Regional growth in postwar Japan

We show that a shift from light to heavy industries brought about the fast regional transformation from the Tokyo-Osaka bipolar system to the Pacific industrial belt system, and a shift from heavy to high-tech and service industries induced the second transformation to the Tokyo monopolar system. We also show that the recent development in telecommunications and transportation technologies tend to agglomerate knowledge-intensive activities in the core regions of Japan while dispersing mass-production activities to nonmetropolitan regions and overseas. This partly explains the recent renewed tendency of the increasing income differential between the core and peripheral regions.