A Draft List of Terms Related to Cultural Geography in Japan: Contributing to the Multilingual Glossary of Cultural Approaches in Geography of IGU

Abstract

The development of new terminologies to reflect the recent trends in geography is essential in order to further the advancement of geographical studies. In 1998 the author was requested to draft a list of English-Japanese terms for the Project on the Multilingual Glossary of Cultural Approaches in Geography by the IGU Study Group on the Cultural Approach in Geography. Considering the importance of Japanese terms in cultural geography, he participated in the project as a member of the specialist team from Japan. The list was compiled over several stages. First, over 5, 000 terms were selected from about 1, 100 research papers on cultural geography published during the period 1987-1996. These terms were then compared with those that appeared in the summaries, chapter titles, and map/figure titles of 55 articles appearing in the four major geographical journals and also with those that appeared in the indexes and chapter titles of two books on cultural geography during the same period. In this manner, the first list of English-translated Japanese terms relating to cultural geography was compiled. Working under the guidance of project leader Dr. Vladimir Annenkov, the author reduced the exhaustive list to more manageable size. The revised list of English-translated terms for the IGU project was finally compiled. The terms tabulated in this paper (see Table 1) are classified into two groups according to meaning. Group A consists of terms that show or bear many fields of geography and their various fundamental concepts and related disciplines. Group B consists of fundamental terms representing more concrete concepts than those of Group A.