Goshogawara-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about fifty-one thousand (51,415 in 2020). What I want to note first here is that there is a large step in this city’s population. Goshogawara-shi was born in 2005 from the merger of the former Goshogawara City with Kanagi town and Shiura village, and just after the merger, in 2005, it counted 62,181. From there, through 58,421 in 2010 and 55,181 in 2015 to 51,415 in 2020, it has fallen by some ten thousand over the fifteen years since the merger. It is a curve of population going on falling, even while at the center of the Tsugaru Plain.

Looking inside the figures, the aging is deep. The share aged 65 and over reached 35.7% in 2020, a high level on a par with many cities across the country. The Fiscal Capacity Index was 0.32 in fiscal 2023 — its own tax revenue covers only about a third of expenditure, and it lies on the side that leans heavily on the local allocation tax. On the other hand, the Childcare Waitlist has stayed at zero in recent years. A town where the plain’s goods gathered keeps its childcare capacity even while holding a falling population and a deep aging. This combination makes sense for the first time only by tracing back to the history of the Iwaki River shipping and the plain’s collecting-and-distributing center.

Goshogawara’s skeleton is set by the geography of being in the middle of the Tsugaru Plain. This town was ringed on four sides by farm villages and was the collecting-and-distributing center where the plain’s goods gathered. It is the role, in economic geography, of a “collecting-and-distributing market” that gathers the produce of its hinterland and trans-ships it. The rice grown in the plain was drawn together here.

What carried that rice was the Iwaki River shipping. In the Edo period, the Tsugaru rice that came down the Iwaki River was handed on from the river mouth at Tosa-minato to the port of Ajigasawa on the Sea-of-Japan side by small boats. This water transport, called “Tosa Komawashi,” made Goshogawara a knot where rice and goods came and went by way of the river. The character of the plain’s collecting-and-distributing center and the artery of the river’s shipping overlapped, and shaped this town’s origin.

From the modern era onward, that character as the plain’s center appears in the town in another form. In 2004 the Tachineputa Museum opened in the city center. A summer festival, in which the giant float “Tachineputa,” standing more than twenty meters tall, is raised and paraded, has become the town’s symbol. The plain’s rice gathered, the river’s shipping handed it on, and now a giant float is raised — this town’s shape stands upon the history of being the collecting-and-distributing center of the Tsugaru Plain.

What characterizes Goshogawara-shi is that, after a population swelled once by the merger, it has gone on falling straight down since. Over the fifteen years from just after the merger in 2005 to 2020, some ten thousand were lost, and the share aged 65 and over rose to 35.7%. The siting at the center of the Tsugaru Plain once gathered rice and goods, but it can be read that, amid the falling weight of farming and the younger generation leaving the plain, the fall in population and the deepening of aging are advancing at the same time.

Even so, the childcare capacity is held. The Childcare Waitlist has been zero in recent years, and the situation of households wanting to leave a child losing a place on the spot has not arisen. While there is also an aspect in which room has been born in the capacity as the very number of children falls, it is certain that the capacity is functioning. Population falls, aging is deep, and the Childcare Waitlist is zero. These three numbers, which look as if each tells a different story, are separate cross-sections of one and the same flow — the contraction of the plain’s collecting-and-distributing center. Take out any one of them, and the figure of the town does not surface.

In Goshogawara, several faces of different origin overlap. One is the geography of being near the center of the Tsugaru Plain, holding the origin of a collecting-and-distributing center where the goods of the surrounding farm villages gathered. Another is the Iwaki River shipping that joined the river mouth at Tosa-minato to the Sea of Japan — the starting point of the artery that sent the plain’s rice off toward Kamigata and Edo. And the Tachineputa float, more than twenty meters tall, now rises into the summer sky as this town’s symbol.

On a summer night, the Tachineputa, standing more than twenty meters tall, lights its lamps and rises in the middle of a plain ringed on four sides by rice fields. At its feet there once was a collecting-and-distributing center where rice gathered and the boats of the Iwaki River handed goods on. The geography of being in the middle of the Tsugaru Plain and joined to the sea by a river drew in rice and goods, and the memory of that prosperity now stands in this town as the festival’s giant float.