Insularity and Geographic Diversity of the Peripheral Japanese Islands (eBook)

Dr. Akitoshi Hiraoka was born in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. He is a professor emeritus at Shimonoseki City University, Japan, and a founder of the Research Group on Island Regions of the Association of Japanese Geographers. He has been studying Japanese islands for more than 50 years. He especially focused on islands in Western Japan, such as the islands in the Seto Inland Sea, the Kyushu area, and Okinawa. In the course of these studies, he revealed that the Japanese advance into the South Sea was initiated and developed for the purpose of catching albatrosses (Japanese Advance into the Pacific Ocean, English version published by Springer). He received several Geographical Society Awards for this study.

Dr. Satoshi Suyama was born in Toyama Prefecture, Central Japan, which has the fewest islands among Japanese coastal prefectures. He is a professor at the Department of Geography, Komazawa University, Japan, and a member of the Research Group on Island Regions of the Association of Japanese Geographers. He has served as the vice president of the Japan Society of Island Studies since 2019. He specializes in human geography, especially in landscape studies and regional promotion. His research focuses on remote island regions. He has been working in the Amami Archipelago in the Nansei Islands of Japan for more than 20 years and has been appointed as the Amami tourism ambassador since 2012. He dreams of living in Amami after retirement.

Dr. Hisamitsu Miyauchi was born in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. He is a professor of the Faculty of Global and Regional Studies at the University of the Ryukyus, Japan, where he served as the vice dean of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is a member of the Research Group on Island Regions of the Association of Japanese Geographers. He holds a Ph.D. in humanities from Hiroshima University, Japan. His main research interests include the transformation of social space on Japanese islands and population migration from the Ryukyu Islands. He has authored or co-authored over 50 book chapters and journal articles on island geography or migration studies, many of which are peer-reviewed. He is a visiting professor at the Center for Spatial Information Science (CSIS), the University of Tokyo. He is also the chief editor of the Okinawa Journal of Geographical Studies and Immigration Studies.

Takehisa Sukeshige was born in Tokyo, but his ancestors lived on Suo-oshima Island in the Seto Inland Sea. He is a professor of the Department of Contemporary Sociology at Toyama University of International Studies, Japan, and a member of the Research Group on Island Regions of the Association of Japanese Geographers. He specializes in human geography, especially in regional development of remote islands and farming villages in peripheral regions of Japan. The main study areas include the Tsushima Islands in Nagasaki Prefecture, the Miyako Islands in Okinawa Prefecture, and Teshikaga-cho in Hokkaido.

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This book clarifies the geography of the peripheral Japanese islands from a variety of angles. The islands are distributed in the tropical and cool temperate zones, and the most distant inhabited islands are more than 1,000 km from the mainland. In the past, they were Japan's frontier, close to neighboring countries. However, during Japan's modernization process, the islands were positioned as backward regions, supplying food, resources, and labor. Today, the islands are considered to be on the periphery of Japan, with lifestyles different from those of the mainland. The islands are also getting attention as sightseeing locales and emigration regions attracting those who prefer country life-an image of the islands that has been created by the romanticized gaze from the Japanese mainland. The authors describe the various forms of the outlying Japanese islands and at the same time discover their common regional characteristics, as defined by the view from the mainland.