This paper examines how the sweeping political and administrative reforms of the Meiji Restoration—through which roughly 250 feudal domains were abolished and reorganized into 46 prefectures, accompanied by a reconfiguration of political elites from samurai to landowners–—reshaped industrial development. We capture this by delineating city boundaries from historical maps in the early 20th century with a deep-learning image-segmentation method. We find that cells around prefectural capitals increased city areas and public goods facilities and prefectural capitals became better shaped. Moreover, non-capital areas grew similarly regardless of their distance from the prefectural capital. We argue that Japan’s geographically dispersed landlord elite, empowered under taxpayer-based suffrage, facilitated public goods investment broadly and sustained this even spatial pattern of development.