Chuo-ku

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 249,000 (248,680 in 2020). Over the five years from 237,627 in 2015 it added some eleven thousand. It is an administrative ward, one of the ten that make up Sapporo, set at the center of the prefectural capital. Because the unit is a ward, figures a city holds — such as the Fiscal Capacity Index or the number of children on the childcare waitlist — cannot be treated here. What can be read are the indicators that mirror what kind of people are gathering into this central ward.

What is worth seeing here is that, while it is a central ward, the population added more than ten thousand in five years. As suburbanization and population decline advance in much of urban Japan, that a central ward holds this much gain mirrors a movement of return to central-city living. The absolute number of children, though, is nearly flat. Those under 15 edged down slightly from 23,997 (2015) to 23,868 (2020). Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 21.3% to 23.1%. Households with children make up 13.1% (2020), on the low side. People increase, yet children do not, and households with children stay thin — a figure mirroring that those gathering to the center are chiefly single people and working-age adults. The residential land price is in the 164,000-yen-per-m² range. Why this shape arises cannot be read without tracing back the origin of the Colonization Commission’s city plan.

Chuo-ku’s skeleton is not natural landform but the very lines the Colonization Commission drew across the wild grassland. In 1869 the Hokkaido Colonization Commission was set up, and the corner of the Ishikari Plain that is now Chuo-ku was chosen as its base. The colonization magistrate Shima Yoshitake conceived a grid layout, placing the east–west axis on the Sosei River and the north–south axis on what would later be Odori (Shiribeshi-dori), and designing the town from nothing. It is, in the terms of economic geography, a textbook case of a city set by plan rather than arising naturally. The skeleton of the streets was, at this moment, drawn by human hands across the grassland.

What decided this town’s character was the firebreak made in 1871. A broad belt was set to run east–west through the center, separating the government land to the north from the residential and commercial land to the south. This firebreak later became Odori, and changed shape further into Odori Park. The urban skeleton of official land to the north and private land to the south was born from a single line drawn to prevent fire. To this day, divided by Odori, the composition holds as the line of the firebreak left it: to the north gather the functions of government and business — the Hokkaido Prefectural Government, Sapporo City Hall, Sapporo Station — and to the south spread department stores and shopping streets, and beyond them the Susukino entertainment quarter.

Then, in April 1972, with Sapporo’s transition to a Designated City, Chuo-ku was founded as one of seven wards. The Colonization Commission drew a grid on the grassland, a firebreak split official from private, and that center became, just as it was, the core of the prefectural capital — this town’s form stands less on landform than on the origin of a Meiji-era city plan.

What characterizes Chuo-ku is that, while the total population added eleven thousand, the number of children held nearly flat. This is a way of moving peculiar to the return to central-city living, unlike either a suburban residential area or a depopulated region. Into a ward with the strong pull of being the prefectural capital’s center, single people and working-age households keep gathering from outside. What lifts the total population is chiefly this inflow, not the thickness of child-rearing households. So people increase greatly, yet the absolute number of children stays flat, and the household-with-children rate stays at a low 13.1%.

That the share aged 65 and over rose from 21.3% to 23.1% is the sign that, even within the gain, the older layer keeps a certain weight. Even in a central ward whose population overall increases, the age composition is quietly shifting toward the older side. Read the same “children do not increase,” and how it reads changes entirely with whether the population behind it is rising or thinning. If the flat line of a depopulated region is the entrance to a long decline, Chuo-ku’s flat line is an equilibrium in which inflow offsets the fall in children. The same level line mirrors, on one side, the omen of a descent, and on the other, the standoff of a tug-of-war.

The functions Chuo-ku holds are split cleanly in two by the single belt of Odori. One is the cluster of government and business functions gathered north of Odori — the core of the prefectural capital’s administration and economy, where the Hokkaido Prefectural Government, the Ishikari Subprefectural Bureau and Sapporo City Hall, along with national branch offices and the head and branch offices of firms, concentrate. The other is the entertainment quarter spreading south of Odori, where department stores, shopping streets and the Susukino nightlife district run on. Odori Park itself, which runs between them, is the space that symbolizes this ward, with its origin in the firebreak.

Chuo-ku is one of the administrative wards that make up the city of Sapporo, not a city in itself. It is Sapporo (1100), a Designated City, that holds powers on a par with a prefecture; the ward is the central-city unit that carries the prefectural capital’s core functions within it. From the grid the Colonization Commission drew on the grassland, to the firebreak that split official from private, and on to a central ward holding the prefectural office and the entertainment quarter. The single decision that this corner be chosen as the base of colonization summoned the grid of streets, and that grid set the government district and the entertainment quarter in turn. Not landform but the human hand of a Meiji-era city plan decides this ward’s present form.

Lay out Chuo-ku’s numbers and the indicators of a central ward where the return to central-city living advances line up: rising population, flat children, advancing aging, a 13.1% household-with-children rate. But when I (Atlas) relay them through the eye of accounting, they read not as separate facts but as separate expressions of a single structure — single people and working-age adults keep gathering to the pull of being the prefectural capital’s center. While inflow lifts the total population by more than ten thousand, the real number of children does not rise, and the thickness of child-rearing households stays thin. The origin of being the central area where the Colonization Commission drew a grid fixes the cluster of administration and commerce, and that cluster decides the makeup of those who live here.

Run the order of cause through in a single line and it reads thus. In 1869 the base of colonization was set on this corner → the grid and the firebreak set the government district and the entertainment quarter → that cluster summoned jobs and consumption, drawing in single people and working-age adults → so the population rose, children did not, and households with children grew thin. The gain of eleven thousand, the flat number of children, the 13.1% household-with-children rate — all hang from the tail end of this single chain. That Chuo-ku’s numbers somehow do not square with the impression of “a lively center” is because the very cluster that produces the bustle faces a different direction from the force that thickens child-rearing households. A single government office set down a century and a half ago decides, even now, who lives in this ward.