Many studies have been published to deal with Japan's urban growth which began at the Meiji era, but there seems to be very few works which focus its examination on the urban functions and city and region relationship on a meso-scale, and have a scope to develop into macro-scale study of the whole region. Since a regon exists as a part of the whole, attention to such a direction will be urgently needed.
The writer intends to explain a historical change in the city and region structure in the Niigata Plain-the country's second largest plain-and its surroundings for the period of about seventy years since the early Meiji era. To this end the processes of forming the Ura Nippon Region must be unraveled dynamically and regionally, and location and the sphere of influence of urban functions, which may be classified into four categories-administrative, cultural, economic and transportational, are examined in relation to city size and distribution of cities. Parts of the results obtained are summarised as follows.
1. In 1879 there were thirty-three cities and towns in the objective region, and thirty-four in 1935. Cities in 1879 are classified into three, ie. a city in Class I, four in Class II, and twenty-eight in Class III (See Figure 1).
2. The four cities in Classes I and II were separated each other by 30 to 40 kilometres, and the distances between Class III cities were around 6 to 9 kilometres, the intervals being quite uniform. The outline of this structure had already been formed by the middle of the eighteenth century. Since that time most of those cities have had periodical fairs, and half of them were nuclei of textile and hardware industries which had been located at the rural settlements around them (See Figures 1 and 2).
3. On this foundation the administrative and cultural institutions such as government offices and schools began to be located corresponding to city size at the early years of Meiji. At the same time economic activities, especially of modern manufacturing industies which tend to be unevenly distributed, began to be accumulated around those cities. The framework of established orders among cities was therefore not broken down but was solidified more as the time passed.
4. Consequently larger cities genarally developed more in proportion to their scale. If the Zipf's rule is applied, the three largest cities had smaller scale than the rule's ideal value, and Class III cities larger than the same in 1887, and the case was reversed in 1935. As a result the difference in the scale of the largest and the smallest cities increased by 2.7 times during the period. This was also the process when the order among cities became rank-sized (Table 11).
5. After the middle of the Meiji era the objective region was gradually subordinate to Tokyo, and formed into a part of the Ura Nippon Region. The trend was definitely fixed at the mid-Taisho years. The cities developed only slowly in this region, and their influence over the countryside remained weak. Therefore the countryside began to be controlled by the cities outside this region and by the outer realm. The large-scale landlordship was the most important internal factor to keep the rural country into stagnation.
6. Another factor to bring about such change to the region was a drastic change in transportation: a shift from maritime and river-borne traffic to the modern railway. This should not be overlooked.

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