Japan's lawyers are disproportionately concentrated in Tokyo, leaving 39 district court jurisdictions out of 253 nationwide with no practicing lawyers, according to a report issued Monday by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations.

Aomori Prefecture has 24 times more residents per lawyer than Tokyo, says the report, submitted to the Judicial Reform Council, which was created in 1999 under then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's Cabinet.

Aomori has 36,950 residents per practicing lawyer, while Tokyo, where half of Japan's 17,000 lawyers practice, has 1,532 people per attorney. Aomori has the largest number per lawyer and Tokyo has the least, according to the report.

Shimane Prefecture has 36,476 people per lawyer, followed by Iwate, Ibaraki and Shiga, which have more than 30,000.

The report is based on October 1998 population data and the tally of lawyers in each prefecture as of April 1998.

The 39 districts without attorneys include the Izuhara branch of the Nagasaki District Court, the Wakkanai branch of the Asahikawa District Court in Hokkaido and the Towada branch of the Aomori District Court.

There are 34 jurisdictions with only one practicing lawyer, the report says.

The council has decided to correct the uneven lawyer distribution, as people in areas with lawyer shortages cannot receive legal aid services usually provided by local governments. The areas are also disadvantaged in selecting court-appointed lawyers, council members said.

The federation is taking steps to open public lawyers' offices in such areas through a special fund.

The federation set up public lawyers' offices in the town of Izuhara, Nagasaki Prefecture, in April. Nine lawyers from Nagasaki and Fukuoka prefectures take turns working there, the federation said, adding that it plans to set up another office in the city of Hamada, Shimane Prefecture.

All lawyers nationwide are asked to contribute 1,000 yen each to the fund. It is expected to reach about 1 billion yen in five years, the federation said.

According to experts, the disparity in the distribution of lawyers was an issue that had been left unattended until the burst of the asset-inflated bubble economy of the late 1980s.

Some say it is a major sticking point in trying to carry out judicial system reforms such as having judges selected from the nation's pool of attorneys.

In 1964, a government panel on judicial reforms called for correcting the imbalance, but the number of attorneys practicing in big cities continued to rise as the nation experienced strong economic growth from the mid-1960s on, as well as during the bubble years.