Search

Local knowledge is recognised as a critical element of global energy transition and energy justice. This paper explores the roles local knowledge in the formation of a community organisation responsible for monitoring the nuclear facility operations, governance, and public risk communication. Our case study examines a local nuclear oversight organisation in the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa region in Japan, where suggestions have been made to consider nation-wide institutionalisation of organisations similar to French Commissions Locales d'Information (Local Information Commissions). Our findings reveal the critical roles of three forms of local knowledge, with a particular emphasis on the nuanced yet crucial impact of everyday-life knowledge (seikatsu-chi), a facet not extensively explored in existing studies, in facilitating the establishment of the local organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of life-environmentalism (seikatsu kankyō shugi), which emerged in the 1980s as a shared research framework among Japanese social scientists studying the adverse effects of modern industrialization of everyday life in rural communities. Despite its recognition in Japan, the life-environmentalist approach remains largely unknown to Anglophone literature. While the recently published book, Everyday Life-Environmentalism, provides an introductory English-language text, it lacks thorough theoretical articulation of the approach in relation to contemporary Anglophone approaches. This paper centers on actor-network theory, a widely circulated approach within post-human and more-than-human geographies, as a comparative frame of reference to elucidate key characteristics of life-environmentalism. Through a comparative examination of the applications of these approaches to a local case study, we suggest that life-environmentalism offers valuable insights when analyzing socioenvironmental controversies and community-level responses, particularly in contexts where a long-standing social community is central to the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines contemporary Japanese overseas tourism from a supplier-side perspective using the concept of production systems. We first outline characteristics of the evolving structure of Japanese overseas tourism, with an emphasis on the global spread of Japanese travel companies. This provides a frame for presenting an empirical account of the transactional relationships in the Japanese package tour production system in Whistler, British Columbia, where Japanese tour operators play a pivotal role. We conclude that the recent expansion of Japanese travel companies is fostering the functional integration of the global tourism production system and exhibits increasing reflexivity. Key Words: globalization, Japanese tourism, production systems, reflexivity, Whistler.

Postnuclear land conversion has gained attention as more civilian nuclear power reactors reach their design life. To date, most former nuclear power plant sites have been converted into another power plant or are sitting idle, often with spent nuclear fuel on site. However, a former nuclear power plant site in the town of Haddam, Connecticut, presents an alternative possibility: land conversion into a nature conservation area. We adopt theoretical vantage points of the geographical political economy literature to analyze the evolution of different discourses and actions relating to the former nuclear site, and examine why and how nuclear-to-nature conversion has gained momentum. The study reveals that the nuclear-to-nature proposition emerged as a political leverage to resolve conflicting interests over land reuse and spent nuclear fuel problems, which eventually engendered active local agency for land conservation. We argue that recognizing multiple articulations of space and associated agency is essential to understand the seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of nature and nuclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Economic Spaces: New Economic Geographies. Edited by Richard Le Heron and James W. Harrington. Hampshire, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. Richard Le Heron and James Harrington present a collection of short [...]

The debate over high-tech rankings, relationship to growth and specialization is greatly enriched by Cortright, Mayer, Gottlieb and Mathur. Cortright and Mayer's views on specialization particularly were found to be provocative and Gottlieb's framing of that issue in terms of urbanization and localization economies were useful.

Rankings on the basis of an occupational definition of 'high techness' are generated and compared to those of four other studies. The results rank larger and older industrial cities, such as Chicago, New York and even Detroit, higher than many of the smaller places celebrated as high tech, such as Austin.

The recent Fukushima disaster has raised policy concerns regarding the resilience of Japan's nuclear host communities. Drawing on concepts from evolutionary economic geography and using a quasi-experimental research design we evaluate how these communities "bounce back," absorb, and adapt to both unanticipated "shocks" and public-private policy interventions. The experience of two nuclear host communities, Kashiwazaki and Kariwa, relative to their "twin" non-host communities of Sanjo and Izumozaki suggests that long-run developmental trajectories were only temporarily shifted during the nuclear power plant construction phase. This raises questions about the economic justification of nuclear power plants made on the ground of long-term structural transformation of host communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the characteristics of contemporary Japanese package tourism, through an analysis of tour brochures. The brochures are analyzed in terms of functional components of the tours, as well as the visual images that are represented. Drawing on a sample of 15 brochures that contain winter ski package holidays for Japanese travelers in Whistler, British Columbia (Canada), this study identifies several key elements in the promotion of Japanese package tourism. These elements include the lean and flexible nature of the functional components of package tours, and the use of both concrete, and abstract images of tourists and tour experiences in the brochures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]