1. How do people communicate geographic information?

The first topic I would like to introduce is the one that came to me mainly during my time in a master’s program at graduate school, and which became the starting point of my life as a researcher. The aim of this research is to clarify how strongly culture and society influence the ways in which people convey and understand geographic information.

In our everyday lives, we read maps with ease and listen to spoken directions from car navigation systems to grasp a route. When you stop to think about it, this is quite a remarkable feat of information processing. Simply by looking at drawings on paper and listening to words, we are able to understand how to proceed along the roads in front of us and eventually reach a destination far away. And we can do all of this in real time. Even the most advanced robots would struggle to perform this smoothly!

Such sophisticated processing and behavior are possible because there is a shared understanding between the person giving directions and the person receiving them—an implicit set of conventions about how geographic information is communicated. But what exactly does this shared understanding consist of? Which parts of it are innate, and which parts are cultivated through growth and experience? This research seeks to shed light on these questions.

The original inspiration for this work came from my time studying at a graduate school in the United States. Most of the maps I encountered there looked like the one shown on the right (upper half). As you can see, they contain little information beyond the road network and street names. They are largely black and white. To me, they seemed plainly hard to read, yet people there used them as a matter of course. On the other hand, I was taken aback when some Americans described the map I showed them (the one below) as “cluttered” and “difficult to read.” To my eyes, the maps we commonly use in Japan appear richer in information and more refined in design. Don’t they seem that way to you as well? This experience made me question my simple assumption that “the United States is a highly advanced country, so everything must be the same as, or more advanced than, Japan.”

Languages, after all, differ—Japanese and English, for instance. Once we grow up as native speakers of Japanese, we do not easily become fluent English speakers, and the reverse is equally true. I began to wonder whether maps might be similar. Having grown up using what struck me as rather austere maps (forgive the bluntness), perhaps people there understand space itself in a different way from us. This thought stayed with me.

As I looked into the existing literature, I discovered that very few researchers had seriously examined this question. Most related studies had been conducted by psychologists. As I read their work, it became clear that their focus was largely on differences in individual ability or on strategies for making information processing in the brain more efficient. The broader influences of society and culture—stretching out behind individual differences—were often regarded as relatively unimportant. In response, I decided to take a cross-cultural perspective. By comparing the content of maps and written directions across cultures, and by conducting comparative experiments in which people from different cultural backgrounds were asked to find routes by following given instructions, I sought to demonstrate scientifically that there are indeed cultural differences in spatial understanding and route-finding when maps and directions are used.

Below is an example of a paper I have written on this topic. If you are interested, I hope you will take a look. While I now write far fewer papers in this area, in 2024 I returned to the theme after some time away, publishing a study on cultural differences in color perception, using the familiar example of the “green traffic light.”

Research Publications on This Topic

• Suzuki, K. 2000. Note on the development of mapping abilities: controversy between nativism and constructivism. Japanese Journal of Human geography 52(4): 385-399 (65-79).
• Suzuki, K. and Wakabayashi, Y. 2005. Cultural differences of spatial descriptions in tourist guidebooks. In C.Freksa, B.Nedel, M.Knauff and B.Krieg-Brückner (eds.) Spatial cognition IV, LNAI 3343. Springer-Verlag, Berlin: 147-164.
• Suzuki, K. 2013. A cross-cultural comparison of human wayfinding behavior using maps and written directions. Geographical Review of Japan Ser. B 85(2): 74-83.
• Suzuki, K. 2024. Grue-type errors on traffic light colour-name responses. Geographical Reports of Tokyo Metropolitan University 59: 81-88.

2. Why do people come into conflict, and how can conflicts be guided toward dialogue, mutual understanding, and reconciliation?

The second theme gradually took shape through regional fieldwork that I began after becoming a university faculty member. This line of research seeks to understand how the will of local residents interacts with the local community, external experts, and broader public opinion, and through what processes it is ultimately formed. At the same time, it asks how sharpened tensions and conflicts within communities might be steered toward dialogue, understanding, and, eventually, reconciliation.

