Central Place Theory and the Japanese National Land Planner Tokutaro Kitamura

Abstract

Before World War II, Tokutaro Kitamura, an engineer in the Ministry of Home Affairs, was a pioneer in the discipline of open-space planning as well as a leading figure in open-space administration in Japan. During wartime, he became one of the representative Japanese national land planners. Kitamura, who had mastered Nazi German national land planning theory during the war, contrived a settlement organization theory such that central settlements were hierarchically arranged as the neighborhood center (the lowest order), the rural center, the town and small city, the middle city, and the large city (the highest order). This was a modified version of the above-mentioned German planning theory that had been adjusted to Japanese settlements. Kitamura considered applying his theory to the establishment of new municipalities reorganized by the Showa Municipal Merger policy started in 1953.

In the process of brushing up his theory, Kitamura read The New Regional Pattern: Industries and Gardens, Workshops and Farms (1949), written by Ludwig Hilberseimer, a German-American architect and urban planner, and found that Christaller’s (1933) central place theory introduced in that text was likely related to Nazi German national land planning theory. This was a result of his speculation that the nesting structure consisting of multiple hierarchies of central settlements’ circular spheres of influence, which is discussed in Nazi German national land planning theory, is topologically similar to that of central places’ hexagonal market areas in Christaller’s theory. Before becoming involved in national land planning, Kitamura had conducted research on the park location problem and proposed a plan in which attraction areas of parks of various sizes were nested; he was thus acquainted with the nesting structure.

Moreover, what convinced Kitamura that the theoretical basis of settlement location theory in Nazi German national land planning theory consisted in central place theory was a paper briefly explaining the latter written by Shigeki Muramatsu, who specialized in settlement geography; that paper was published in Toshi-Mondai Kenkyu (Journal of Municipal Problems), Vol. 8, No. 3 (1956). By reading Muramatsu’s paper, Kitamura understood the essence of central place theory, which he could not completely understand from Hilberseimer’s book (1949).

Although Kitamura had no involvement with geography, his papers on national land planning confirm that he made significant contributions to urban geography and central place studies in Japan for the following reasons. First, Christaller’s (1933) hexagonal diagram was originally illustrated in Japan in Kitamura’s paper published in Shisei (Municipal Government), Vol. 5, No. 4 (1956). Second, another of his papers, published in Toshi Koron (Municipal Review), Vol. 19, No. 8 (1936) was the first to use the rank-size curve of population for the problem of city size distribution in Japan. Third, judging from Christaller’s (1933) quote in the book by Hilberseimer (1949), who had fled Germany to the USA in 1938, Kitamura (1956) showed that central place theory might have already been popular among German architects and urban planners before World War II.