Masahiro Kubo (CERDI, UCA)

Masahiro Kubo
CERDI, Université Clermont Auvergne

Résumé

This paper examines how the sweeping political and administrative reforms of the Meiji Restoration—through which roughly 250 feudal domains were abolished and reorganized into 46 prefectures, accompanied by a reconfiguration of political elites from samurai to landowners–—reshaped industrial development. We capture this by delineating city boundaries from historical maps in the early 20th century with a deep-learning image-segmentation method. We find that cities selected as prefectural capitals increased their size and maintained good shape while non-capital cities grew similarly regardless of their distance from the prefectural capital. We also find expansion for cities that lacked political importance during the feudal period due to remoteness from historical capitals. We argue that Japan’s geographically dispersed landlord elite, empowered under taxpayer-based suffrage, facilitated public goods investment broadly and sustained this even spatial pattern of development.

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