ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of the spatial problems arising from the transmission of information in Japan's increasingly information-oriented society, from a geographical viewpoint. The rapid transformation of Japan into an information-oriented society has been responsible, along with the development of the enabling technology, for the formation of new information networks. These networks have caused a diminishing of time and space and a restructuring of spatial organization, a transformation which has in turn had impacts upon regional systems. The new media have now permeated society, both at the industrial and at the individual level. In the year 1972, with the introduction of the first phase of the government's liberalization of telecommunications circuits, a public circuit was made available in Japan for general use, together with the necessary data processing systems. This made possible the mass utilization, rapid dissemination and regional diffusion of large volumes of information.
