The industrial location is generally changed in accordance with the transition of the social structure, the improvement of raw materials and the progress of technique. This article aims to prove how the progress of technique has changed the location, taking copper smelting industry as an example. Surveying the development of copper smelting in our country from the feudal age up to the present, the author has come to the following conclusions.
(1) The copper smelting by means of the traditional technique at the Edo period was divided into the copper smelting at mines and the copper refining in Osaka. The former came out from the economic and technical reasons, and the latter from the political reason, that is, the feudal government allowed the refineries in Osaka to hold a monopoly of copper production in order to control the trade of copper.
(2) After the Meiji Reformation, new techniques were introduced from the West. But, compared with the modernization of mining technique, smelting technique was very late to be modernized. Up to the days of the Sino-Japanese War the old technique had been dominant in smelting. As the control by the feudal government had been removed, copper refining began to leave Osaka and be carried out at refineries at each mine.
(3) Pyritic smelting which began at the Kosaka Mine in the thirty-third year of Meiji was an excellent technique. Especially it was a profit for custom smelting that the process made the combined smelting of copper and gold or silver possible. From this time copper smelting became the core of metal smelting. On the basis of Pyritic smelting, a new copper smelting process (Pyritic smelting-converter smelting-electrolitic refining) was settled. And in the twenty-sixth year of Meiji the revised law of mining admitted the construction of smelters independent from mines. Then the monopolistic capitalists who had nearly established their bases advanced into custom smelting, mostly at the smelters belonging to large mines, in the prosperous days from the Russo-Japanese War till the First World War. Minor industrialists as well as the capitalists constructed custom smelters one by one on the coasts of the Seto Inland Sea that were convenient for collecting ores. These smelters were located on an island or at the end of a peninsula to avoid injury from smoke.
(4) The world-wide panic and depression which followed the First World War caused minor industrialists to decline and the capitalists to accomplish the monopoly of copper smelting. And the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident brought the munitions boom and the copper smelting industry flourished again. But the technique remained fundamentally unchanged. Only the process of producing sulfic acid from withdrawn sulphurous acid gas made a remarkable progress, so the injury from smoke was greatly removed.
(5) After the Second World War came the age of technical reform; the oxygen smelting at Hitachi, the flash smelting at Ashio and the fluidized bed roasting process at Kosaka were invented. Consequently a great deal of sulfic acid and raw material for iron manufacture was produced as by-products, and copper smelting got closely related with other industries. And the injury from smoke was almost removed. After the end of the war, a lot of ores and scraps were imported and used as raw material more than the ores produced in our country. In this way there is no longer a positive reason why copper smelters should be located in such inconvenient places, as mountains, small islands or peninsulas. New smelters are planned in the littoral industrial districts with a good harbour near the market.

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The author intends, in this article, to examine problems concerned with the formation of manufacturing regions, through analysis of changes in the location of the cotton industry, which has had an important position in the process of development of regional variations in the industrialization of Japan.
The author thinks that examination of a single manufacturing industry is important, because it is the essential first step for the understanding of regional differences which is an object of the economic geography.
It is impossible, however, to explain completely the formation of manufacturing regions in Japan only from the side of the cotton industry, which is a single manufacturing industry, it will be possible to explain the relationships between the cotton industry and other manufacturing industries from an historical viewpoint based on the wide scope of the national economy.
In this paper the location of the cotton industry is discussed, because the author thinks that the role of the cotton industry was the most important at the earlier stage of capitalism in our country, and that through such an analysis problems of the development of manufacturing as a whole can be partly made clear.
The four problems described in this paper are as follows;
1) The location of the early cotton enterprises by the feudal clan governments, and the location of later factories by the Meiji government which took over the former ones.
2) The trend towards the centralization of the big cotton factories in the Osaka area at about 1890 (in twenties of Meiji) as private enterprises.
3) The simultaneous location of small cotton factories in the local districts.
4) The establishment of the capitalistic big cotton industries combining both spinning and weaving processes, and the combination of the small cotton industries in the local districts.
Fig. 1 The distribution of the cotton factories by water or steam power in 1886 (Meiji 19).
Fig. 2 The distribution of the cotton factories in 1894 (Meiji 27).
Fig. 3 The distribution of the cotton factories in 1902 (Meiji 35).
Fig. 4 The combine of the main cotton spinning companies.
In a later article, the author will examine the location of the cotton industry before the First World War when ten large companies monopolised the industry, which has not been dealt with in this paper.

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Rice, especially paddy-field rice, is produced in most parts of Japan. Its production occupies as much as 52% of the total value of agricultural output, and therefore, rice is the most important product of Japan's agricultural industry, and plays a predominant role in the economy of individual farms.
This study was aimed at investigating the increase in rice productivity by periods (see Fig. 1), and the regional difference in rice productivity in each period in order to determine the regional development of the increase in rice productivity during the period of 1883 to 1959.
As á result of such an investigation it is evident that several regions with high productivity appeared in very small areas here and there in early days and after that regions become gradually larger regional group expanding into the environs. When such groups of high productivity region extended to the vast part of the country, their level of productivity should not be regarded as high but as the general level. After then, a new high productivity region appears.
Repeating such cases, in early days, highly productive regions were found at the central part of Honshu (see Fig. 2). But they moved to the western Japan, such as Osaka, Nara and Saga prefectures which showed remarkably high productivity periods (see Fig. 10). During and after Second World War the center of high productivity moved again to the eastern Japan, and such as Yamagata, Yamanashi, and Nagano prefectures. where high productivity was shown when the weatern Japan was keeping its productivity at the general level. Thus the highly productive regions have shifted from western to eastern Japan (see Fig. 14).
This study reveals that the national average yield per tan of rice increased though to a varying extent in different regions.
The above conclusions can not be reached only by tracing historical development of the average yeild per tan in the whole country nor can the formation of high productivity regions be explained unless one has explored the agricultural structure in each of those regions.

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