Hakodate-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 251,000 (251,084 in 2020). Over the five years from 265,979 in 2015 it lost close to fifteen thousand. A decline of this width in five years falls in the fast class.

The fall in the number of children is more striking still. Those under 15 fell from 27,131 (2015) to 23,560 (2020), some thirty-five hundred fewer. Over the same five years the share aged 65 and over rose from 32.3% to 35.5%, passing more than one in three. The total population falls, children fall, the share of the elderly rises — all three currents run together in the same direction. Households with children make up 14.8% (2020), lower than Sasebo or Shimonoseki seen elsewhere. The residential land price is in the 39,000-yen-per-m² range (38,550 yen, 2026). The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.48 (2023), a structure that covers less than half of standard expenditure with its own tax revenue and fills the rest with the local allocation tax and the like. The childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025). What is worth seeing here is that a zero waitlist amid a fall of thirty-five hundred children carries the aspect of a shrinking demand side. Why this shape arises cannot be read without tracing back the origins of the opening of the port, the fisheries and the ferry.

Hakodate’s skeleton is the origin of having been one of the first windows through which Japan turned outward. At the southern tip of the Oshima Peninsula, facing the Tsugaru Strait, this port town — formerly written Hakodate with different characters — opened in 1859, under the Japan–U.S. Treaty of Amity and Commerce, as one of Japan’s first ports of international trade, together with Yokohama and Nagasaki. In the western district a foreign settlement was set, consulates and churches lined up, and a townscape blending Japanese and Western forms took shape. It is, in the terms of economic geography, an early example of the type in which trade with the outside clusters at an opened port. In 1864 Goryokaku, Japan’s first Western-style fortress, was built, and it became the stage of the last battle of the Boshin War (the Battle of Hakodate).

The second foundation that carried modern Hakodate was the sea itself. The port prospered as a base for the North Sea fisheries and became a node linking Honshu and Hokkaido. In 1908 the Seikan Ferry began service, carrying people, freight and rail cars across to the far shore of the Tsugaru Strait. Two pillars — the fisheries and the ferry — held up the port town’s population. The population reached a peak of about 345,000 in 1980.

But both pillars came to the end of their roles. The North Sea fisheries declined with regulation and changes in the resource environment, and in 1988 the Seikan Tunnel opened, the Kaikyo Line began service, and the Seikan Ferry, with its eighty years of history, was abolished. The function of being a node where ships crossed the sea moved to a tunnel passing beneath it. After a period of trying to turn toward an industrial city, Hakodate shifted the nature of Mount Hakodate and the historic streetscape, kept since the opening of the port, over onto tourism. The Goryokaku Tower, opened in 1964, is one of its symbols. An outward-opened port, fisheries and a ferry that leaned on the sea, and then tourism — this town’s present stands as the consequence of the same condition, the sea, shifting its functions in turn.

What characterizes Hakodate-shi is the speed of the fall in population and children after its two pillars — the fisheries and the ferry — came to the end of their roles. Fifteen thousand in five years, of whom some thirty-five hundred were children. It is one stretch in the middle of a long decline, from a peak of about 345,000 in 1980 to 250,000 in 2020.

The childcare waitlist has reached 0 children. But this too, as with Shimonoseki, is a figure to read with care. A zero amid a fall of thirty-five hundred children is also the reverse face of demand falling below the supply of childcare. The 14.8% household-with-children rate is on the low side even compared with other cities of similar scale, hinting that the layer of young households has already thinned. The Fiscal Capacity Index of 0.48 shows a structure that can cover less than half of standard expenditure with its own tax revenue, but this is the standard form of local public finance seen widely in port towns whose mainstays of fisheries and ferry have shrunk. There is no room to insert a word of appraisal. Holding the peak-era population’s city area while only the contents tilt heavily toward the older side — Hakodate’s living-infrastructure numbers read as one frame in the middle of that transition. The single line of a zero waitlist is also a zero reached after child-rearing households thinned, arriving there by the very opposite path from the zero of a town where children increase.

The functions Hakodate holds have changed places, era by era, upon a single cape opened to the sea. One is the historic streetscape of the western district kept since the opening of the port, where the consulates and churches built as a foreign settlement and the buildings blending Japanese and Western forms remain, together with the view from Mount Hakodate forming the core of tourism. Another is Goryokaku, Japan’s first Western-style fortress, whose star-shaped moat, the stage of the Battle of Hakodate, is preserved as a Special Historic Site, with the adjoining Goryokaku Tower showing its full shape. Further, the port facing the Tsugaru Strait long carried the role of a node linking Honshu and Hokkaido, as a base for the North Sea fisheries and as the point of departure and arrival of the Seikan Ferry.

From the first port that opened outward, to a base for fisheries and the ferry, and on to a tourist city carrying its mountain and its history. The streetscape of the open port, the port of fisheries and ferry, the scenery of tourism — all rest, in the end, upon the same cape opened toward the Tsugaru Strait. A location opened to the sea summoned function after function, and several of them came to the end of their roles — Hakodate’s present stands as the balance of that coming and going.

Lay out Hakodate’s numbers and the indicators of a regional city after its mainstay industries shrank line up together: fifteen thousand fewer in five years, fewer children, an aging rate above 35%, a fiscal capacity of 0.48, a zero waitlist. But when I (Atlas) bundle them again through the eye of accounting, they read not as separate events but as results branching from a single origin — the two pillars of fisheries and ferry came to the end of their roles. Hold a population scale built on the sea inside the city area, and once the functions that sea carried shrink, the population falls, child-rearing households thin, and the power to cover expenditure with one’s own tax revenue declines too. The zero waitlist also carries the aspect of being the reverse face of a thin 14.8% household-with-children rate. High indicators and low alike are separate expressions of one origin in the sea.

Set a span of time before the eye and the meaning of this town’s numbers grows clearer still. Over the seventy-odd years from the Seikan Ferry’s start in 1908 to the peak of 345,000 in 1980, Hakodate kept fattening on the people and goods the sea carried. And over the thirty-odd years from the Seikan Tunnel’s opening in 1988, when the ferry vanished, to its shrinkage to 250,000 in 2020, it has kept paying off, in population, the loss of the functions the sea had carried. The same Tsugaru Strait swelled the town in the first half-century and shrank it in the second. The schools, ports and streetscapes that remain in the city area now were mostly built to fit the era of swelling, and the population of the era of shrinking uses them. The door to the sea, opened on this cape with the opening of the port in 1859, still stands open. Only what comes in through that door has changed places — from ships to tourists — and that difference shows in the present numbers.