TAKUJI OGAWA AND HIS CONTRIBUTION TO HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY IN JAPAN
Prof. Takuji Ogawa (1870-1941), tried hard to reach Humboldt's geography in order to found modern geography in Japan. He planned to bridge the two phases of the earth sur-face, natural and cultural, based upon Bruhn's concept of paysage geographique as facts de masse, being opposed to the idea of Ratzel's environmentalism. Most of historical geographers in Japan have been influenced by his dynamic way of geographic thinking. One of his lifeworks “Historical Geography of China” was published in 1928-29, in which he criticized some historical explanations of Richthofen's “China”. Prof OGAWA employed _??_ as usable documents of the ancient chinese geographical knowledges mixed with myths. Besides these pioneering contributions, he established a geographic way on studies on Japanese villages. He considered the most-surrounding nucleated settlement to be a pattern introduced from ancient China and also some field plans such as Joni in Japan, _??_ in northern China and centuriation in Rome. His attempts to systematize the earth surface as complex in ecological orders, from villages to states and to make some mathematical models are of great interest.