Japan’s Urbanization Featured By Metropolitan Area Construction

Japan is one of the earliest industrialized Asian country and its great economic achievements was accompanied by its high improvement in urbanization level.Urbanization in Japan is developed with the promotion of metropolitan area construction and population growth made a great contribution to urbanization in every stage of urbanization process. Based on the main line of formation and development of Tokyo metropolitan area, this paper explored the important role metropolitan population scale change played in different stages of urbanization in Japan. Tokyo,Osaka and Nagoya are the first three districts realized economic takeoff taking advantage of verity kinds of resources and became the growth pole in economic growth in their own region respectively. Economic development provided great number of employment opportunities and promoted the formation and expansion of metropolitan area. Analysis result showed that total population scale in these areas maintained the momentum of growth during the formation and development period of the three major metropolitan regions except the war time, creating a positive effect to reducing of population pressure and national urbanization. Next in this paper,necessity of construction of metropolitan area to Japan’s urbanization was pointed out in terms of high density of population and shortage of resources, and then main factors that could influence formation of metropolitan were discussed.Urbanization in Japan is carried out under the guidance of the government, the government responds actively to urban problems at the same time of creating plans for development of the metropolitan area and other economically backward region.Japanese government made plans in many aspects such as national region development, metropolitan development and industrial allocation, forming a multi-level planning system. However, due to the spontaneity and complexity of the market economy, a large deviation between planning and expectations aroused, andmany problems appeared during the process of urbanization remained incompletely resolved. This paper summarized main issues appeared during metropolitan development process and also pointed out the successful experience of urbanization in Japan and then raised some important issues on urbanization in China.This paper is divided into four parts:Part I: Chapter 1This part is the introduction part. The background and significance of the research topic were introduced, main progress and academic achievements of domestic and foreign scholars on urbanization and issues of Japan’s urbanization were explained.Finally, ideas and framework of this article were summarized.Part II: Chapter 2This part focused on the definition of urbanization, stage division standard and related basic theory. The location theory, migration theory and theory of uneven growth were described.Part III: Chapter 3 & 4This part introduced the important role of the metropolitan area formation and development played in different stages of urbanization in Japan based on the development of Tokyo metropolitan region. The reason why did Japan promote the urbanization by construction of metropolitan area was analyzed and influencing factors for formation of metropolitan area were explored. Part IV Chapter 5 & 6The fourth part introduced the positive impact of development of the metropolitan area on Japan’s economic growth and urbanization, and problems appeared during metropolitan process were analyzed. Finally, successful experience of urbanization in Japan was summarized and suggestions were proposed on how to learn from Japan’s experience to promote urbanization of China.