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The present paper attempts to clarify the diffusion process of automobiles which had appeared on the Japanese road traffic as modern transport facility, during the Taisho and the pre-war Showa periods (1912-1937). Main findings are summarized as follows:
In Japan there were only 535 automobiles in 1912. The number of automobiles had gradually increased since then (Fig. 1). Particularly since automobiles showed great convenience at the reconstruction works just after the severe earthquake hitting the Kanto district in 1923, the number of automobiles had increased remarkably and counted 128, 735 at its maximum in 1937. Throughout the study period, most of automobiles were used for business, that is for both the bus enterprise and the trucking. Because prices of automobiles and their related costs exceeded the Japanese living standard in those days, private automobiles were very few. Also throughout the period, most of automobiles were imported articles from the Western countries, especialiy from the United States.
The number of automobiles per ten thousand population was calculated for each prefecture for the year's 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930 and 1935. Subsequently distribution maps were drawn (Fig. 3). On the whole automobiles spread from the most urbanized areas containing large cities, i. e. Tokyo, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Osaka and Hyogo prefectures to the urbanized areas and then to the rural areas. The propagation of automobiles on the nation-wide scale arrived latest at some of the Tohoku district and Hokkaido, where the propagation began over ten years later than Tokyo, the most advanced area. By using correlation analyses between such time lag variable and the selected explanatory variables, the author founds that areal variation of the time lag resulted from various industrial structures, road conditions and income level of areas and so on. Thus the author could be concluded that the automotive diffusion in those days described some parts in Japanese modernization process spatially and temporally.

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