Abstract
The Great East Japan Earthquake drew attention to the fact that many non-Japanese women were resident in dispersed areas of rural Japan. They were the immigrant wives (mostly Chinese, Korean, and Filipinos) married to Japanese men and living in local communities, where they were isolated from other non-Japanese residents. This study analyzed the distribution pattern of such women using the grid-square statistics of Japan’s 2010 population census and GIS. We applied statistical data for 1-km × 1-km grids; we identified grids that had only one non-Japanese resident, and that person was a woman as “isolated grids.” Among the isolated grids, there were grids where no non-Japanese resided in the eight adjacent grids: We defined such grids as “more-isolated grids.” From our analysis using kernel density estimation, isolated grids were distributed in eastern Japan (such as Tohoku); however, more-isolated grids appeared not only in eastern Japan but also in western Japan (such as Kyushu).
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We are grateful to Professor Kenji Tani of Saitama University for his help in preparing Fig. 1.
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Okamoto, K., Morita, M. (2022). Mapping Isolation: Distribution of Isolated Foreign Women Living in Rural Japan. In: Wakabayashi, Y., Morita, T. (eds) Ubiquitous Mapping. Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1536-9_10
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