抄録
Trends of internal migration in Japan have shown several different stages mainly in accordance with a changing Japanese socio-economic situation. From the industrial revolution in the middle of Meiji Era to the postwar high economic growth period, the population movement from rural prefectures in peripheral regions to metropolitan prefectures in core regions had been a major migration stream, but in the 1970s a new stage of migration emerged, characterized by balancing of net migration between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. In the 1980s the migration stream tended to reconcentrate into the large metropolitan areas, especially the Tokyo metropolitan area.
It should be noted that to date the structure of internal migration has not been revealed satisfactorily. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the structure of internal migration in the 1970s and the 1980s in the Chugoku district as a case study in terms of the spatial patterns of migration streams.
The statistics on migration employed in this paper are supplied by each prefecture in the Chugoku district (Tottori, Shimane, Okayama, Hiroshima and Yamaguchi Prefectures). These statistics have merits that cannot be derived from the popular data sources in the country: Annual Report on the Internal Migration in Japan Derived from the Basic Resident Registers and Population Census of Japan.
This paper consists of three sections. The first section reveals the migration fields in the Chugoku district. The second section examines the spatial structure and the temporal changes of inter-regional migration. The final section is devoted to examining the spatial processes of the migration between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas.
The main findings obtained are summarized as follows:
1) It can be seen that inter-regional migration in the Chugoku district is more concentrated into central cities (e. g., Hiroshima, Okayama, Fukuyama and Kurashiki) than into the three largest metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya).
2) The inter-regional migration in the Chugoku district is characterized by concentration into central cities, especially in the 1980s.
3) It is conjectured that the inter-regional migration in the Chugoku district is linked with the quantitaive and qualitative differences of job opportunities between rural and urban areas. The increasing job opportunities mainly in the central management functions sector in central cities probably exerted a strong influence on rural-to-urban migration.
4) Central cities have played an important role in internal migration since the 1970s. While these central cities absorbed population from the three metropolitan areas in the 1970s, there has been a reconcentration into the metropolitan areas in the 1980s.
