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Japan’s economic geographers of the younger generation have sought to explicate the so-called regional structure of their motherland. They consider it necessary in order to lay the foundation of adequate regional policy. Japan was suffering from tremendous regional problems, kamitsu and kaso, especially in 1960s and 1970s. Kamitsu means overcrowding literally, i.e. urban problems, while kaso means a too thinly scattered population because of villagers’ outmigration from remote regions toward urban agglomerations. The former is represented by difficulty of housing, urban transport congestion, upheaving land value, deficiency of public services and so on. The latter probably precipitates destruction of traditional community life and fear that entire villages in remote regions would be extinguished due to outmigration of younger inhabitants. These two regional problems are connected with each other, and it seems they are not yet resolved completely. Regional structure, in terms of a model formulated by Yada (1974), is a key concept to make the phenomena clear. It is a spatial reflection of national economy or one of capitalist structure of reproduction in the case of Japan. It is not, however, a direct outcome of the capitalist mode of reproduction, but there is a mediator between them. Yada (1974) thinks that locational processes of factories, offices, any other economic activities and infrastructures play a role. These ten years have seen a lot of papers from this viewpoint in Japan’s economic geography as a discipline. But most of them are concerned with Japan exclusively. Thus it is not yet clear if Japan’s experiences are typical for advanced capitalist national economies. In other words, we have not yet a comparative study of national economies from the viewpoint of regional structure. This paper aims to establish a bridgehead for this by conducting a case study of West Germany, i.e. the Federal Republic of Germany and Berlin (West). The present author focuses his attention on the locational pattern of joint-stock corporation headquarters by industrial sectors and the national economy as a whole, using Statistisches Bundesamt (1970) as a basic data source. The results by sectors are shown from Table 3 to Table 30, and Table 31 and figures from 3 to 6 indicate the summary and the entire pattern. On one hand, Japan has a pattern of one-point concentration in the primate city Tokyo, or a pattern of two foci of Tokyo and Osaka. Even in the latter case, Tokyo plays a dominant role with the exception of the textile industry. On the other hand, West Germany has an entirely different pattern, that of dispersion. It is remarkable that each sector has its own primate city, though Hamburg and a few of other major cities come first several times. As a result, West Germany has no national primate city in the real sense. If we consider the numerical strength of headquarters, the capital-stock scale and the population scale altogether, we find that Hamburg, Berlin (West), Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne and Düsseldorf take their position as a same and first rank, and Bremen, Hannover, Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, Mannheim, Stuttgart and Nuremberg as a second rank. It is true that headquarters are rather concentrated in the Rhine-Ruhr district, but this concentration is not heavy and headquarters are dispersed among major leading cities which are rather far away from each other. What has brought about such a pattern of no national primate city? Some advocates of regionalism in Japan explain it in terms of historical heritage, federalism as a politico-administrative system and Raumordnungspolitik (regional policy). The present author is not against their opinions. But he is afraid that they might miss some important historical reality. The Japan’s regionalists seek to explain the regional pattern of West Germany only from the viewpoint of federalism, regional policy or the kleinstaaterei (particularism). These factors are eventually political. We ought to investigate further into which factors underlie the political system. In the present author’s opinion, more importance should be given to economic factors. That West Germany of today has no national primate city in the real sense is surely supported by the dispersed locational pattern of joint-stock corporation headquarters in which most important decisions in advanced capitalist national economies are made. In theory, headquarters tend to be concentrated into one most accesible place in a country, especially if enterprises assume multi-locational business organizations. The place which gathers a lot of headquarters necessarily develops into the primate city, because business profits flow into the city and service industries which are labor-intensive and thus employ a lot of people come into being to capture a share of the profits. Berlin before the World War II was such a case, too. The Japan’s regionalists miss this fact. The present locational pattern of joint-stock corporation headquarters is a result of German defeat in 1945 and subsequent division into two entities. With this as a turning point, headquarters of large enterprises in important sectors which had been located in Berlin were removed to different cities in the FRG. Schöller et al (1984) point to this fact, too. They think, however, Berlin did not play such a dominant role as Paris did in France and London in the United Kingdom. They give a reason for it, that there was and is a strong regionalism, especially in western and southern Germany. The present author has some reservations about their opinions. There are very strong rationalistic sentiments in France and the UK, too. It is also important to ask what sustains such regionalism. If headquarters of leading enterprises had continued to concentrate in Berlin, this city would have grown more and more, and occupied a position similar to that of London in the UK, Paris in France, Tokyo in Japan or New York in the United States of America. Then, in order to explain the situation at present, we must clarify what motivated enterprisers to remove their headquarters to different cities in the FRG.
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