By the castle-town in the late middle age (or the early castle-town), the author means one during the age from 15th to the beginning of 17th century. It consisted of retainers' dwelling places and commercial sections assembled together around the foot of a castle.
The elements of the groups which composed a castle-town were firstly a castle and it's lord's residence, secondly retainers' dwelling places and thirdly merchants' quarters. Most of the castles took a form of Yamajô (a mountain castle) and Hirajo (a castle on a flat land) style and their lord's residence was generally called Ondoi or Yakata. Attached to the residence, there was invariably a wide ground for military use.
The reatiners' dwelling places centered around the residence. Most of the dwelling places belonged to prominent retainers and were by no means possessed by numerous retainers, and there were also dwelling places belonging to servants of lower ranks. There was a limit to the number of retainers living in a castle-town and they were not yet to be town-consumers.
Plane diagrams of retainer's dwelling places were irregular and assumed a loosely compact form, while the merchants' quarters called Ichimachi (_??_) formed the economic center containing also craftsmen engaged in munition industry.
In contrast with the retainers' dwelling places, the merchants' quarters had the form of a crowded town. The merchants and craftsmen were required to live in separate parts in accordance with their birthplaces and not with their trades.
Early castle-towns are divided into two kinds, one being rural castle-towns (_??_) and the other semi-urbanized castle-towns (_??_). In a rural castle-town the market right was not independent z but in a semi-urbanized castle-town it was independent and the merchants' autonomous system was complete, although subject to strong control of lord. Thus a characteristic of a castle-town was in its being the lord's town.
The retainers' dwelling places and the merchants' quarters confronted each other in an inharmonious form. In other words, the former were like a farming village, while the latter a town. Consequently when the retainers' dwelling places and the merchants' quarters were transformed into a town under a joint townplanning, an early castle-town became a modern one. Such a modern castle-town was an urbanized castle-town was an urbanized castle-town, to be called a later castle-town against an early castle-town in the preceding stage.
How were the above characteristics of an early castle-town formed? It seems that they were due to the next two elements. One was the system of agrarian soldiers (we cannot tell a soldier from a farmer), and the other was the character of trade area. The former regulated the retainers' area, and the latter restricted medieval economic functions, dimensions of the castle-towns, and compositions of the trade area.

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During the last 11 years of 1951-61, there were 54 typhoons which attacked the Japanese Archipelago bringing about heavy rains and severe damages.. The geographical distribution of heavy rains in connection with these typhoons were illustrated on about 200 daily isohyetal maps of Japan. And their distribution patterns and hourly changes of rainfall intensities were checked and analyzed. Then, the following four distuibution patterns were identified:
1) Orographic rain-band pattern
2) Frontal rain pattern
3) Coastal rain pattern
4) Scattered rain pattern
1) Orographic rain-band pattern
A) This was the most frequently occurring and the most characteristic pattern. It occurred on 65% occasions of typhoon rains in Japan (Tab. 1). Amount of areal rainfall for whole Japan brought by one typhoon of this pattern was much larger than those by the other patterns of rains and often exceeed 25×10⁹ tons.
B) Locations of rain-bands were restricted geographically to the following 8 regions. The more distinctive ones were designated by asterisk:
1) Bôsô Peninsula (Eastern Japan)
2)^* Izu-Tanzawa-Ashio Mts. (Eastern Japan)
3) Akaishi-Kusatsu Mts. (Central Japan)
4) Mikawa-Kiso Mts. (Central Japan)
5)^* Kii-Suzuka-Ibuki Mts. (Western Central Japan)
6) Eastern Shikoku-Ôsaka (Western Japan)
7) Western Shikoku (Western Japan)
8)^* Eastern Kyûshû (Southern Japan)
C) Band structures were mainly constructed on the eastern side of the typhoon path. Therefore the afore-mentioned 8 rain-bands were not always constructed by every typhoon, irrespective of the path of the center.
1) When a large and strong typhoon passed along the western coast of Kyûshû Island, the 8 band structures were observed together frequently.-Fig. 1, TY 5609 & TY 5612.
2) When a typhoon landed on Shikoku Island, the western-most band in Kyûshû was not formed. -TY 5817.
3) When a typhoon hit and traversed central Japan, only eastern band structures appeared remark-ably.-TY 5915.
D) At the southern tip of each rain-band, there is a high mountain of more than 1, 000 m in elevation facing to open sea and/or flat lands of its eastern side.
E) The axis of each band structure did not always run parallel with the direction of the mountain range starting from the aforementioned southern high mountain. The axis often stretched from SSW to NNE.
F) The average width of the rain-bands was rather narrow and only about 30 km, but their maximum length often reached more than 300 km. However, they did not pass beyond the central back-bone mountains of Japan mostly.
G) The rainfall of this pattern is not a typical orographic rain along the upslope of a mountain range, as is taught in textbooks of meteorology.
Numerical calculations of orographic rainfall at various locations in Eastern Japan were done and the amounts of theoretically expected orographic rains on each cross point of 15 km mesh on the 1: 200, 000 topographic sheets covering the area were evaluated. The calculations were made by different wind directions of each 20° difference and the wind speeds were assumed always to be 20 m/s.
The results were plotted on the maps and isohyets were drawn by wind directions. Thus, 18 isohyetal maps of orographic rains in Eastern Japan were constructed and the distribution patterns of orographic rains were illustrated by various wind directions.
A similar pattern to the above-mentioned band-type distribution was recongnized with that of orographic rains by prevailling wind of 140° directions as are shown in Figs. 2 & 5. However, the directions of the prevailing wind above the area during rains were about 200° up to at least 10 km and its speeds were about 20 m/s as a shown in Figs. 3, 4, 8 & 10.

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Rising from the eastern foot of Volcano Nasu, the Abukuma River flows through the western margins of the Abukuma Mountains, and pour into the Pacific Ocean near Iwanuma, Miyagi Prefecture. Koriyama Basin in the middle course of the river is a waste-filled basin where two levels of land surfaces composed of lacustrine or marshy deposits can be found. They are called Yabuki Hills (Fig. 1-4) and Koriyama Uplands (Fig. 1-8) in descending order.
After Shirakawa Dacitic Welded-tuffs dammed up the river, Yabuki Gravels and Tuffaceous Sands composing Yabuki Hills were deposited in the upper drainage basin up to Sukagawa. On the other hand, Koriyama Sands and Gravels unconformably overlapping Yabuki Gravels and Tuffaceous Sands compose Koriyama Uplands, which are distributed over a wide area in the basin. Koriyama Sands and Gravels were deposited in the basin due to the subsidence of the basin, the centre of which was the region around Koriyama City.
In this basin, the older the land surface, the upper the drainage basin of the river it develops: And both Yabuki Hills and Koriyama Uplands have been warped towards north (Fig. 2).

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