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onIn recent years, neo-geographical practices became popular in Japanese society.

Neo-geography means that non-experts view, search, use and make the geospatial

information stored on various website according to their individual interest and daily living

situation (Turner 2006). Japanese ordinary people come to recognize the importance of

geospatial data and geographical visualization especially when they faced at the heavy

disaster situations in Great East Japan Earthquake, 2011. For example, sinsai.info

(http://www.sinsai.info) played important role for neo-geographical practices for sharing

disaster information. Ushahidi(http://www.ushahidi.com) based geographical visualization

of disaster information, base map delivered by crisis mapping of OpenStreetMap and

moderating information are managed by OSMFJ(OpenStreetMap Foundation Japan)

and global volunteer neo-geopraphers (Seto and Nishimura, 2015).

As related example,

OpenStreetMap project

are accepted as one of

the neo-geographical

mapping practice in

Japan. Japanese

registered users of

OpenStreetMap were

increased drastically at

April, 2011 and were over

3,700 in September,

2013(figure 1). The number

of registered and active

users still increasing

continuously.

Open data/government policies also interested Japanese ordinary people in the

neo-geographical practices. The effect of G8 open data charter agreed in 2014, The

action for open data by Japanese government is slow pace and the especially releasing

public open data by local governments in Japan is very limited (datainnovation.org, 2015).

However, voluntary activities related to open data are active in Japan. Code for Japan (it

learn from Code for America) established in 2013 and 32 authorized brigades (Fig. 2,

brigades mean volunteer groups of each local communities) and 23 brigades preparing

authorization in August 2015. The

number of the events of international

open data day has also increasing

every year. International open data

day events held only at 8 cities in 2013,

35 events in 2014, the events

expanded to 62 cities in 2015. These

events include the various type of the

meeting(hackathon, datathon stc.),

making/using geospatial data have

become one of the main topic

(photo 1).

The number of opened GIS data

and geocoded data is very limited in

Japan, these neo-geographers use

(and sometime they make by

themselves) geospatial data for

visualizing local issues geographically.

Because the main purpose of each

Code for X are solving the local issues

by using ICT, they need the

geographic visualizing and

geographical analysis for it. QGIS

hackfest planed by Japanese

neo-geographers and took placed in

July, 2014 at Tokyo. 2nd QGIS hackfest

in August, 2015 are expanded to

3cities (Tokyo, Sapporo, Osaka), these

events also carried out by

neo-geographers.

Such neo-geographical practices

could be related to Japanese

Neo-liberalism. Recent Japanese

‘New Public Commons’ could be

associated with these practices.

Though openness, transparency and participatory natures of these practices attract

attention by some of the Japanese local/national government and local citizen want to

use open data for solving local issues, bureaucratic tendency of the Japanese

local/national government and the limited contract article between local/national

government and the data producing company prevent local citizen from open data

access.

1. THE EMERGENCE OF NEO-GEOGRAPHY IN JAPAN 2. GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION IN JAPANESE UNIVERSITY

3. NEO-GEOGRAPHY,OPEN DATA, AND GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

Neo- geography and Geography Education in the Japanese Universities

Yuichiro Nishimura1

Japanese geography education in universities are

similar to UK, most of the geography education in

universities are still old-fashioned and aimed for

educating professionals, the new type of mapping

practices like neo-geography are dissociated from it

(Dodge and Perkins, 2008). Geography education in

most of Japanese universities remains conservative

style. The GIS education in the Japanese geography

education is biased toward the methods of using

desktop, proprietary software like ArcGIS desktop.

The share of FOSS4G software and web-GIS are still

limited, and they did not integrated to geography

educating system, except some advanced

universities.

Japanese GIScience BoK(Body of Knowledge) has

established in 2012 (Fig. 3), small mention about

neo-geographical aspect. The part related to

neo-geography are as below.

Though there are the part of public participatory GIS(PPGIS) and internet GIS in the

chapter of GIS and society, there is no mention related to these words in the chapter of

GISc education.

Figure 1. OSM statistics of Japan from 2008 to April, 2013: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/a/ae/Osm-japan-data-node

s.png

Photo 1. International opendata day mapping event in

Nara, 2015

PO-181 Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nara Women's University

Kitauoyanishi-machi, Nara 630-8506, JapanEmail: nissy_yu@cc.nara-wu.ac.jp

However, such situation is now changing. The student have

new chance to using various different open source

softwares, web based platforms, and data collection

initiatives (Fig. 5)(Cowan and Hinton 2014). The several

universities in Japan now hire the new curriculum for

learning GIS and geography by neo-geographical tools.

The students also learn the possibility and the limitation of

neo-geographical mapping(Photo 3, Fig. 4). Some

university students now doing crisis mapping by

OpenStreetMap and making the disaster map by using

FOSS4G softwares (Photo 4).

Fig. 3 Japanese GIScience BoK(Body of Knowledge)

http://curricula.csis.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Fig. 2 Code for Japan 32 authorized brigade (August,

2015)

data derived from http://code4japan.org/brigade

chapter: GIS and society

PPGIS：Public Participation GIS

internet GIS

FOSS4G software

wikipedia town

geospatial open data

open data platform and related internet services used by neo-geographers in Japan

local story, qualitative

information

quoted local facts,

qualitative information

local fact data,

quantitative information

diverse map expression, custumable map

“open streetview”

custumable map, “open my map”

“my guide map”

issues

▽ understanding about neo-geography and open

data in the university

▽ materials, online tutorial for educating using

FOSS4G written in Japanese

▽ need for education of license of web map and

geospatil data

▽ keeping motivation finishing the university class

▽ making connections between

neo-geographers and university education

▽ open science and geography education in the

university

Photo 3 mapping around campus

Fig. 4 mapping around campus

campus

Photo 4 Nepal earthquake crisis

mapping in Nara Women’ s Univ.

Fig. 5 NEO-GEOGRAPHY,OPEN DATA, OPEN SOURCE AND GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

©OpenStreetMap contributors