2019 PROJECT: MAPPING TENRYU

Who Am I?

Name: Madison Jean Philippe

Age: 20

School: Middlebury College

Major(s): Japanese and Economics

Class Level: Rising Senior

My Project

For my project, I wanted to conduct something economically beneficial for the village. As someone who uses googles maps for findings things on a daily basis, I would often try to use the app while in Tenryu-Mura. However I was led to discover that a lot of stores, restaurants, and facilities would not appear on googles maps or would be missing important information, such as business hours. From an economic standpoint, ensuring that potentials patrons and consumers are made aware of your business and can easily access related information is extremely important. It was this discovery that led me to decided to create a map depicting what types of stores and services are available in Tenryu-Mura.

Process

The first thing I decided to do was survey the Hiraoka area that we were staying in. I walked around the whole entire Hiraoka area making note of where stores were located and which ones did not appear on google maps/had missing information. After getting a sense of how many stores were in the area, I then created a survey to begin collecting information about the stores.

On this survey I gave a brief explanation of who I was and the goal of my project, and then created an area for the shop owners to fill our information about their store, such as business hours, address, phone number, and brief descriptions. I distributed these surveys to all of the shops I had made note of and spoke to the owners/people working at the stores in regards to their businesses. The surveys were left at the stores to be completed and picked up 3 days after the initial delivery date. Upon collection of the surveys I took pictures of the shop owners standing in front of their stores as a way to express their deep sense of community and the variety of kind people I had met during my stay.

Once the completed surveys were collected, I began to enter the information I collected into a map that I began to make via the “My Maps” map creator provided by Google. I broke up places into four categories: Supermarkets/Selling Goods, Services, Restaurants, and Public Facilities. I entered the information related to the stores and any pictures I was able to take inside and outside of the stores.

Results

The end result was an interactive map that can be accessed by anyone with internet service. There are two versions of the map: one in Japanese and one in English. While I am not able to assess any economical activity change within the community, my hope is that likelihood that people will shop and increase the money flow within the village will increase.

Link to Map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=1QetlnZCgEkW4knQgV4gz9cFHqX7sQw6C