Abstract
This chapter contains sections which provide background information about Japanese society and health including long-term transition of mortality, newly emergent socially vulnerable populations from the lost decades, the recent earthquake disaster whose impacts are readable in many mortality maps and social area formation in contemporary Japanese metropolitan areas. In addition, this chapter explains how to read the maps and graphs shown in later chapters. The materials and methods used to construct the health inequality atlas include the spatial unit for mapping, mortality indices with the data source and measurements of social inequalities in the mortality indices using areal deprivation index. Several analytical concepts such as the prismic cartogram, slope index of inequality and relative index of inequality are introduced.
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Nakaya, T., Fukui, K., Ito, Y., Yano, K., Isoda, Y., Kondo, N. (2020). The Shape of Japan: Backgrounds, Materials and Methods. In: Nakaya, T., Ito, Y. (eds) The Atlas of Health Inequalities in Japan. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22707-4_2
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