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In Japan, women's opportunities, expectations, and demands regarding their working and family lives are changing rapidly. A highly educated cohort of female workers, between their early twenties and late thirties, is growing increasingly discontent with a labor market traditionally marked by rigid gender stratification. These women are also growing discontent with the complex of social and cultural practices that work to sustain a highly gender-segregated society (Ueno, 1994). These phenomena have been crosscut by rapid cultural internationalization, including a huge increase in the number of Japanese women traveling abroad as tourists (Hashimoto, 2000), in search of career opportunities or to study abroad (ryugaku), and those who pursue new lives through kokusai kekkon (international marriage) or through other relationships (Kelsky, 1994; 1996; Kobayashi, 2002). Related to these trends there has been a rapid growth in the private English conversation school (eikaiwa) industry in Japan since the 1970s (Joyce, 1996). Inside these eikaiwa, the participants are predominantly women and, in terms of skill and enthusiasm, these women are better students than their male counterparts (Tolbert, 2000). Younger women are pursuing English-language learning for three major reasons (Bailey, 1998; 2002). The first reason is to enhance their career prospects, either by working for one of the increasing number of foreign-owned companies in Japan

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Highway corridor alignment presents a highly complex decision environment in which a variety of social, environmental, and economic factors must be defined and weighted and trade-offs must be evaluated. These data vary widely in format and quality. Stakeholders from various groups, often with competing interests, should be integrated into this process efficiently to determine objectives, to select data, and then to quantify the importance. Corridor planning is therefore an appropriate domain for the development and application of enhanced methodologies that conjoin multicriteria decision-support techniques with the spatial analytic and presentation capacities of a geographic information system. The analytic minimum impedance surface (AMIS) methodology is presented, and its application to a case study in the southeastern United States is evaluated. AMIS features the structured integration of stakeholder input into a hybrid analytic hierarchy process. The advantages of the approach are highlighted, along with the significance of process design in building an effective methodology. Several potential applications are discussed. Conceptual constraints and problems related to the implementation of AMIS are set forth, and future enhancements are posited.

Public involvement in transportation planning and design has a problematic history. Professionals lack access to a coherent, organized method for communicating with the public, and some important principles of public involvement known to community design professionals are still being discovered by transportation professionals. A protocol, structured public involvement (SPI), is proposed. SPI was designed to ensure that public involvement is meaningful to the professional and the public. Principles of SPI are presented, and a series of steps useful for engaging the general public in a complex design or planning problem is given. SPI is intended to be transparent, accountable, democratic, and efficient. SPI places the use of technology within a public involvement framework built on community design experience. While technology can be useful, it must be placed in a social context. That is, various technologies are used because they can address such problems as lack of access to information, inconvenient and time-consuming meetings, confusing terms and graphics, and one-way communication. Highlights and examples are drawn from practical experience, where SPI protocols have been designed and used to solve problems of route planning, highway design, and transit-oriented development. While each problem set called for a different mix of technical tools, the protocol within which those tools were used was the same, with similar encouraging results. With SPI, public participation is less contentious and more informed, and the professional has information of high quality with which to begin the design process.