Yamagata-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 247,000 (247,590 in 2020). From 253,832 in 2015 it fell, over five years, by more than six thousand. Though it is the capital of Yamagata Prefecture, its population has entered a phase of decline.

What I want to note here is the way the number of children is falling. Those under 15 fell from 31,869 (2015) to 29,120 (2020), more than two thousand seven hundred fewer in five years. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 27.1% to 29.2%. The total population falls, the children fall faster still, and the share of the elderly is about to reach three-tenths — this town, too, has entered the phase of demographic transition widely seen in regional prefectural capitals. The share of households with children is 21.0%, on the slightly thicker side among regional cities of the same scale. Residential land prices run around ¥59,000 per m², close to the level of Fukushima City in the same Tohoku. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.74, below 1.0. This is the standard figure of local finance, where its own tax revenue alone cannot cover a standard level of expenditure and the difference is filled by the local allocation tax, and is nothing unusual for a prefectural capital. The Childcare Waitlist is 0. Why these numbers take this shape cannot be read without going back to the history of the castle town and of the cast metalwork and safflower.

Yamagata’s frame is the very history of shifting its center, while a castle town, toward a town of artisans and merchants. The ground for making things in this land is, in fact, older than the castle town. In the late Heian period, nearly a thousand years ago, the sand of the Mamigasaki River flowing through the city and the soil quality around Chitose Park were found suited to molds for casting, and Yamagata cast metalwork is said to have arisen. In the terms of geography, it is an instance where the sand a river carries — a local material — became the starting point of an industry.

The second foundation is the reorganization of the castle town. In the Keicho era, Mogami Yoshiaki, who became the first lord of the Yamagata domain, rebuilt Yamagata Castle and remade the castle town. At this time he arranged Kajimachi and Domachi as artisans’ quarters, granting privileges that exempted them from various levies, and advanced a townmaking that handled fire. This became the foundation as a cast-metal production area, and in 1615 the technique of Yamagata bronze casting was established through the inspection of advanced centers such as Kyoto. Another thing that made this town known across the country was safflower. When the river shipping of the Mogami River was opened and goods came and went with the Kamigata region by way of the river port of Oishida, the Mogami safflower harvested in the Yamagata region became known across the country as a then exceedingly costly dye. Onto the axis of waterborne transport that joined the castle town and the Kamigata region, the face of a collecting-and-distributing center for dye was overlaid.

And what most deeply decided this town’s character was the exchange of daimyo. After the Mogami house was dispossessed, through the more than two hundred and forty years up to the abolition of feudal domains in the Meiji era, twelve generations of daimyo entered Yamagata one after another. Each time, the assessed yield was cut, and the population of samurai dwelling in the castle town fell too. While the samurai thinned, the activity of the merchants grew, if anything, brisker, and Yamagata, while a castle town, shifted its center toward a town of merchants and artisans. The local craft of cast metalwork, the cash crop of safflower, and the merchants who came forward each time the samurai dwindled — these three remade a castle town into a commercial city.

What sets Yamagata-shi apart is that, while the total population fell by six thousand, the number of children fell by two thousand seven hundred. The children fall faster than the total population. This is different from the population outflow of regional cities that lost greatly, and different from the increase of children in Chofu City — it is a shrinking of internal composition typical of a regional prefectural capital. Behind a total that wears down slowly, the layer of the next generation thins faster still.

At the same time, the Childcare Waitlist is kept at 0. But this is different in meaning from the zero achieved, as in Urayasu or Kawasaki, by piling up supply while children were increasing. In a town where the absolute number of children itself falls, demand for childcare shrinks too, so supply becomes more able to keep up. The same "Childcare Waitlist of zero" reads wholly differently depending on whether children are increasing or falling behind it. That the share of households with children, at 21.0%, is on the slightly thicker side among cities of the same scale also has a side that supports the difficulty of a waitlist arising. Children fall, the share of the elderly is about to reach three-tenths, and yet the Childcare Waitlist is zero — in a prefectural capital where several flows advance at once, taking out a single number alone does not fix its meaning.

The faces Yamagata-shi holds in a single basin are not one. One is its face as the capital of Yamagata Prefecture, the central place where the administration of the whole prefecture gathers. Another is Yamagata cast metalwork, which arose in the late Heian period relying on the sand of the Mamigasaki River and rooted itself as an artisans’ quarter in Mogami Yoshiaki’s reorganization of the castle town, and which still leaves the memory of a townmaking that handled fire, as a local traditional industry. Further, the history of being joined to the Kamigata region by the river shipping of the Mogami River and sending out Mogami safflower as a collecting-and-distributing center pushed the castle town wider into a town of merchants.

Yamagata, while beginning as a castle town, became a town where, as twelve generations of daimyo were exchanged, the samurai dwindled and the artisans of cast metalwork and the merchants handling safflower came forward. Castle, cast metalwork, safflower, merchants — within a single vessel, the Yamagata Basin, different faces are layered for each age. It was not that artisans gathered because there was a castle; it was the local material of the river’s sand and the axis of waterborne transport of the Mogami River that drew artisans and merchants to the castle town. The castle is no more than one of the vessels, and the true foundation lay rather in the local resources the basin held.