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In modern times Japan, large-scale epidemics of infectious diseases such as cholera and plague were repeatedly introduced from major cities with ports. Osaka, along with Kobe, is the earliest city in the country to have plague epidemics at that age. To consider the counter measures of such epidemics, epidemic reports were often edited to record the details of the epidemic trends with individual records of infected persons. In case of the plague epidemics in Osaka city, the three-volume set of the Second Osaka Prefectural Report of Plague Epidemics (hereafter, the Plague Epidemic Report) was compiled and published in 1909. According to this report, the plague epidemics prevailed in the city between 1899 and 1900 and between 1905 and 1907. Especially in November 1907, the number of cases exceeded 220 which was the largest number of monthly incidences in the city.

This study aims to digitally reconstruct the spatio-temporal sequences of the city-wide historical plague epidemics at the individual level from September 1906 to the end of December 1907, recorded in the Plague Epidemic Report, by using a geographic information system (GIS). We examine the possibilities of visual understanding about the geographical processes of the plague epidemics in the city through space-time mapping of the historical materials of the disease in a GIS environment. The database and visualized space-time features of the epidemics would be useful for theoretical studies of infectious disease epidemiology with spatial dimension, since it is not easy to obtain such detailed individual data of infected persons in a city-wide extent at present days due to …