地域システムとしてみた中国地方

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Chugoku district is one of the national districts consisted of five prefectures : Tottori, Shimane, Okayama, Hiroshima and Yamaguchi. Physio-geographically it is structured by three regions : the coastal regions of Seto Inland Sea and Japan Sea and the mountainous region. In Hiroshima city many national administrative branch offices and a number of branch offices of large firms are concentrated except for the agro-political office of Chugoku-Shikoku district located in Okayama city. This paper refers to which structures Chugoku district has in regional systems and if a regional unity it also keeps, based on the analyses of migration areas (Fig. 1) and commuting areas (Fig. 2). Table 1 shows central cities of migration and commuting areas and their population increase in the period 1990 to 2000. While large cities such as Hiroshima, Okayama etc. have larger population in migration areas than in commuting areas, there are many central cities with smaller migration areas than commuting areas ; small towns such as Mimasaka in Okayama prefecture and Yoshida in Hiroshima prefecture lack their migration area. Generally speaking, the population of central cities themselves as well as their tributary areas tends to increase in response to their positive activities in the last 10 years. A special example is Higashi-Hiroshima located in the eastern suburbs of Hiroshima where the increasing ratio of urban population and its tributary area was more than 25 percent in this period. The population of Hiroshima and its migration area amounts to 1, 126, 000 and 1, 966, 000 inhabitants respectively, in comparison with Okayama with the urban population of 627, 000 and the population of migration area of 1, 477, 000 inhabitants. In contrast, there are no large centers in the coastal region of Japan Sea. While one can recognize a kind of hierarchical structure formed by the tributary areas of Hiroshima or Okayama and the areas of small central cities included within it, there are no structures consisted of central cities of medium size such as Tottori, Yonago, Matue, Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi etc. These central cities are directly connected with Osaka or Tokyo metropolitan areas, as shown in Fig. 3. Accordingly, Hiroshima city cannot dominate all central cities within the district with intensive connections. Especially in eastern part of the district Okayama city is located as a rival city. In addition, recently one can find the declining trend of Hiroshima city. It may depend not only on the depression of the automobile firm Mazda but also the stagnation of urban functions of higher order. Although the development of regional unity is today not recognized in Chugoku district, one can expect the establishment of Chugoku province, when Japanese government adopts the deconcentration policy to multiple regional metropolises in future, instead of the one-point concentration into Tokyo metropolitan area. If the national province were formed in Chugoku district, its regional unity of Chugoku district would grow. If Hiroshima were selected as the provincial capital in various scenarios, the administrative and economic functions of Hiroshima would be developed. But it would be significant for Hiroshima city to develop corporative relations to other cities, especially to Okayama.
福山大学の論文

地域システムとしてみた中国地方

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