Asahikawa-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 329,000 (329,306 in 2020). Over the five years from 339,605 in 2015 it lost some ten thousand. It is a city that, while holding a scale above three hundred thousand, has entered a phase of population decline.

What is worth seeing here is the level of aging. The share aged 65 and over rose from 31.3% (2015) to 34.1% (2020), already passing more than one in three. Over the same period those under 15 fell from 37,173 to 34,691, some twenty-five hundred fewer in five years. Children thin and the share of the elderly passes a third — two currents running at once. The residential land price is in the 24,000-yen-per-m² range, low for a city above three hundred thousand. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.53, well below 1.0 — a structure that covers only about half of standard expenditure with its own tax revenue and fills the rest with the local allocation tax. This is the form common to regional cities in snowy, cold regions that hold a wide administrative area. The childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025), and households with children make up 16.7% (2020). Why such numbers take this shape cannot be read without tracing back the origins of the farmer-soldiers, the division and the forest.

Asahikawa’s skeleton is the very history of people and industry carried by plan into the Kamikawa Basin, where there had been nothing. In 1890 the three villages of Asahikawa, Nagayama and Kamui were set in Kamikawa District, and from the following year tondenhei farmer-soldiers settled as the vanguard of colonization. Into a basin ringed by the forests of the Daisetsu mountains, people were first set down.

The second foundation was the military and the railway. In 1898 the railway opened, and the following year, 1899, the Imperial Army’s Seventh Division relocated from Sapporo. As a base carrying the defense and colonization of northern Hokkaido, Asahikawa took on the character of a military town. It is, in the terms of economic geography, base formation with a military facility and the railway at its core. And the third foundation, the one that spread this town’s name across the country, was the forest. The Daisetsu range held a rich, fine virgin forest of broadleaf trees. To build the town’s structures and the division’s facilities, and to manufacture and repair the railway’s freight and passenger cars, woodworking artisans gathered to Asahikawa from across the country. The disadvantage that natural drying was hard under winter snow was overcome by the spread of artificial dryers, making large-scale shipping possible. Thus a woodworking industry clustered, and the source of Asahikawa furniture took shape.

The course as an industry, too, is carved into the origins. In 1949 Asahikawa was designated one of only twelve woodworking cluster districts nationwide, and the sole such district in Hokkaido. The farmer-soldiers opened the basin, the railway and the division set the base, the Daisetsu forest drew the woodworking artisans — Asahikawa’s form stands not on natural growth but on the origin of people and industry carried in by plan.

What characterizes Asahikawa-shi is that, while the total population fell by ten thousand, the number of children fell by twenty-five hundred too. The current of a phase of population decline shows up, just as it is, in a base city of northern Hokkaido that holds a wide area in a snowy, cold region.

The childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025). Reading this “zero,” though, calls for care. The path by which a childcare waitlist reaches zero is not single. There are towns that reach zero by preparing capacity thicker than demand, and towns where the absolute number of children itself thins, supply and demand slacken, and it converges on zero. In Asahikawa those under 15 fell by some twenty-five hundred in five years, and the household-with-children rate, at 16.7%, is not high. That is, the zero waitlist here cannot be cut off from the aspect of supply and demand loosening as children decline. A zero waitlist in a town where the aging rate passes a third and children thin carries, even as the same zero, a different meaning from a zero in a town where children increase. Take a single “0” at face value, and the thinning of children advancing beneath it goes unseen.

The functions Asahikawa holds are made of layers, era by era, piled on the single point of being the center of northern Hokkaido. One is the woodworking and furniture industry that clustered against the backdrop of the Daisetsu forests. The artisans who gathered from across the country with the settlement of the farmer-soldiers and the relocation of the division became its source, and in 1949 it was designated the sole woodworking cluster district in Hokkaido. Asahikawa furniture keeps carving this town’s industrial origin into the map.

Another is the municipal Asahiyama Zoo, opened in 1967. Japan’s northernmost zoo, from 1997 onward it repeated reforms toward behavioral exhibits that show animals’ behavior as it is, becoming a facility with among the strongest drawing power in the country. The location of being the base of northern Hokkaido, the industry of the forest, and a zoo as a device for drawing crowds stand side by side within one city. Further, Asahikawa is a transport node of northern Hokkaido where rail and roads gather, and a central city binding the wide surrounding area. The farmer-soldiers opened the basin, the military and railway set the base, the Daisetsu forest summoned the artisans, and later the zoo gathered people. On the single point of being the center of northern Hokkaido, different functions have been piled era by era. To read Asahikawa is nothing other than the work of peeling back that layering, one sheet at a time.

Lay out Asahikawa’s numbers and the indicators seen in a regional base city of a snowy, cold region line up: population decline, fewer children, an aging rate above a third, a fiscal capacity of 0.53. But when I (Atlas) look through the eye of accounting, the lowness of a fiscal capacity of 0.53 does not immediately mean the town’s weakness. To hold more than three hundred thousand people across a wide area and to maintain winter snow clearing and cold-region infrastructure takes heavier expenditure than a city on flat, mild land. Filling with the local allocation tax the share that own tax revenue cannot cover is a structure common to base cities holding such conditions, not a problem peculiar to Asahikawa.

In the basin the farmer-soldiers opened, the forest industry, the zoo and the transport node coexist, and Asahikawa goes on being the center of the wide surrounding area. A population above three hundred thousand, a woodworking and furniture industry, a zoo that has drawn on the order of a million people a year, a node where the roads and rail of northern Hokkaido cross — it maintains this much function on land where more than a meter and a half of snow piles up in a year. The figure of a fiscal capacity of 0.53 is the endorsement of that maintenance cost. When the reader measures this town, applying the same yardstick as a city on flat land misreads the meaning of this 0.53. Winter snow-clearing costs, cold-region housing, the labor of clearing roofs — the felt sense of living shows in the winter numbers, not the summer ones. Only by placing your own household budget in winter Asahikawa do this base city’s numbers become three-dimensional. After that, only the question of how you yourself would pass that winter remains.