ABSTRACT
This introduction chapter presents an overview of the book. The book provides a record of a conference, the first of its kind ever held in the UK, that brought together some 20 Japanese geographers and a roughly equal number of British colleagues for purposes of considering and discussing geographical topics of mutual interest. Following Japanese conventions, the conference was called a seminar, and indeed the discussions that followed the presentation of papers were often of the lively, informative and amiably contentious kind that one would expect of a good university seminar. All of the papers contributed by the Japanese members of the seminar are reproduced here in edited form, and the book includes all but two of the papers contributed by English colleagues. The papers that make up this book, then, show a wide variety of approaches and an extraordinary range of subject matter.
