Yoshinori Nakagawa

Policies for climate change adaptation differ from those for climate change mitigation, both of which share the common aim of maintaining a sustainable climate system that enables humankind to survive while enjoying wellbeing. Considering the variability in regional conditions, they must be diverse throughout the policymaking process, with the participation of multiple stakeholders, to place the livelihood of residents as the central issue. Simultaneously, these regional diversities must also be realized in a manner consistent with the global goal of climate change mitigation. To that end, comprehensive and transformative adaptation measures are essential, rather than responding to imminent issues on an ad-hoc basis. As the literature shows, a transdisciplinary approach involving researchers across different fields and multiple non-academic sectors can fill the gaps in transformative adaptation. Still, it has yet to be implemented because of the lack of experience of this issue. Here, we present key findings that affect the generation of synergies and tradeoffs among issues through our novel transdisciplinary approach in Kyoto, Japan, via a series of Future Design workshops in agriculture in collaboration with local farmers, regional policymakers, and researchers with diverse backgrounds. These results provide a direction for future research to secure a methodological foundation that will facilitate the sustainability of these efforts.

The relationship between aging brains and driving safety performances (DSPs) of elderly drivers was studied. A total of 90 dementia-free participants (63 men and 27 women, mean age 75.31 ± 4.795 years) were recruited and their DSPs were analyzed on actual vehicles running through a closed-circuit course. DSPs were comprehensively evaluated on the basis of driving instructors' scores (DIS). Signaling and visual research behaviors, part of DSPs, were measured to supplement the DIS evaluation by driving recorders (DR) and wearable wireless sensors (WS), respectively. Aging brains were evaluated via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings and experimentally assigned to two grades (high vs. low) of brain atrophy (BA) and leukoaraiosis (LA). Regression analyses on DIS and DR data, and logistic analysis on WS scores showed significant correlations of aging brains with degradation of DSPs. The participant group with more advanced BAs and LAs showed lower DIS, DR data, and WS scores representing degraded DSP regardless of age. These results suggest that MRI examinations from both volumetric and pathological perspectives of brains have the potential to help identify elderly drivers with dangerous driving behaviors. Brain healthcare, lifestyle improvements and medical treatments to suppress BA and LA, may contribute to preventing DSP degradation of elderly drivers with aging brains.

 Relinquishment of driving licences is regarded as a measure to prevent elderly drivers' traffic crashes. Those who completed relinquishment often suffer from constraints on transportation. In order to consider measures to support these people, it is essential to understand what the act of relinquishing driving licences actually means to them. Thus, the present study aimed to conduct a life story research of two elderly people in order to clarify the meaning. There were two major findings. First, it was shown that there are cases in which the meaning of the act can be understood only through the understanding of the stories of the entire life span. Second, the two subjects were found to be similar in the sense that their acts of relinquishing licences can be interpreted as the opportunity to strengthen the motivation to make their lives more coherent. Practical implications of the findings are also discussed.

The present paper aimed to develop concepts explaining how construction workers acquire and transfer their techniquies. Life stories were collected from a pair of two construction workers: a master and a woker who used to be his pupil. After utilizing the tool of Analytical Worksheet, seven concepts were identifiend. It is expected that a general theory on the process of acquisition and transfer of the techniquies will be described using the seven concepts, although the development of which is a futre task.

This paper reviews the history of regional transportation system in Kochi Prefecture, Japan. The history of regional network development is categorized into the four periods: before Edo-era, Edo-era, Meiji-era to the World War II (WW II), and after the WW II. The results show Kochi has suffered from poor road accessibility because it is landlocked whereas it has developed maritime network mainly connecting Kansai Region. As it has been located far from any political centers in the past, the unique culture has been developed in Kochi. This has made the local authorizes introduce the conservative transportation policy which prevents the local people from regional travels. They also show the religious-purpose travelers contributed to the technology transfer from other regions to Kochi.

This paper aims to establish a method to support designs of policies for prevailing anti-seismic retrofitting of wooden fragile houses by local governments. Specifically, we conduct the following three items. First, we list up and structure the criteria (or psychological factors) that individuals keep in mind when they decider their own attitudes toward seismic retrofitting. In order to neglect comprehensive items that do not overlap with each other, we exclude individual attributes and indirect factors. Second, based on the established structure, we propose a framework to rationalize the change in the distribution of the degree to which people intend to adopt seismic retrofitting. This enables us to investigate effective ways of combining different approaches toward the ultimate goal of prevailing retrofitting. Third, we investigate the most effective ways of embodying each of the approaches by identifying relevant demographic and personality variables.

A number of various policy, measures and administrative works exist in local governments in order to provide public services effectively for the resident's demand. In addition, they owe the obligation which makes such a series of measure system to visible and makes it public to the resident as accountability. This research not only proposes the methodology to plan policy and measures in the local governments and to achieve set strategic target effectively but aims to construct the administrative management system by making good use of the tool which called problem structuring, logic model and so on.

This paper proposes a method to generate future scenarios with an analysis on the reciprocal expectation of stakeholders and applies it to a case of regional transport planning. Our method covers both macroscopic uncertainty and microscopic uncertainty. The macroscopic uncertainty originates from five factors: natural, political, economics, social and technological, whereas the microscopic uncertainty originates from interrelations among stakeholders. We demonstrate an empirical application of the proposed method to a case of regional transport planning of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area.