Distributional pattern of the cities and towns in Kantô District, East-central Japan, has been changing in the past 100 years since the Meiji Restoration of 1868. However, there has been practically no geographical studies concerning this point primarily because of the lack of comparable statistical data. In Japan, administrative boundaries do not always coincide with the actual limits of built-up areas. In most cases, Japanese cities (shi) and towns (machi) have been over-bounded, but the case of metropolises like Tokyo has tended to show the inner-bounded type recently.
In this paper, the authors employ the terms “cities and towns” as defined by built-up areas constructed by delimiting areal expansion of urban built-up areas on large-scale topo-graphical maps irrespective of administrative units. Urban population was obtained by multi-plying the average urban (built-up area) population density of the respective periods to areal size of the built-up areas or urban settlements measured on the maps. Urban population utilized for calculating the average population density was obtained from administrative unit population of some urban administrative units with a rural population of less than 20% for the Meiji and Taisho Periods. For the Shôwa Period (present-day), the average population density of the densely inhabited districts for 1960 Census was utilized. The lowest limit of urban population was set at 1, 000 persons.
As Fig. 1 shows, both the number and the size of urban settlements or cities and towns have tended to increase chronologically, resulting in higher densities. In the Meiji (I) Period, the central-place type distribution was not very conspicuous as compared with the following Taish (II) Period, but still linear arrangement of towns was clear along major highways as post towns (shukuba-nachi) mostly for pedestrians. In the Taishô Period, central-place pattern became more complete, at least so represented on the map. This is primarily due to the evolution of towns with more than 1, 000 population as local economy grew. Although incipient, the formation of satellite towns and cities was also recognized around Tôkyô. In the Shôwa (III) Period, the distributional pattern is modified by the increase of many satellite towns and cities around Tôkyô to a considerable degree. In East Kantô, the central-place type pattern is still apparent, not making a sharp contrast to the preceding period. A further detailed survey of those towns and cities in East Kanto shows that the average dis-tance between all cities and towns is 8. 9km. This is somewhat lower than 10.5km which was theoretically obtained by some selected samples from various parts of Japan. Such a difference in density may imply some other causes for town emergence than the central place concept. The actual and theoretical average distances in West Kanto are 6.4km and 9.8km, manifes-ting relatively more advanced industrialization than in East Kanto.
Population density of the built-up areas for the three periods are 20, 000 persons per km² for the Meij i Period, 15, 000 persons for the Taishô Period, and 10, 000 persons for the Shôwa Period. This declining tendency seems to have a correlation . with the increase of per-capita income.