Abstract
I Most present cities in Japan were built about 300 years ago (Tokugawa era) by the feudal landlords around their castles. But after the Reformation in Meiji we had two industrial revolutions, and some of these feudal cities changed into modern industrial cities, others were not changed at all. Therefore, Japanese industrial cities are developed either out of the feudal cities, or in the deserted places or very little villages, by the industrial exploitation of the modern capitalism. And these modern cities should be dealt with as the main object of our investigation.
II Three peaks in Japanese urban-sociological works are “On Great Cities in our Time”(19-) by F. Okui, “Urban Sociology” (19-) by E. Isomura, and “Principles of Urban Sociology” (1952) by E. Suzuki. I dealt with them in this paper to derive three fundamental orientations (1. typology of the cities, 2. problems concerning the Japanese capitalistic socio-economic system, 3. Social processes in the city must be grasped in their integrant reality) from the critical analysis of them.
III Cities are usually classified by the criterium how many populations they have. This is a one-side classification. In this paper, I classified 248 cities in Japan, by criterium of the occupation population composition of them. But my central research object is here limited to those 61 cities which contrain 40 or more % of the industrially occupied population (the second industry by C. Clark). Next, I classified these cities into four types by two criterion as follows
A. Those industrial cities which had been only small villages before Meiji era. (Muroran, Hitachi, Kamaishi etc.)
B. Those which had been already cities in feudal age (Yonezawa, Kiryu, Amagasaki etc.)
α. Those industrial cities, the economic process of which are now almost entirely ruled over by one big (a) factory (Kamaishi, Aioi, Yahata etc.)
β. Those, in which plural factories participate competitively or equally in the economic process (Fuse, Nagoya, Seto etc.)
Then, we have four logically constructed types, [Aα] [Aβ] [Bα] [Bβ], of the industrial cities in Japan. Empirically, most industrial cities are either [Aα] or [Bβ] type.
IV Social processes in these industrial cities must in principle be analysed with a view of grasping them (or Community in general) as the territorially localized forms of the Japanese class structure reinforced by the state policy, at the present stage in the development of the capitalistic social system. In particular, the social processes of the [Aα] type cities are grasped as this graphic paradigm.
My hypotheses are as follows :
(1) Economic process of the [Aα] type cities shows the despotic structure [α] factory at the top.
(2) In mediating process, (a) D1 (α factory managerial stratum), D2 (Subcontract F. and Commercial Firm owners) are combined in nature, (b) B (α. F. Labor) is in nature proletariat but one as a middle stratum in the city, (c) C (subc. F. Labor, and firm clerks) is also proletariat but as a lower stratum, and shows instable conservative orientations. (A stratum is not analysed here)
(3) Political process of the [Aα] cities will be subcontractual to the [α] Factory, alienating A, B, C strata from the. process.
