Sapporo

In the most recent Population Census the population stands at about 1.97 million (1,973,395 in 2020). Over the five years from 1,952,356 in 2015 it added some twenty thousand. This is a designated city approaching two million, where growth has entered a very gentle phase.

Yet the number of children points the other way. Those under 15 fell from 221,013 (2015) to 215,366 (2020), a drop of roughly five thousand. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 24.8% to 27.4%. Behind a total population that holds at a slight increase, the composition is steadily shifting its center of gravity toward the older end. Households with children make up 16.7%, and the employment rate is 49.0% (both 2020). The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.71; the gap below 1.0 is filled through structures such as the local allocation tax. Childcare waitlist figures show 0 children (2025), a level at which supply and demand are, for now, said to be in balance. What is worth keeping in view here is that these are averages for a city of nearly two million. The municipal area is divided into ten wards — Chuo, Kita, Higashi, Shiroishi, Toyohira, Minami, Nishi, Atsubetsu, Teine and Kiyota — and the central wards, the suburban wards, and the wards near the mountains differ greatly in character. The gaps between wards are flattened out and do not appear in this single figure. Why the city takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the colonial origins that drew a grid across the wilderness.

Sapporo’s skeleton is itself a set of lines drawn across wilderness by human hands. This area was originally open plain spreading across the southwest of the Ishikari Plain, with large flatland left untouched. That geographic condition is precisely what decided the city’s fate.

The first foundation was the national colonization project. In 1869 (Meiji 2) the government renamed Ezo as Hokkaido, established the Colonization Commission (Kaitakushi), and began building Sapporo. The colonization magistrate Shima Yoshitake conceived a city plan modeled on Kyoto, taking the Sosei River as its east–west axis and Odori as its dividing line, and laid a grid of blocks across the center. The framework of streets and blocks was drawn artificially at that moment. In the terms of economic geography, this is a textbook case of a city set down by plan rather than arising naturally.

The second foundation was the tonden-hei. From 1875 (Meiji 8), military colonists who combined development with northern defense began to settle, with the first colony placed at Kotoni. Onto the grid drawn by the Colonization Commission, the tonden-hei and their families, along with migrants who crossed over from Honshu, settled and filled it in. The lines were drawn first, and people moved in to fill them — the reverse of the many castle towns and post towns that grew large naturally over long stretches of time. Sapporo is a city where the plan came before the population. Then in 1972 (Showa 47) Sapporo was designated a government-ordinance city. The state drew lines across wilderness, and the tonden-hei and migrants filled those lines in — the form of this city rests on its colonial origins rather than on natural terrain.

What characterizes Sapporo is that while the total population rose by twenty thousand, the number of children fell by five thousand. Here you can see a city that gathered people all at once through colonization now passing the peak of its growth and entering maturity. Over the same five years the share aged 65 and over rose from 24.8% to 27.4%, crossing one quarter. The children thin out gently, the share of the elderly rises, and yet the total still holds at a slight increase. Sapporo sits in the middle of that stage, where growth and maturity contend.

The childcare waitlist shows 0 children (2025). But this zero cannot be read the same way as the zero of a Kawasaki or an Urayasu, pushed down by piling on supply against demand that stays high. In Sapporo, where households with children are 16.7% and the absolute number of children is falling, it is more natural to read the figure as settling at a point where supply and demand are roughly balanced. Even the same “zero waitlist” shifts in meaning depending on whether children are rising or thinning behind it. And this too is an average across ten wards: the circumstances of children and childcare cannot be the same in a ward near the center and a suburban ward. Flatten the twenty thousand gained and the five thousand lost into a single “Sapporo,” and the contours of life in each of the ten wards dissolve from view.

The functions Sapporo holds branch out from a single center into many faces. One is the grid of streets the Colonization Commission drew on the model of Kyoto, together with the urban axis of Odori, which still inscribes the city’s planned origins into its skeleton. Another is its face as the seat of the Hokkaido prefectural government, where the political, economic and cultural functions of the entire prefecture gather. Further south of the municipal area spread the mountains and forests that connect to Shikotsu-Toya National Park; holding nearly two million people, the city keeps nature close at its back.

Sapporo became a designated city in 1972, and in part holds prefecture-level administrative authority on its own. From wilderness to the city of the Colonization Commission, to a planned city settled by the tonden-hei, and on to a city of ten wards carrying the core of Hokkaido. The colonial offices, the tonden-hei colonies, and the later urban districts were all placed on the same blank sheet of untouched wilderness. The terrain did not decide the city. The single fact that a stretch of flatland existed has kept summoning different functions in each era — Sapporo is a city that rose in that order.

Lay out Sapporo’s numbers and they line up as the markers of a large city that grew fast through colonization and has entered maturity: a slight population gain, fewer children, advancing aging, a Fiscal Capacity Index of 0.71. But the one nail I (Atlas) want to drive in, with an accountant’s eye, is that these are the average of a city of nearly two million. Flatten central Chuo-ku, the suburban Teine-ku and Kiyota-ku, and the mountain-side Minami-ku into one, and the reality of the ten wards is leveled out of sight. The 0.71 fiscal capacity and the zero waitlist are the figure for the city as a whole; they do not directly mirror life in any single ward.

What decisively separates Sapporo from Yokohama (14100) or Saitama (11100), which trace their origins to castle towns, is the single point that this is a city begun from one line the state drew across wilderness. In a castle town the blocks are warped by the demands of terrain and power, and that warping survives in today’s roads and layouts. Sapporo has none of that warp. The grid stays orderly to its edges, the ward boundaries run almost straight, and people and facilities line up uniformly. That is exactly why it is easy to mistake the “average” for the reality — and that mistake is the trap in this city’s numbers. The average of a city ordered too neatly hides, by its very neatness, the gulf between Chuo-ku and Minami-ku. To read Sapporo’s numbers, descend once to the unit of the ten wards. The moment you skip that step, a city of two million is crushed flat into a single plain board.