Focussing on the statistical data, the author tries to examine the outline of the local differenciating process in the traditional Japanese paper manufacturing during the Meiji period. Its summing up is following:
1) Two phases are discerned in the Meiji period. The first half period was a shifting stage to get out of the manufacturing system under the feudal clan regime. The latter half period was the production increasing stage, -e.d. improvemant of output irrespective of decreasing number of houses. The latter will be termed as a period when a new manufacturing system, quite different from that which was kept up under the feudalism, had been coming out in the statistics.
2) In reference to the output indices, the Washi manufacturing range was somewhat shrinking compared to that of the Early Meiji period. In adition to it, it seems that the agglomerated manufacturing areas in form of dispersed location have a tendency to nucleation.
3) The indices of productivity and production scale (output and number of houses) point out that prefectures are to be classified in five categories at the end of the Meiji period.
I) Prefectures on a large productive scale
a) comparatively more commercially managed system
b) side line work system
II) Prefectures on the highest commercial basis
III) Prefectures on a small productive scale
a) comparatively more commercially managed system
b) side line work system
Among them only item III is found in the Töhoku or Northeast district. In Central and West-Southern Japan there are recognized every items. The prefectures where produced a great deal of hand-made Washi after the World War II are included in the items I and II.
4) Washi areas, shaped up as the special product place under the feudal clan regime, turned into two different types throughout the Meiji period: a new manufacturing locality, concentrating a lot of productive measures nearby around a nucleus where had been hiherto a spot of more principal-occupational and enterprising activity; and another one, where people scarcely maintain its previous rural, domestic and side line work in gradually dwindling to the smaller scale manufacture.
5) In pursuing further survey on the correlation between the above-mentioned categories with their locational limitation, it will fascilitate to approach the outgrowing process of the machine-made manufacturing regions through the Taisho period to the present time.

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