A CLASSIFICATION OF MUNICIPALITIES IN HIROSHIMA PREFECTURE WITH USING MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS

The regionalization approach which has been integrated by various criteria has been one of the major subjects for regional geography. Nowadays, with the remarkable devel-opment of quantitative geography, it has often been re-examined in various regions by a new method. The purpose of the present paper is to classify, as objectively as possible, the municipalities in Hiroshima Prefecture with the analyses of their demographic and socio-economic characteristics and their population changes, and also to make clear the regional structure. The main results are summarized as follows: 1) Examined the factor analysis (principal axis method) with 57 variables which refer to the regional characteristics such as population, household, age structure, migration, occupational-industrial structure, educational level, housing conditions, standard of living and so on (Tab. 1), the writer extracted nine factors by the rotation of factors with eigen value over unity and considered the highest three as main factors in detail. They can be labelled as urbanity, blue collar worker and suburban area factors. The urbanity factor which explains about 40 per cent of total variance is the primary factor. It seems that the occurrence of such a large first factor mainly stems from regional properties of Hiroshima Prefecture where the large regional capital, Hiroshima City, is sharply confronted with mountainous area of conspicuous depopulation. The writer assumes, however, that, if a similar analysis may be conducted in any prefecture of Japan, the urbanity factor would appear as the first factor. Because the improvement of rural life may be less effective due to the strong outflows of migration from country to large cities so that the spatial difference of life between rural and urban areas, especially large cities, may exist still obviously. 2) The spatial distribution of factor score for the urbanity factor shows a remarkable contrast between the coastal cities and the rural areas of inland and islands. A typical depopulation area such as Chugoku Mountains, Jinseki Plateau and Sera Upland records especially low values. These results coincide with the fact recognized in certain previous geographical surveys, too. The loading value of each variable for blue collar worker factor (explained 11 per cent) has shown similar tendency to that of the first factor and seems to be a sub-dimension of it. Therefore, this score distribution is also similar to it. Contrary to these two factors, the factor score of suburban area factor (explained 7 per cent) shows the highest values in the suburban area of Hiroshima City and is relatively high in its outside zone. A noticeable fact is that the highest value zone does not occur in the vicinity of Fu-kuyama City. On the other hand, the factor score of coastal cities as well as island and remote inland area is very low (Fig. 2abc) . The reason why coastal cities record low values, however, may be different from that of islands and inland area. 3) From the factor analysis about population change from 1920 to 1975 for each five year period which totalled 11 periods, th three factors were extracted. They represent the rapid economic growth period after 1960, the pre-war period, the convulsion period in wartime and post war period respectively (Tab. 4). It is noticeable that the population change rate between 1920 and 1925 is considerably similar to that of the convulsion period. In addition, the spatial pattern of the population change for pre-war time tends to be largely different each other compared with the population change of each five year period after 1960 (Tab. 5).