Urban Growth Analysis in Postwar Japan: Fact Findings on the Distribution of Urban Population

This paper is an excerpt from a book written by three authors, Sakashita, Asano, and Irie (1979), in which a multidimensional analysis of the urban growth in postwar Japan has been made. After a brief introduction, an analysis that involves the use of several kinds of Hoover indices for the set of all Japanese cities over the period 1955–1975 is made, with a view to demonstrating the strong tendency of the population to concentrate in the metropolitan area. Application of the theoretical lognormal and Pareto distributions is then discussed. The paper closes with a theoretical consideration that coordinates the observations presented.