Abstract
This paper aims to clarify how the early Imperial Diet members argue the land system and places in modern Japan on the first Diet opened in 1890, analizing the contents of the shorthand notes of the proceedings of the Diet. The Imperial Diet was composed of the Diet members elected from each constituency and the governmental members of cabinet members and high officials. Though they were opposed about some agendas each other in the various cases, they were all the then components of the national governmental authority in the end of the nineteenth century. The first session of the House of Representatives in Imperial Diet had included some bills which the government proposed to develop some places and infrastructure on the national land. Another bill aimed at the political restructuring of the spatial structure, dividing or merging the localities. Many names of places and regions found in various discussions correspond with the main focuses of national policy planned by the national government. There were Tokyo as the imperial capital, Osaka as the largest industrial and trading city in Japan, Yokohama, Kobe and Otaru as the influential trading port, Kure, Sasebo and Yokosuka as the naval bases, Karuizawa and Naoetsu as towns along the new railway line, Tomioka as the new silk industrial town and Osarizawa and Ichinokawa mines. We can especially find out Tokyo and Hokkaido on many pages of the shorthand notes. The former was the center of Japan but the latter was the peripheral area. However those places were the intensively invested areas under the national developmental policyt. Key persons of the government like Aritomo Yamagata and Sen-ichi Shirane expressed their important views about the political system of national land space. Yamagata stressed two geopolitical concepts of the sovereign line and the profitable line from the viewpoint of national defense. Shirane explained the standards of restructuring the local administrative organs. Some member of the Diet also expressed his opinion on making the rational spatial organization of the modernizing country. Those remarks in the Diet were interpretable as geographical texts and so we can understand the quality and quantity of spatial recognition of those in power in the times.