The seaside port town where director Hayao Miyazaki, famed for My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, is said to have stayed for about two months while developing ideas for Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is Tomo-no-Ura, in Tomo Town, Fukuyama City.

Tomo-no-Ura is a naturally sheltered harbor with a long history, mentioned even in the Man’yōshū, Japan’s oldest anthology of poetry. It once flourished as a hub of maritime transport in the Seto Inland Sea and at one time developed into a castle town. Even today, many historic sites and a charming streetscape of modest yet beautifully crafted wooden houses bear witness to its past. At the same time, however, the roads running through the town remain as narrow as they were in the Edo period. As a former castle town, its streets were deliberately laid out in a complex, winding pattern for defensive purposes.

With the arrival of an automobile-centered society, these narrow roads began to fill with commuters driving to Fukuyama City and with tourists, leading to traffic congestion and illegal parking during the morning and evening hours. Homes along the roads came to suffer from noise, vibration, and exhaust fumes. Ambulances and fire engines risk delays, and on the single narrow thoroughfare it is impossible even to block traffic in order to carry out sewer construction. As a result, many residents still rely on traditional non-flush toilets.

Against this backdrop, the local authorities proposed a plan to reclaim part of the harbor area—where space was more abundant—to build a wide road and accompanying parking facilities. This was in 1983 (shown as the blue area in the center of the map on the right). The idea was to connect, by means of a bridge, the already widened prefectural roads (shown in orange) extending along both sides of the harbor, thereby easing congestion. For this reason, supporters of the project would often say, with some insistence, “You’re using the wrong words. There is no such thing as a ‘harbor bridge problem.’ This is a ‘harbor improvement project.’”

When the plan was made public, however, voices of opposition soon emerged. Tomo-no-Ura retains much of its traditional Edo-period townscape and is also valued as a scenic area containing historically significant harbor structures from the perspective of civil and architectural engineering. Opponents argued that if the bridge were built, the overall harmony of the landscape that had defined Tomo as a port city would suffer irreparable damage (see photos). Should one prioritize the “right to scenery,” or the “right to everyday life”? Thus began a long, drawn-out period of conflict within the town.

In general, when local conflicts arise over public works projects, governments and corporations are often cast as the villains. The familiar narrative pits vulnerable residents, allied with experts and cultural figures, against a powerful adversary—until, in the end, the citizens prevail. Around the year 2000, Tomo-no-Ura also saw well-known architectural and civil engineering experts arrive from the Tokyo metropolitan area to conduct surveys demonstrating the value of its townscape and harbor remains, using these findings to criticize the bridge project. When I first learned of the Tomo bridge issue through newspapers, books, and television, I too had this familiar storyline in mind.

…Yet when I visited Tomo-no-Ura for the first time as a tourist and happened to strike up a casual conversation in a local shop, I realized that what local residents were saying did not quite match what I had heard from outside. While harbor construction weighed heavily on their minds, many nonetheless said things like, “We need the bridge, so we want it built,” “Traffic congestion and exhaust fumes threaten our daily lives,” “You can’t understand this discomfort unless you live here,” and “All the residents of Tomo feel this way.”

These candid voices were entirely unexpected, and I found myself deeply unsettled. I began to think that it was not enough to listen only to the loud voices amplified by the media. Someone needed to carefully gather the quieter voices of those living with the problem every day, to listen attentively to both sides, and to reconstruct data from a neutral standpoint that could genuinely help people make informed value judgments. This realization became the starting point of this project.

Calling for the protection of the landscape is, in itself, easy enough. Yet the feelings of residents who bristle at being told what to do by those who “do not even live here” carry a weight that we outsiders cannot ignore. As Tomo-no-Ura seeks to grow as a tourist destination, how can it move forward in a way that works for everyone? And how might conflicts between residents, which appear deeply entrenched, be transformed into reconciliation and mutual understanding? These are formidable challenges.

