Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyze the process of how a huge enterprise forms an industrial district. The shipbuilding industry has promoted Japanese industrialization since the Meiji era and needs various subcontact factories around shipyard. It employs a number of regular and part-time workers. It also constructs many company's houses for its employees around Shipyard, thus forming industrial districts.
Aioi City was chosen as the study area for this research, because it is a typical example for the single industrial cities of shipbuilding in Japan. Relations of the developmental stages of shipbuilding industry and regional systems of production with their effects upon the study area are considered. The following four characteristics are fundamental:
1) Change in industrial production and its composition and the ratio of number of employees in shipbuilding industry to all employees in all manufacturing industries in Aioi (Table 1). 2) Relation between the city population change and the shipbuilding production change (Fig. 2). 3) Establishment and expansion of the various subcontract factories (Fig. 3). 4) Expansion of industrial land uses (Fig. 7-1, -2, -3, -4).
The results of this study are summarized as follows:
1) Most subcontract factories were established by retired employees from the shipyard (Fig. 3). Smaller factories have been derived from these subcontract factories recently. Some large subcontract factories have constructed secondary ones in suburbs (Fig. 9). All of these are organized into the shipbuilding industrial district in Aioi. 2) The kind of products in subcontract factories has shown multiplication from simple parts such as bolt and nut to more complicated ones such as wooden product, boiler and tank. This technological development has made possible the construction of larger ships and the introduction of block construction system, thus giving an order for larger body parts in an accelerated manner.
3) Industrial land use of Aioi only saw an expansion of the shipyard itself and the company's houses before 1945. But since 1955, many subcontract factories have increased in number and been newly built in suburbs. Expansion of the shipyard in land use is not conspicuous.
Fig. 12 summarizes the development of Aioi's shipbuilding industry in a diagramatic form.
