## 3 Results and Discussions
### The Possibility of Promoting Respondent's U-Turn to Improve the Population Disparities
Therefore, it is important to prevent population outflow by enhancing residents' evaluations of the pleasantness of climate. Generally, people living in heavy snowfall areas face difficulties such as snow removal around their houses and traveling in snowy conditions. Examples of effective countermeasures according to an earlier survey [50] include providing more substantial snow removal services for roads, and the adoption of snow-resistant house construction materials or snow melting equipment in built environments, and the provision of financial support. These countermeasures may enhance tolerance to the bad climate and improve their individual evaluations. Unlike these two living conditions, attachment to the region did not display a significant relationship with the characteristics of cities. Nonetheless, attachment to the region did have a positive relationship with many respondents' U-turn motivations. This implies that every local government can improve its residents' evaluations regardless of the city size. Previous studies said that it is important to have frequent contact with regional environments and resources (e.g., urban facilities, nature) through daily movement and having positive impressions of the regional community and local government is important [51; 52]. According to these findings, it is effective to provide mobility services that enable peoples' contact with these regional resources and introduce positive information regarding such regional resources. Contrary to Nodes 7 and 13, the U-turn motivations of respondents at Nodes 3 and 9 were low due to the bad climatic conditions (Node 3) or insufficient shopping environments (Node 9). At Node 9, over half the respondents' hometowns were smaller than their current residence. At this node, there were more women and married couples, who have considerable potential to contribute toward a sustainable population structure. Approximately 70% of respondents would move from one rural area to another rural area or stay within the same rural area. Therefore, their U-turn may have a small impact on improving population disparity between the three major metropolitan areas versus other provincial areas. However, the findings also suggest that their U-turns have some potential for improving population disparities within rural areas, which occur between larger provincial cities and smaller depopulated villages. To achieve this, it is vital to develop the shopping environments of smaller cities. The lack of developed shopping environments in small cities has been recently identified as a social problem in Japan [53]. The results in Table 8 also demonstrate that the shopping environments in smaller cities are evaluated as insufficient. Although it is often difficult to implement a spontaneous increase in the number of stores due to low demands and business opportunities in smaller cities, a number of services that support local shopping (e.g., mobile sales wagons, internet shopping and delivery services) have emerged [54]. Previous studies have demonstrated their effectiveness in mitigating people's difficulties in daily shopping [55; 56]. If these cities develop their accessibility to stores, a sufficient selection of items, and satisfactory shopping experiences by introducing these services for respondents at Node 9, the U-turn motivation of people may increase and contribute to the improvement of population disparities. Though the majority of U-turn motivations at Node 3 were also low, the ratio of people who migrated to rural hometowns from the three major metropolitan areas was the second highest among all nodes. The younger respondents and women at this node also have the potential to contribute toward a sustainable population structure. In addition, the results showed that the low U-turn motivations of respondents are explained by their low evaluations of climate caused by living in heavy snowfall areas. Thus, the discussion of the means to ameliorate this concern for Node 13 is also applicable in this case.