What began as an empirical study of local issues in Tomo-no-Ura has since expanded into research on the mechanisms underlying conflict itself. This includes examination of concepts such as the “Outstanding Universal Value” principle of World Heritage, which was used to support the legitimacy of the opposition, and the notion of NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) as a behavioral logic through which opposing groups seek to exclude one another. In 2015, I also took up a landscape conflict surrounding the development of a mega-solar project in Hokuto City, Yamanashi Prefecture. By inviting the parties to the dispute to participate directly in an online journal and practicing “deliberative democracy” within its pages, I experimented with an approach aimed at preventive conflict resolution.

Research Publications on This Topic

• Suzuki, K., Suzuki T. and Suzuki H. 2008. Bridge over the Troubled Harbor - dynamics of local residents' campaign in Tomonoura. The International Journal of Tourism Science 1: 50-68.
• Suzuki, K. 2010c. The world heritage as politics. The International Journal of Tourism Science 3: 57-69.
• Suzuki, K. 2010e. The sights and spheres in the sight-seeing maps of Tomonoura. Proceedings of Geographic Information System Association 19: (CD-ROM, 6p).
• Suzuki, K. 2011b. NIMBY studies: problems and prospects. Proceedings of the Japan Institute of Tourism Research Annual Conference 26: 17-20.
• Suzuki, K. 2014b. Prevalent 'Myths' about the effect of the estimated outcomes of public project in Tomonoura. The Historical Geography 56(1): 1-20.
• Suzuki, K. 2015b. Understanding recommendations to be implemented for the better management of Mt. Fuji as a World Cultural Heritage. Journal of Geography 124(6): 995-1014.
• Suzuki, K. 2015e. Rethinking Locally unwanted land use from NIMBY studies. The Municipal Problems 106(7): 4-11.
• Suzuki, K. 2016a. Maintaining a Repository-based e-Journal as a tool for becoming a COC. Proceedings of the Japan Geoscience Union Meeting 2016: G-03 (Invited Paper).
• Suzuki, K. 2024. What is NIMBY? Mechanisms and solutions explained with concrete examples. Asahi Shimbun SDGs ACTION!. (Last updated: Aug. 5, 2024).　 https://www.asahi.com/sdgs/article/15365606

Research Grants

• Suzuki, K. 2008. Research grant: JSPS (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research: Category Youth-B: Head). The decision-making mechanism of a community facing 'development or conservation' dilemma (No. 20700673). https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/ja/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-20700673/

3. How does innovation in information technology affect society?

Finally, I would like to introduce several theoretical and empirical studies that I am currently developing. At the heart of this work lies a concern with the many ways in which the rapid advances in information technology we have seen in recent years are reshaping society. From this perspective, my research presently focuses on the following main aspects.

3-2. Exploring the possibilities and challenges of e-tourism accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic

As the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic persisted over an extended period, few sectors were hit as hard as tourism, which had long depended on face-to-face interaction. One approach that has attracted growing attention as a way to overcome this crisis and to ensure the sustainable development of tourism as a socio-economic activity is e-tourism.

The concept of e-tourism itself dates back to the 1990s. It was originally used to describe efforts to rationalize tourism-related processes—such as online marketing and e-commerce—by digitizing parts of procedures that still fundamentally presupposed in-person contact. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has brought new possibilities and challenges to tourism studies, particularly by accelerating the commercialization of XR technologies, which integrate real and virtual information and feed the results back to human sensory experience, reflecting ongoing advances in information technology.

In response, I have sought to reframe the emerging challenges of e-tourism from two complementary perspectives: (1) the potential loss of opportunities for destinations when tourism experiences are substituted, and (2) the expansion of opportunities for users. Working collaboratively with researchers in engineering, ethics, area studies, and social welfare, I am redefining e-tourism to include forms of “tourism without travel” within the context of a low-touch economy. Through this approach, I aim to open up a new field of e-tourism research that reflects the social conditions of the post-COVID era. This research has only just begun, supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, and it remains very much a work in progress. Nevertheless, some of the initial findings have already been published in the form of the papers listed below, and further results will be made public gradually in the years to come.

