## 3 Results and Discussions
### Relationship between the Evaluations of Living Environments and City Characteristics
& 24.3 & 25.6 & 23 & 20.3 & 23.1 & 20.5 \\ Specially designated city & & & & & & \\ City with population \(\geq 0.1\) million & 16.8 & 21.6 & 17.6 & 14.7 & 17.1 & 15.9 \\ City with population \(<0.1\) million & 28.9 & 26.9 & 7 & 26.8 & 25.6 & 25 \\ Town and village & 7.5 & 7 & 8.1 & 12.1 & 7.5 & 9.1 \\ \hline Transportation environment & & & & & & \\ (Current residence: \({}^{**}\), Hometown: ***) 1  & N = 184 & N = 138 & N = 152 & N = 194 & N = 155 & N = 125 \\ \hline Ordinance-designated city. & 27.7 & 21 & 11.8 & 40.7 & 20 & 12.8 \\ Heartland city. & 26.1 & 23.9 & 23.7 & 23.2 & 25.2 & 14.4 \\ specially designated city & & & & & & \\ City with population \(\geq 0.1\) million & 20.1 & 18.8 & 18.4 & 11.9 & 18.7 & 18.4 \\ City with population \(<0.1\) million & 19.6 & 29 & 37.5 & 18.6 & 26.5 & 37.6 \\ Town and village & 6.5 & 7.2 & 8.6 & 5.7 & 9.7 & 16.8 \\ \hline Climate 1  & N = 269 & N = 136 & N = 69 & N = 233 & N = 166 & N = 75 \\ \hline Ordinance-designated city. & 21.6 & 23.5 & 11.6 & 27.9 & 27.7 & 20 \\ Heartland city. & 25.3 & 25 & 21.7 & 22.7 & 21.1 & 18.7 \\ City with population \(\geq 0.1\) million & 17.8 & 21 Significant associations were found between the city size and evaluations of the transportation and shopping environments, and ease of visiting ancestral graves. For ease of visiting ancestral graves, a test was conducted for the evaluations of both regions, and a significant association was found with only the current residence. For the transportation shopping environments, the larger city size was found to be associated a higher evaluation. These environments are generally developed intensively thorough urban planning in order to meet the needs of a large population. On the other hand, evaluations of visiting ancestral graves had a significant relationship only with the current residences. Moreover, in this case, the relationship was opposite to that of the other two living environments. Several people have better access to plots for their family graves in their hometowns. However, in the large cities, it is difficult to secure lands for new graves that is close to people's neighborhoods because of intensive land utilization for buildings and a stronger tendency to consider graves as \"not in my back yard (NIMBY)\" facilities. The evaluations of other living environments (i.e., attachment to the regions, climate, the ease of supporting parents, and ease of management of inherited lots or houses) had no significant relationship with the city size. However, as for climate, there was another important factor related to evaluation. Nodes 3 and 13 were last nodes in which low evaluations of the climate reduced the U-turn motivation. When tallied, the ratio of respondents whose hometowns (Node 3) and current residences (Node 13) was located--wholly or partially--in a heavy snowfall area (Figure 4) was much higher (Node 3, 56.5%; Node 13, 54.5%) than the average of all nodes (15.1%). Intense cold and heavy snowfall had a significant influence on the evaluations of climate. These findings help the local governments of people's hometowns to effectively develop the region. By combining these with the results from the decision tree, they could estimate the feasibility of a U-turn in the current condition, or the feasibility in the future after further developments of living environments. If individuals' U-turn motivations are influenced by the evaluation of a particular living environment of one region (hometown or current residence), and the evaluation has a significant relationship with the urban characteristics mentioned above, each local government may be able to  
Figure 4: The heavy snowfall areas in Japan. estimate the number of people who appear to give an evaluation that meets the branch condition from the city size.