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Here, we present an iteration of our theoretical/creative writing project Hashima, begun in 2012. The paper is a collaboration and draws on the different discourses, practices and sensibilities of a performance theorist, a geographer, and a visual artist. For us, Hashima, located off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, and a former site of forced labor and intensive offshore coal-mining, is a provocation for experimentation. Hashima, exploited and abject, has offered itself, unsurprisingly, to the fetishistic gaze of artists, photographers urban explorers, and ruin enthusiasts. The logic here is to control representation, and to determine and fix the meaning of the island as always in reference to something else and elsewhere. Paradoxically, there is no sense of temporality or transformation in these representations of ruins; time has been stopped in an image. By contrast, we want to draw out the allegorical value of Hashima not as a site of loss, but as a baroque, blasted landscape of monstrous becomings that resists, and forefronts, this tendency to collapse history into nature. In the following, we introduce the island before turning to an exegesis of Walter Benjamin's writing on German baroque tragedy in order to demonstrate how representation itself becomes tainted through a material encounter with the baroque's two primary topoi, the ruin and the labyrinth. To do this, we finish with a creative narrative and two images illustrating our methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to identify the salient features of the destination choices made by new immigrants who entered Japan in the 1995-2000 period, and to provide a multivariate explanation for their choice behaviors. The salient features can be summarized as follows; first, destination-choice patterns differed markedly by ethnicity; second, the higher the educational qualification of the immigrants, the greater the attraction of the Tokyo prefecture and the less dispersed the destination-choice pattern; and third, among female immigrants, those with the household status of daughter in law were more prone to go to the Tohoku region, where the maintenance of the traditional stem-family system was a serious concern. Our multivariate analysis has revealed that the destination choices made by the new immigrants were indeed subject to the selective effects of labor-market conditions, the distributions of coethnics, and the spatial patterns of marital opportunities in theoretically meaningful ways, and that labor-market conditions were most important, whereas marital opportunities were least important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]