Abstract
This treatise is to clarify the productive location of the basic industries at the bottom of the machinery industry in Japan, and secondarily to analyse its regional structure as well as function in the Keihin area, the largest manfacturing part in Japan.
Almost 80 percent of the total output of Japanese machinery industry are turned out from the three large industrial areas: Keihin (Tokyô, Kanagawa and Saitama), Hanshin (Osaka, Hyôgo) and Chûkyô (Aichi). The Keihin area is the largest manufacturing center among them at nearly every sections of machinery industries, such as automobile, electric industry, cameras, machine tools and so on. It holds a leading position among them.
In taking up a form of the ‘subcontractural industry’ in the machinery producing system, there are various manufacturing groups such as casting, gilting, pressing, dycasting etc. The author here defines each group, which locate at the base of machinery industry, as the ‘bottom industry’. Most of them spread in the same distributive pattern to the almost other machinery industries at the three large industrial area, first of all, at the Keihin area.
Most of the bottom industries, except the casting industry, gathered themselves there in southern part of Tôkyô (Ohta, Shinagawa). They have been gradually thronged about there as subconstractors to the all machinery industries and at the same time grew up a tightly functioned complex with each other.
The machinery in the Keihin area, well known for its superior quality and manifold productivity, is maintained by dint of accumulated techniques of the bottom industries which converge at the southern part of Tôkyô.
