The author outlines the major trends of the thought in geography from the beginning of the Meiji Period, to the end of the Taisho Period. The account does not list the scientific achievements or works published during the period, but concentrates on clarifying the academic background or climate in Japan's geographical circles.
1. Japanese Geography for the Public and in Education
Japan's geography began with the Fudoki, written in the eighth century ; and later from the 12th to the 14th centuries, rough maps of the whole territory were drawn. Geographical accounts of foreign countries increased after the arrival of the Europeans in Japan in the six-teenth century. Knowledge of this kind, however, was limited to the intellectuals of the Imperial court or of the samurai class. Commoners' conception of the world, dating from the medie-val age, was that consisting of the three countries : Japan, China and India. This belief lasted until the arrival of the “black ships” of Commodore Perry in 1853.
After the opening of the country, it became necessary for the samurai class and govern-ment officials to have an adequate knowledge of world geography and recent history a diplo-matic and political tools, for the Opium War of 1840-42 had provided a warning of the danger of colonisation by the Europeans. Thus numerous European and American books, firstly on geo-graphy and history, and then, on munitions engineering and modern military organisation were introduced, some being in translation from Chinese translations or in direct translations.
For old countryf olk or for children, accounts of world geography easy to understand and to memorise their verse form appeared and spread widely. The Sekai-Kuni-Zukushi (Countries of the World Without Exception) by Yukichi Fukuzawa, an eminent writer of the early Meiji Period and the founder of Keio University, was the first book of this kind. In school educa-tion, at both the primary and secondary levels, geography has remained to be an important subject up to the present When a modern education system was set up in 1872, the Ministry of Education published lengthy textbooks of Japanese and world regional geography for teachers' use, and later numerous publishers produced pupils' textbooks. All books for school use have been examined and approved by the Ministry of Education from the beginning of this century to the present day. With the establishment of geography and history courses in the Higher Normal School in 1897, geography teaching was centred on regional geography, both domestic and foreign, and lessons in geography qenerally meant the memorisation of place names with figures for population and products. It was an unattractive school subject. Moreover, detailed syllabuses were established and there was little to choose from among published textbooks. It was almost impossible to introduce any variation in descriptions due to the government policy of the times. At one period, international co-operation was emphasised in textbooks, while at another, nationalistic sentiments were stressed. Geography teachers for middle schools were fostered at four national higher normal schools and a number of private schools, all of which taught the same course, and they had to pass an annual, licensing, examination conducted by the Ministry of Education. They were trained to follow the contents of the textbooks without any special individual thought. In the latter half of the 1920's, however, two journals of academic geographical associations, were inau-gurated as well as a geography teaching magazine by a private publisher. These provided school teachers with materials for study The situation improved with the successive publication of a complete series of systematic geographical work from 1929-30 onwards.

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Prof. Naomasa YAMASAKI (1870-1929), the founder of the Department of Geography, the University of Tôkyô, was one of the pioneers of modern geography in Japan and was mainly interested in geomorphology. His studies in geomorphology were chiefly carried out on the following three subjects ; volcanoes, glacial and tectonic landforms.
Prof. YAMASAKI, who started his academic works as a petrologist, surveyed geology of volcanoes in central Japan in the earlier stage of his research career. He explained the historical development of the volcanoes, describing topographic features as well as petrographic characteristics of their constituents. His descriptive studies of volcanic landscape were a model of geomorphological investigations of volcanoes in the earlier stage of Japanese geomorphology.
In 1902, immediately after he came back from Europe, where he studied geography under the leadership of Profs. J. J. REIN and A. PENCK, he published a famous paper on glacial landf orms in Japan. In this paper he pointed out the existence of traces of former glaciers in high mountains of central Japan. Since then, studies on glacial topography were extraor-dinarily accelerated in Japan.
In 1923, the southern part of the Kantô District was attacked by a severe earthquake, ac-companying remarkable land deformation. Prof. YAMASAKI surveyed characteristics of the seismic land deformation and found its close relationships with geomorphological and geological structure of the district. Afterward, he planned to carry out relevelling of bench marks along the coast of the Sea of Japan in order to detect chronic land deformation not associated with earthquakes. As a result of these investigations, he proposed an important idea on the devel-opment of tectonic landforms in Japan as follows. The earth's crust is being deformed acutely at times of earthquakes and chronically in aseismic periods, and such present land deformations are very similar in mode to crustal deformation by which tectonic landf orms have been formed. Present acute and chronic crustal movement therefore, must be successive in nature to mor-phogenetic crustal movement in the recent geological time.
Stimulated by Prof. YAMASAKI's works, studies on tectonic landf orms have been one of the most interested research fields in Japanese geomorphology. Many important studies have been carried out on the geomorphological structure of the Japanese Islands, processes of morpho-genetic crustal movement in the recent geological time, and active faults and folds. As a result of these studies, Prof. YAMASAKI's idea on the development of tectonic landforms has been proved to be correct. Studies on tectonic landforms in Japan have just arrived in the stage which Prof. YAMASAKI was eager . to attain to, and will be developed into a new stage in near future, where the development of tectonic landforms will be synthetically investigated together with volcanic landscape in which he also was much interested.

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Prof. Takuji Ogawa (1870-1941), tried hard to reach Humboldt's geography in order to found modern geography in Japan. He planned to bridge the two phases of the earth sur-face, natural and cultural, based upon Bruhn's concept of paysage géographique as facts de masse, being opposed to the idea of Ratzel's environmentalism. Most of historical geographers in Japan have been influenced by his dynamic way of geographic thinking.
One of his lifeworks “Historical Geography of China” was published in 1928-29, in which he criticized some historical explanations of Richthofen's “China”. Prof OGAWA employed _??_ as usable documents of the ancient chinese geographical knowledges mixed with myths.
Besides these pioneering contributions, he established a geographic way on studies on Japanese villages. He considered the most-surrounding nucleated settlement to be a pattern introduced from ancient China and also some field plans such as Joni in Japan, _??_ in northern China and centuriation in Rome.
His attempts to systematize the earth surface as complex in ecological orders, from villages to states and to make some mathematical models are of great interest.

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The figure shows the relationships between the rates of change in households and population for Japanese cities during the period of 1960-65. The number of households increased during the period, whereas the size of households showed a reverse tendency. Relationships of the change rates of households with those of population can be classifies as follows: A: Increase in both households and population (57.8% of all cities). B: Increase in households but decrease in population (37.9%). C: Decrease in both households and population (4.3%). Correlation between the change rates of households and population is very high, as the correlation coefficient r is 0.988, and the relationship is expressed by the regression line Y=0.82X-8.32, where X=10.15 in case of Y=0. It shows that the population increased in the cities where the increase rates of households were 10.15% or more for the five years from 1960 to 1965 and vice versa.

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