There are some investigations on the distribution of the head offices in the metropolis, but no report was available to the writer on medium and small cities. In this paper, the writer gives some comments on the structure of areal distribution of head offices in cities taking examples of five local cities. The subject of study, the head offices of firms, are the campanies with a capital of over 10 million yen, on July 1, 1966.
1. The head offices in each urban area are densely distributed in the center of the city and they are decreasing towards the outer zone, and the weight of head offices is conspicuous in the central district in proportion to the urban scale.
2. Industries concentrated in the central district are finance and insurance, whole sale and retail trade, services, real estate, and so on, but wholesales (car dealers) are dispersed along the trunk roads.
3. There are manufacturing industries, transportations and construction in the outer zone.
4. As the big firms are few, the result was not clear concerning the difference of the areal distribution according to the capital size.
Thus, the head offices of comparatively large scale indicate the centripetal distribution in local medium and small cities, too, but the difference of the areal distribution is great not by the scale of capital but by the kind of the industry. That shows that the controlling function of the head office and field office is not specialized.