Settlement patterns
Traditional regions
The concept of regions in Japan is inseparable from the historical development of administrative units. Care was always taken to include various physical features in the larger administrative units so as to create a well-balanced geographic whole. Many of the ancient terms for administrative units have survived in the form of place-names.
The Taika-era reforms of the 7th century established the ri (roughly corresponding to the later village community) as the basic social and economic unit and the gun (district) as the smallest political unit to be governed by the central government. The gun were grouped to form more than 60 kuni (provinces), the largest political units, which were ruled by governors appointed by the central government. Each kuni was composed of maritime plains, interior basins, and mountains to constitute a more or less independent geographic entity. Several adjacent kuni that were linked by a trunk road or a convenient sea route were grouped into a dō, the term signifying both the route and the region. The core region of the country was called the Kinai—i.e., the land adjacent to the shifting imperial capitals.
During the Nara (710–784) and Heian (794–1185) periods, the region of Honshu to the east of the three great mountain barriers of Arachi, Fuwa, and Suzuka north, east, and southeast of Lake Biwa was called Kantō and that to the west Kansai (kan, “barrier”; tō, “east”; sai, “west”). As the empire’s frontier shifted to the northeast, Kantō came to signify the region to the east of the Hakone Barrier (a pass near the town of Hakone), and Kansai gradually came to include limited areas near the capital of Kyōto as far as Ōsaka and present-day Kōbe. Northern areas that had not come under direct control of the central government were called Ezochi (or Yezochi), “Land of the Ezo (Ainu).”
A third regional system was applied after the 10th century, in which kuni were amalgamated according to their distance from Kyōto. The larger units were kingoku, or proximate kuni; chūgoku, or intermediate kuni; and engoku, or remote kuni. Mutsu and Dewa in northeastern Honshu and islands such as Sado, Oki, Tsushima, and Iki were termed henkyō, or peripheral, lands.
In 1871 the feudal system was dissolved and the ken, or prefectural, system was established. At first the more than 300 prefectures were mostly the former fiefs of feudal lords, who were appointed as governors. Through amalgamation and partition there were frequent changes in the ken pattern, until by 1888 the present configuration of 43 ken (including Okinawa), three fu (urban prefectures) of Tokyo, Ōsaka, and Kyōto, and one dō (Hokkaido) was established; in 1943 Tokyo was given the status of to, or metropolis.
Early in the 20th century it was recognized that larger geographic divisions were needed. By 1905 a system of eight chihō (regions) had been set up, dividing the country from northeast to southwest. The chihō are Hokkaido, Tōhoku (northern Honshu), Kantō (eastern Honshu), Chūbu (central Honshu), Kinki (west-central Honshu), Chūgoku (western Honshu), Shikoku, and Kyushu (including the Ryukyus). Another system used by some governmental agencies is a modification of the chihō system. The Chūbu region, for example, is subdivided into Hokuriku, Tōsan, and Tōkai. This system is devised so as to group prefectures of similar geographic character into one chihō and is more effective for illustrating regional contrasts and comparing statistics. In addition, planners have come to refer to the string of industrialized and urbanized areas along the Pacific seaboard between Kantō and northern Kyushu as the Pacific Belt Zone (Taihei-yō Beruto Chitai). This zone includes most of the Japanese cities with populations of more than one million, as well as more than half of the country’s total population.