GGOS Japan: Uniting Space Geodetic Activities in Japan

<p>Since the establishment in 2013, GGOS Japan, formerly known as GGOS Working Group of Japan, has actively contributed to domestic and international space-geodetic activities.  Until it was established, six Japanese agencies with their own backgrounds and missions had individually conducted geodetic observations of GNSS, VLBI, SLR, DORIS and gravimetry in Japan and Antarctica.   GGOS Japan was established to strengthen the collaboration between the agencies and to get connected to international organizations such as IAG and GGOS.</p><p>Its core members consist of a chair, a secretary, a lead of the outreach working group, a lead of the DOI working group and representatives of five core techniques.  It is supported by tens of people in Japan and also by its parent entity, IAG subcommittee in Japan.</p><p>This presentation will cover our achievement such as assembling our site list, hosting various domestic/international meetings, planning a special issue in a domestic journal, producing its leaflet and website and so on.  Since 2017 it has been approved as an GGOS Affiliate and it is remarkable that Basara Miyahara was elected as GGOS President in 2019.</p>

Historical Trends of Academic Research on the Water Environment in Japan: Evidence from the Academic Literature in the Past 50 Years

This paper analyzes historical trends of academic research on the water environment in Japan over the past 50 years in relation to societal circumstances by looking into 1470 articles published in a Japanese domestic journal during 1961–2010. We examined three components of the individual articles to substantiate the trends including “Visions”, “Target Water”, and “Objects”. The database of these components was first constructed, and then statistically analyzed. Principal components analyses revealed two historical turning points of the research trends, in 1970 and in the mid-1990s, showing first a clear transition of the main concern from industrial pollution to eutrophication, and later, a transition to global environmental issues. We also demonstrate that Visions and Target Water gradually diversified during the past 50 years, indicating that although the research activity in the early periods focused on serious pollution issues, more recently, the scope of water environmental studies expanded to various other issues along with the improvement in the quality of the water environment. We argue that academic research activity in Japan was conducted in close association with public concern and global movements in a timely and sensitive manner. Such knowledge could also provide implications to other nations facing serious water pollution.