The use of quantitative methods has become popular among Japanese geographers, since they have a tradition of statistical analyses back to 1930's.
In order to promote the knowledge of such methods, the attention is drawn to the possibilities offered by factor analysis. This analysis may provide an objective solution to the problem of urban geography such as a comparative study of urban systems in different countries. This paper reviews the comparability of urban systems extracted from factor-analytic studies done in five countries, namely the United States, Japan, England and Wales, India and Canada. These include studies by Price (1942), Yasuda (1959), Moser and Scott (1961), Hadden and Borgatta (1965), Ahmad (1965), King (1966), Yamaguchi (1967), and Ray and Murdie (1968). The author presents in the last section a summary of the application to Japan in 1967. His analysis of 189 cities used 50 variables such as area, population structure, population change, education, labour force status, industry and occupation, household size and composition, and journey to work. As a result, the first component (20.1%) was regarded as reflecting social status and the second component (16.4%) was related to urban economic base. The third component was closely associated with employment status of working population and the fourth component was strongly associated with urban centrality. The first four components altogether accounted for 59.6 % of the total variance.
In conclusion, at least one thing which was common to the studies mentioned above, excluding the case of Ahmad, was the existence of socio-economic status level playing a predominantly discriminating role among cities. However, variables highly associated with this factor would explain the difference and similarity of its function within each urban system of the country studied.
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