Otaru-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 111,000 (111,299 in 2020). This city’s population traces not a step from a large merger but a clear downhill: from 150,687 in 2000 to 142,161 in 2005, 131,928 in 2010, 121,924 in 2015 and 111,299 in 2020 — close to forty thousand fewer in twenty years. It is a curve along which a once-prosperous port town has shrunk consistently in population.

Look at the contents and the aging runs deep. The share aged 65 and over reached 40.8% in 2020, at a level where two in five are elderly. Households with children make up a low 13.3%, and births per thousand people, at 3.8, fall in the low class nationwide. The childcare waitlist has been zero in recent years. The Fiscal Capacity Index was 0.47 in fiscal 2023, not reaching half of expenditure with its own tax revenue, with heavy reliance on the allocation tax. A town once called the Wall Street of the North now shows, in its numbers, the figure of holding population decline, deep aging and fiscal weakness all at once. Why this shape arises cannot be read without tracing back the origins of the port and the banks.

Otaru’s skeleton is set by the geography of a natural harbor facing Ishikari Bay. From the early modern into the modern period, Otaru became the northern port of call for the kitamae-bune ships that generated enormous wealth, and then prospered as a port for landing herring catches and for shipping out the coal carried from the Ishikari coalfield. By way of the sea, people, goods and wealth gathered here, making it one of Hokkaido’s leading commercial ports. It is, in the terms of economic geography, a textbook case of a maritime node deciding a town’s origin.

That wealth summoned the banks. Coal and herring were goods whose prices moved with the market, and trade and shipping with overseas, beginning with Russia, could not do without financial institutions handling exchange and insurance. In the Meiji period many banks set up branches in Otaru, and one quarter near the bay became a street lined with stone banks, called the “Wall Street of the North.” Here was one form of a modern Japanese economic city, in which finance bound up the wealth of a port.

What symbolized that prosperity was the Otaru Canal, completed in 1923. The barges laden with cargo that plied this canal were the heart of the port town. But after the war, as the lead role in logistics shifted to rail and trucks, the canal lost its role, and after a long dispute over preservation, half of it was filled in. Beginning with the wealth of the kitamae-bune ships, prospering as a banking district, and the canal coming to the end of its role — this town’s form stands upon the origins of a port and of finance.

What characterizes Otaru-shi is that a town once among Hokkaido’s leading commercial ports now holds population decline and deep aging. Close to forty thousand were lost in twenty years, and the share aged 65 and over rose to 40.8%. With poor herring catches, the contraction of the coal industry, and the change in the lead role of logistics, the mainstay industries that held up the port town lowered their weight, and amid a flow of younger generations moving to Sapporo and other cities, a steep fall in population and a deepening of aging read as occurring at once. The low 13.3% household-with-children rate is one expression of that.

That weakness shows strongly in the fiscal numbers too. The Fiscal Capacity Index of 0.47 is a level that does not reach half of expenditure with its own tax revenue, with heavy reliance on the allocation tax. That the mainstay industries shrank reads as showing up in a thinning of the tax base. A town once called the Wall Street of the North now holds, at once, a steep population fall, deep aging and weak finance. These are not separate symptoms. They are numbers that capture, from separate angles, what is happening to a port town on Ishikari Bay after the wealth of the port has receded.

The functions Otaru holds remain as a chain in which the port’s wealth summoned, one rung at a time, something else. One is the origin of a commercial port on Ishikari Bay where the kitamae-bune ships, herring and coal gathered, holding the beginning of a leading Hokkaido port that drew wealth. Another is the banking district that bound up that wealth, the “Wall Street of the North,” keeping the memory of a modern economic city where stone banks lined up. And the Otaru Canal, half of it filled in, gives this town a scenery of its own that conveys, at once, prosperity and its end.

From a port of call for the kitamae-bune ships, to a port shipping out herring and coal, and on to an economic city where stone banks lined up. The geography of a natural harbor facing Ishikari Bay summoned shipping and trade, and that trade summoned finance. Finance bound up the wealth of the port — that chain set this town beside the bay. To read Otaru is to read the outline of that chain, which remains even after the wealth has gone.

Lay out Otaru’s numbers and the indicators of a prosperous port town tracing a descent line up: close to forty thousand fewer in twenty years, an aging rate of 40.8%, a 13.3% household-with-children rate, a fiscal capacity of 0.47. But when I (Atlas) look through the eye of accounting, what first holds the eye are two — the aging rate of 40.8% and the Fiscal Capacity Index of 0.47. Two in five are elderly, and own tax revenue does not reach half of expenditure — this combination mirrors, just as it is, the downhill phase of a prosperous regional city in which, after the mainstay industries shrank, the younger generations flowed out and the remaining population aged.

There is another thing to weigh: the distance between this town’s origins and its present numbers. The memory of a prosperity called the Wall Street of the North, when barges plied the canal, still remains in the town as the scenery of stone banks and the canal, forming the core of a tourism that draws many people. But the rank of that history, or the crowds of tourism, does not immediately hold back the fall in resident population. The face as a tourist site and the numbers as a town to live in need to be read separately. On a summer afternoon, tourists walk in lines before the stone warehouses along the canal. One street back from that same lane, the houses where elderly residents, more than four in ten, live stand quietly in rows. The bustle of tourism and the aging of residents lie layered upon the same block — and the stone walls of the quarter once called the Wall Street of the North still, in silence, divide those two times.