Research Publications on This Topic

• Suzuki, K. and Matsui, Y. 2023. Comparative Analysis of Japanese and Foreign Tourist Behaviour using User-Generated-Content: A case study of Shirakawa-go, a World Heritage village. Journal of Tourism Research 64: 1-12.

Research Grants

• Suzuki, K. 2023. Research grant: JSPS (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research: Category Main-C: Head). Supra-academic research on the potential and challenges of XR in e-tourism, loss of opportunity and equality. (No. 23K11645). https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-23K11645/

3-3. Research on the social roles assigned to the uncanny things

The uncanny things—ghosts and the so-called haunted places associated with them—has been a subject of widespread social interest across cultures, both East and West, and across historical periods. And yet, as scientists, we are often expected to dismiss such matters with a cool “ghosts are not worth discussing,” maintaining an air of studied indifference. It is, in truth, a deeply ambivalent presence. As an experiment, try looking for researchers in Japan who study ghosts seriously and scientifically—seriously being the key word here—outside of folklore studies. You will likely find almost none. However, the marginalization of ghosts within the scientific community is, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back only about a century, to around 1910. Have most scientists really given serious thought to why ghosts should not be considered a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry?

With this in mind, and in order to demonstrate that ghosts, too, can be studied scientifically if approached with appropriate questions and methods, I began a project known as the “Geography of Ghosts” together with a graduate student who was then enrolled in my program. At first glance, this topic may seem unrelated to advances in information technology. Yet the research was made possible in large part by the advent of computer-based spatial analysis.

For a more detailed introduction to this theme, I have on a previous occasion contributed an essay on request to my university’s website that is particularly well suited for this purpose. I will reproduce that piece here. To high school students who are considering applying to university: I very much hope you will give it a read.

“My field of expertise is geography.”

When you hear that, it is perfectly natural for images from your Geography A or Geography B textbooks to flash through your mind. “You’re someone who can tell the climate just by looking at a climograph, right?” “You’re someone who knows whether the capital of Sri Lanka is Colombo or Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, right?”

That is probably how many people picture geography as an academic discipline. And yet, geography is far freer and more expansive than you might imagine. In fact, it has only one basic requirement: it deals with phenomena that have some form of spatial extent on the Earth’s surface.

When you buy something and pay for it, money passes from hand to hand through exchanges and travels around the world. Seen this way, economic activity is a subject of geography—economic geography. The pattern of your daily life is another example. Over the course of 24 hours, you move about from place to place—this is the realm of time geography. Oh, you didn’t leave your room at all today? Even so, if I asked you, “From your room, which direction is your school?” you would probably have a rough sense of its direction and distance, even if you cannot actually see it. Why is that? Studying the mechanisms behind such everyday spatial understanding is also geography—behavioral geography. In truth, geography encompasses almost everything that happens in our world.

“So… can ghosts be studied in geography?”

What about a topic that seems as far removed from academia as one could imagine—ghosts? As it turns out, geography can even make ghosts a subject of scholarly inquiry. Let me briefly introduce a study that I conducted together with a graduate student I supervised.

In 1910, Japan was in the midst of an unprecedented occult boom. That was the year when two professors from an imperial university carried out a dead-serious experiment in clairvoyance with a woman who claimed to possess such powers—the so-called Senrigan Incident.

Two local newspapers in Toyama Prefecture also rode this wave of occult enthusiasm and launched a serialized project collecting ghost stories from around the prefecture. These stories describe who encountered what kind of ghost, and where. What would happen if we plotted these stories on a map? They would suddenly become “phenomena with spatial extent on the Earth’s surface,” wouldn’t they?

Using this idea, my former graduate student Yu and I extracted information on the types of ghosts and their locations from ghost stories published in newspapers about 100 years ago, during the Taishō era. We then did the same for contemporary ghost stories, drawing on haunted-place websites and social media logs. By comparing these two datasets across a century, we sought to examine scientifically how the locations of ghost sightings have shifted over time, how the kinds of ghosts that appear have changed, and how the narratives themselves have evolved.

