The blue-green areas are the neighboring prefectures and the white areas correspond to water regions.

Conclusions

Based on these maps it is evident that Nagano, the prefecture that is both not a part of a highly industrialized region and unsurrounded by water has the least amount of hazardous waste facilities.  For one, there are no permanent facilities and even the number of temporary and transporter waste facilities are much less than the other regions.  Also, it seems that in the other regions, namely in Aichi and Okayama, many of the facilities are densely located nearer to oceanside areas rather than nearer to the inner land regions.  Aichi and Okayama are also the areas that are most densely industrialized.  Hokkaido, on the other hand, which is more agricultural, also has a good number of waste facilities including a few permanent 'specially controlled waste disposal facilities,' but they are pretty spread out over a larger area, throughout the entire region.  There is one noticeable cluster in Hokkaido that may be interesting to look into further.  Hokkaido, may therefore be one very interesting area to start a more in depth type of study. From my preliminary study results, it is evident that there may be some very interesting correlations with respect to the siting of 'specially controlled waste disposal facilities' in Japan.  For the most part, though, further investigation is needed, especially by merging in some analysis related to the demographic/census data in these areas.
 
 

THE END............for now.