The Regional Structure of Social Problems in Japan

It is widely maintained that the dominant feature of Japan's social and economic geography is the contrast between the intensively used, large agglomerations, and the sparsely populated countryside. The present article, however, attempts to show that at least with regard to some of the most important social problems, the reality is far more complex. By using both correlation analysis and multiple classification analysis, it can be demonstrated that it is the occupational structure of regions that exerts the strongest influence upon the distribution of such social indicators as the unemployment rate, the percentage of female divorcees, the number of mother-child(ren) households, and the number of people receiving public livelihood assistance. In this respect, urban areas like Osaka or Fukuoka, which display low percentages of higher administrative and professional occupations, and rural regions with a relative lack of jobs in the manufacturing sector (mostly located in the southwestern part of Japan) may be described as “problem areas”. The urban-rural contrast as such, on the other hand, is only influential with regard to the distribution of the price-adjusted, average income of employees and the age-adjusted, percentage of persons without higher education. Finally, there are some phenomena such as the proportion of burakumin and of older, single-person households, that are distributed according to historical and cultural regions.