Ghosts, too, can be studied through geography

Table 1 presents the results of a quantitative comparison between ghost stories from about 100 years ago and those from the present day. Each episode was coded as 1 when a ghost or supernatural phenomenon (that is, an instance of the uncanny) appeared, and 0 when it did not. Items with p-values below 0.05 indicate statistically significant differences between Taishō-era and contemporary ghost stories—differences that cannot be explained away as mere chance.

Looking first at narrative style, we see that Taishō-era ghost stories tend to be told as accounts of direct personal experience, whereas contemporary stories more often take the form of uncertain rumors. Similarly, in terms of the characteristics of the uncanny, phenomena that were once visible in the Taishō period have gradually become invisible presences in modern times. The category of types of the uncanny also shows that Taishō-era stories featured a much richer variety of entities. In contrast, the only category with a significantly higher value in the contemporary group was “ghosts.” In other words, today’s uncanny has become standardized and largely invisible.

Are there also differences in the places associated with the uncanny? The variable place characteristics classifies the locations where uncanny phenomena were reported and examines differences between the Taishō and contemporary periods. Compared with the present day, Taishō-era stories more often situate such encounters in mountains and fields, near water, in rice paddies, and around the edges of everyday living spaces—such as cremation grounds, cemeteries, temples, and shrines. By contrast, in contemporary stories the locations are almost exclusively abandoned buildings and tunnels. Whereas uncanny phenomena once appeared even within people’s homes, they have now become something one encounters only in deserted houses, ruins, or tunnels far from daily life.

The idea that the uncanny was far more familiar in the Taishō era is illustrated in Figure 1, which focuses on differences in appearance locations. By carefully reading each story and identifying clues that point to where the phenomenon occurred, we can determine its location. Once a location is identified, the positional data can be entered into a computer. By then performing a “spatial subtraction” between the Taishō-era and contemporary distribution patterns—a process known as raster calculation—we can visualize which areas of Toyama Prefecture were more prone to uncanny appearances in each period. Areas shaded closer to red indicate places where the uncanny appeared more frequently in the Taishō era than today, while areas closer to blue indicate the opposite. The gray areas represent forested regions.

What do you think? Don’t the blue areas largely coincide with forests? This analysis, too, suggests that modern ghosts have been driven out of urban spaces and have retreated rapidly into mountainous regions. Even ghosts—things we might hesitate to say exist for fear of being laughed at, or dismiss as mere rumor—can, with a bit of ingenuity, become the subject of scientific inquiry.

Studying and scholarship are not the same

To all high school students: you are probably spending demanding days preparing for your entrance examinations. I imagine you are working hard, dreaming that a rosy student life awaits you once you overcome these trials. But let me say this gently and honestly: what you are doing now is studying, not scholarship.

What you are memorizing now are correct answers. Solving problems, after all, is about arriving at the correct answer, isn’t it? But who discovered those answers in the first place? It wasn’t you.

What will be expected of you at university is not that you remain a consumer who memorizes answers created by others, but that you become an intellectual producer who creates new answers. Even research on ghosts—which may look playful or frivolous at first glance—was published in an academic journal because it discovered a way to analyze ghosts using methods no one had tried before.

Now it is your turn. A university is a place that exists so that you can search for new answers. And if the answers you seek happen to intersect with the broad reach of geography—then let us meet again, somewhere on campus.

(Source: “Visualizing the Invisible ‘Ghosts’”)https://www.u-toyama.ac.jp/future/ksuzuki_01/）

Research Publications on This Topic

• Suzuki, K. and U, Y. 2020. Quantitative analyses of chronological changes in types and spatial patterns of paranormal events. E-Journal Geo 15(1): 55-73.
• Suzuki, K. 2021b. How to see and think regions with maps. In Kikuchi, T. ed. Various visions and thoughts of regions in geography. Tokyo, Ninomiya-Shoten: 118-125.
• Suzuki, K. 2022. 'The Grudge' and the 'Village of Fear' as read through geography. Eureka 54(11): 215-221.
• Suzuki, K., Ito, S. and U, Y. 2023. Quantitative analyses of the geospatial characteristics of haunted sites using open data. Social Sciences & Humanities Open 8(1): 100701. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2023.100701