A Historical Change in City and Region Structure in the Niigata Plain, 1867-1940

Abstract

Many studies have been published to deal with Japan's urban growth which began at the Meiji era, but there seems to be very few works which focus its examination on the urban functions and city and region relationship on a meso-scale, and have a scope to develop into macro-scale study of the whole region. Since a regon exists as a part of the whole, attention to such a direction will be urgently needed. The writer intends to explain a historical change in the city and region structure in the Niigata Plain-the country's second largest plain-and its surroundings for the period of about seventy years since the early Meiji era. To this end the processes of forming the Ura Nippon Region must be unraveled dynamically and regionally, and location and the sphere of influence of urban functions, which may be classified into four categories-administrative, cultural, economic and transportational, are examined in relation to city size and distribution of cities. Parts of the results obtained are summarised as follows. 1. In 1879 there were thirty-three cities and towns in the objective region, and thirty-four in 1935. Cities in 1879 are classified into three, ie. a city in Class I, four in Class II, and twenty-eight in Class III (See Figure 1). 2. The four cities in Classes I and II were separated each other by 30 to 40 kilometres, and the distances between Class III cities were around 6 to 9 kilometres, the intervals being quite uniform. The outline of this structure had already been formed by the middle of the eighteenth century. Since that time most of those cities have had periodical fairs, and half of them were nuclei of textile and hardware industries which had been located at the rural settlements around them (See Figures 1 and 2). 3. On this foundation the administrative and cultural institutions such as government offices and schools began to be located corresponding to city size at the early years of Meiji. At the same time economic activities, especially of modern manufacturing industies which tend to be unevenly distributed, began to be accumulated around those cities. The framework of established orders among cities was therefore not broken down but was solidified more as the time passed. © 1975, The Human Geographical Society of Japan. All rights reserved.