Urbanisation and industrialisation took place in Japan later than in the USA from a different historical and cultural background. Japanese society is more homogeneous and exhibits lesser extremes of socio-economic differences than does society in the USA. Land costs in Sapporo, a city in Hokkaido prefecture, Japan, are distributed regularly from the centre of the city, which provides a basis for ordering population activities, including residences. Dissimilarity indexes computed for 371 "meshes' - each 1 km square - show residential segregation by occupation, marital status and type of housing to be similar in pattern and range to that in the USA. -Author