Nodal regions with central places as their foci have been studied by many geographers, to understand regional structure from functional viewpoint. But in our country we have few studies from national wide viewpoint except T. Arisue's study on passenger traffic regions. In the field study of Kyushu the author tried to classify hierarchy of nodal regions and understand their hierarchical system by using telephone call method, because he thinks that we can be approachable step by step to the regional structure by such studies, and that telephone call method used by H.L. Green is one of the most effective methods for them.
By this method we can recognize 6 orders of nodal regions and central places in Japan as follows:
1st order centre in Japan-Tokyo.
2nd order centre-Osaka, the influence of which is dominant in the western part of Japan.
3rd order centre-Fukuoka, Sapporo, Nagoya and so on, as fig. 3 shows. Of them Fukuoka and Sapporo in the farthest distance from 1st or 2nd order centre, are the most important centres except Nagoya in an important industrial region.
4th order centre in KyuShu-As fig. 1. shows, 6 central places of this order are administrative centres of prefecture. Besides there are an industrial city-complex, whose foci are Kokura, Yahata and Shimonoseki, and Sasebo, an old naval port. Moreover there are a few subsidiary centres of this order: Naze, Nobeoka, Nakatsu and Izuhara.
5th order centre-cities and large towns (fig. 1). Their tributary areas equal with old Gun-areas, or are smaller than them, but boundaries of the nobal regions correspond not allways with ones of old Gun-areas. We can classify the centres of this order in 3 types by their relations to another centres (5A, 5B, 5C). Besides we can recegnize some centres of transitional types between 5th and 6th order (5'D-5'G).
5th order centre-the settlements at village office. We may recognize them, but they can not be classified from this method practically.
Though there seem to be apparent differences between central places of every order on their mean population, it is very difficult to classify them clearly.

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1) The manufacturing industries in Nagasaki are forming a seaside-industrial area standing for an exclusive accumulation, in a limited area which is closely related with labour and production. This geographical fact in a spatially-occupied area shows the economic structure of industry, as described in the following 2), 3), and 4).
2) Nagasaki is a mono-industrial city, in which the production of a metal-machine industry accounts for over 80% of all industrial productions.
3) The main metal-machine industry is ship-building of all-round assembly ndustries, and nearly all of them are carried on by correlated enterprises or subcontracted enterprises.
4) A colossal monopolistic enterprise, named “Mitsubishi”, is responsible for over 90% of all productions of the metal-machine industries, and over 80% of all manufacturing industries. This is a regional characteristic of Nagasaki depending upon authority, of course, though these structures are observed in Japanese economics as a general tendency.
5) A specially fixed area as described in 1) is the old Fuchi Mura village, portion of Nagasaki City, which was incorporated with Nagasaki at the time of the expansion of the first municipal area, in the 31st year of the Meiji era: 1898. This area had already become an industrial area, at the time when the Mitsubishi ship-building yard and its correlated industries were located.
6) As this area was incorporated with Nagasaki City, the port of Nagasaki, which was once a luxury-consuming city, began to show to signs of being newly reconverted to an industrial city in many sections. It was, so to speak, a spatial proclamation.
7) The center of the present industrial area in the city is a district belonging to the old Fuchi Mura village, a portion of Nagasaki, just as it was. This indicates that only an exclusive accumulation by regional groups was set forward, not carrying out spatial expansion from the 31st year of the Meiji era: 1898, and later, notwithstanding the industrial extensive growth of Nagasaki after that.
8) The industries of Nagasaki have been growing together with the Mitsubishi ship-building yard, and the correlated industries……especially the metal-machine industry, located in the interior of the ship-building yard or in the neighborhood. As other industries in this area repeated the rise and fall of prosperity in proportion to Japanese capitalism, there was no formation of an extensive industrial area with mentioning in this area.
9) The industry did not expand spatially, the geographical facts setting forward the exclusive accumulation to the old Fuchi Mura village are nothing else but having a spatially-represented, historical process of which the interior structure of industries shows extreme patterns, as described in 2), 3), and 4).

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J. Stewart formed a conception of “population potential” by the analogy of Newton's law of universal gravitation. His theory which is formulated as p₁p₂/d is that the degree of mutual influence between two units of population is in inverse proportion to the distance between them. It is also proved in the U.S. that his idea is effective as to the analysis of other social phenomena.
The present essay, in connection with J. Stewart's “population potential”, deals with:
(1) Verification of his theory in application to Japan.
(2) Improvement of the computation method.
(3) A regional unit in which his formula is applicable.
(4) Comparison with the model of the ideal distribution of central places.
(5) Relation with traffic.
First, a simple and practical computation method was devised. This method was adopted in making detailed population potential diagrams covering several prefectures.
These diagrams made it clear that population potential diagrams are of less validity in metropolises and their neighborhood where social and economical mobility is large, while they are of practical application not only in the analysis of relative density of population in closed regions such as basins, but in establishing the structure of concentric zone of a city and its zone of influence.
The comparison of the population potential diagram with the model of the ideal distribution of cities suggested the possibility of the diagramatical presentation of regional characters.
The population potential diagram classified accordidg to occupations was made to show relationship with urban function in a particular region. The last, but not the least important use of the population potential diagram is that it shows the closest relationship with the traffic and traffic distance between two regions. It was recognized that this relation will be better analized by the use of “income potential”, that is, of the original population potential multiplied by the weight of differences of income.

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