The purpose of this paper is to analyze a structural change and the localization of the weaving industry in the Ohra weaving district, which is a part of the northern Kanto weaving industrial area. For that purpose, the varieties of textiles, the distribution of weavers, and the role of their capital in the district are described.
Throughout the Meiji and Taisho eras (1894_??_1925), most of the major weavers were concentrated in Nakano village, which is located in the western part of the Ohra district. They controlled other weavers throughout the district. However, after the Taisho era (1912_??_1925), their number declined due to a change of the demand structure. The major weavers began to concentrate in the town of Tatebayashi in the eastern part of the district and most of the weavers in the district came under their control. Thus the center of weaving production shifted from the Nakano village to Tatebayashi town.
By the beginning of the Showa era (1926_??_1940), the center of production was Tateb-ayashi, and the subcenter was Nakano. The reason for the change was due to the differences in the varieties of patterns in the working conditions. The textiles produced at Nakano were generally characterized by a splashed pattern, while those produced at Tatebayshi had striped or plain patterns. Textiles with a splashed pattern required a very sophisticated technique, but it was difficult to weave using power looms. As a result, the major weavers in Nakano were unable to cope with a change in demand after the Taisho era (1912_??_1925). On the other hand, textiles with striped patterns could be woven by power looms and thereby produced in quantity. Consequently, the major weavers in Tatebayashi net the increased demand by modernizing their looms.
Furthermore, the characteristics of the respective capitals and their objects for investment were different in these places differed. The major weavers in Nakano were farm-workers as well as weavers. They invested their capital in weaving and in improvement of their farmlands. This gradually strengthened their characters as landowners. On the other hand, in Tatebayashi the weavers did nothing but weave. They wanted to be industrialists. Hence, they invested their capital in weaving production, modernizing their machine and developing new patterns.
In this way, the types of weaving and the characteristics of the weavers themselves produced differences in the development and the distribution of weaving production in the Ohra district. In conclusion.
I. The Ohra weaving district has been centered in Tatebayashi only since the beginning of the Showa era (1926_??_1940).
II . In the Ohra district there were two centers of weaving production which were different in their patterns and techniques. These factors coupled with the difference in capital investment account for the subsequent shift in importance from one center to the other.

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As the city system is dynamically changing through migration and diffusion of innovations, we should consider the city system not only statically but also dynamically. This paper attempts to analyze the changing city system of Niigata Prefecture in Japan using a Markov chain model. According to an absorbing Markov chain model, the population vector after n periods is
_??_
where W⁽⁰⁾ is an initial vector, x is a vector of births, Q is a submatrix of transitional probability matrix, and I is an identity matrix.
By this model, the projections of population in 1985 and in 1995 are made for 57 urban places with more than 10, 000 residents. Using data of the projected population and the population statistics in 1955, 1965 and 1975, the structural changes in city size distribution between 1955 and 1995 are analyzed in terms of the rank-size distribution and the measures of areal differentiation. The measurement of areal differentiation in the city system is
_??_
The results of these analyses are to be summarized as follows.
(1) When fitting the rank- size rule to the city system of Niigata Prefecture at the successive decades from 1955 to 1975, the system is found to move towards unification rather than diversification. In addition, the force of unification is greater in the period between 1955 and 1965 than in the period of succeeding decade. While the structural changes in rank-size distribution between 1955 and 1965 are mainly due to the growth of upper-ranked cities, their changes between 1965 and 1975 consist of both the growth of upper-ranked cities and the decline of lower-ranked cities.
(2) The similar trends are supported by the measurement of areal differentiation using Shannon's entropic measure of uncertainty. That is to say, there are tendencies that entropy in the city system is becoming smaller year by year and the population energy is concentrated in the upper-ranked cities. These processes show that the areal differentiation of this system becomes greater.
(3) The projection of population is made by using a Markov chain model. As the result, it is predicted that Niigata City and three urban places near by will experience the increase in population and the number of population of these four urban places, whose aggregated population is about 490, 000 in 1975, will increase up to about 620, 000 in 1995.
(4) By fitting the rank-size distribution to the projected population data and examining their parameters, it is found that the force of unification will also be stronger than one of diversification in the next two decades, but the rates of its increase in 1985 and 1995 will be one-half and one-third of that in 1975, respectively.

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Electoral geography, which deals, for the most part, with the regional variations in voting behavior, has occupied one of the main field of the study on the political behavior or on the opinion. Some new ways of research have been introduced in this field and these are summarised here in reference to main and important articles of electoral geography.
1) One of the traditional view points represented by Siegfried is that the political opinion is concerned much more with the social integration of the community through the activities and influences of the social, political and economic organizations or groups. Without this point of view, quantification of each socio-economic element would not be able to clarify the complex relations between community and opinion of its residents.
2) On the other hand, the behavioral approach, represented by Cox, considers spatial elements which are important in the behavior and decision and gives its own explanation in the field of geographical studies to the modeling of voting behavior within the spatial context. But many problems remain to be solved; measuring of the network structure, the information flow and the attitude changed by the acceptance of information, tempo-spatial generalization from the results of small-scale sampling survey to large-scale voting characteristics and so on.
3) Kasperson and McPhail, for example, have recently written some interesting articles which show one of the recent trends in this field. This is the dynamic analysis of areal differentiation in voting behavior and its influence upon the political system through the electoral results. These new points of view in electoral geography within the field of political geography should introduce more of the works done in the recent accomplish ments in social geography so as to elaborate the analysis of spatial pattern in voting behavior.

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The purpose of this study is to clari the diurnal variation of soil temperature at the mounta in slopes of the hill which is locally called Nihon Davos, in the Sugadaira Plateau, Nagano Prefecture. The location of five observation points and observation items are shown in Fig. 1 and Table 1, respectively. In addition to these items, soil was also sampled in two layers, from 0cm to 5cm and from 10cm to 15cm for each point. This observation was held during the period from 10 a.m. on the 4th to 9 a.m. on the 5th of June, 1977 and general weather conditions before the beginning of this observation are shown in Fig. 3.
The results of this observation are summarized as follows:
1) The highest values of daily mean soil temperatures are found at the depthes of 1cm, 5cm, and 10cm on the top of the hill, but at both depthes of 20cm and 50cm on the southern slope. Mean soil temperatures at 1cm depth on both the eastern and southern slopes are nearly equal and these values show the second highest temperature.
2) The amount of soil temperature changes per hour at the depth of 1cm (Δ_sT₁) has a good correlation to the amount of heat exchange in the insulated vessel (ΔQ)(Fig. 9).
The regression equation is expressed as follows:
Δ_sT₁=0.064ΔQ-0.01 (r=0.93)
3) At each point, the duirnal range of soil temperature decreases exponentially from the ground surface to the depth of 20cm, but that at the depth of 50cm does not obey the regression curve (Fig. 11).
4) The thermal diffusivity (κ) decreases with increasing of soil water content (X_w) from 40% to 60% (Fig. 12). The regression equation is expressed as follows:
κ=-0.10X_w+7.02 (r=0.85)

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