Any modernized region had not naturally formed but was structurally and socially produced. In the Japanese modernization process, the three subjects of a nation, society and human agency had interacted with one another and co-contributed to formation of region.