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Abstract |
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Recently,the port policy of Japan has changed its course of direction drastically;due to the shortage of Japan’s finance,
it no longer has become possible to distribute to a large number of local ports the equal amount of budget to improve all
of them. On the other hand,Japan is now faced with the reality that port competition against East-Asian countries has been
intensified and, therefore, more focused investment in the port construction is required in order to survive its heated
competition. Furthermore,the recent port construction has come to take into consideration the aspects of public welfare,
as well as those of the economical efficiency.
The government’s reaction to these environmental changes has been to choose only a limited number of important ports
and invest more biased judges in them. As a result of this strategy, they have started to look more closely at each local
port to find out those which look more outstanding in terms of their ”uniqueness”.
The goal of this study is to identify the criteria by which important local ports can be chosen as worth the investment
of such focused budgets. In order to do so,first,the author extracts the characteristic features of each local port by using
the methods of Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis. On the basis of that result,next,the categorization of
the local ports into two types is made:central container ports and feeder ports. Further,the author proposes a Container
Handling Model to show that container handling capacity is greatly affected by the improvement of access roads. Finally,
the author reminds the reader of the necessity of appropriately replacing dangerous zones in the port areas, so that the
citizen will become more frequently visit the ports and more acquainted with the sea. |
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