Iwaki-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 333,000 (332,931 in 2020). Over the five years from 350,237 in 2015, it fell by a little over seventeen thousand. It is a city that, while keeping a scale of more than three hundred thousand, has entered a phase of population decline.

What I want to note here is the way the number of children is falling. Those under 15 fell by a little over four thousand four hundred in five years, from 42,404 (2015) to 37,979 (2020). In the same span the share aged 65 and over rose from 28.1% to 30.7%. In parallel with the total population thinning, the composition too is shifting its center of gravity to the older side. The land price of residential areas is about 44,000 yen per m². The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.79, below 1.0 — a structure in which standard expenditure cannot be covered by its own tax revenue alone and the gap is filled by the local allocation tax. This is nothing unusual for a three-hundred-thousand city; it is a shape common to many regional cities. The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025), and the household-with-children share is 19.3% (2020). A zero waitlist where the number of children is thinning does not necessarily mean “childcare is ample” — why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back over the history of coal and the wide-area merger.

Iwaki’s skeleton is the very history by which the declining coal towns were bound together into one. To begin with, this southern Hamadori held the Joban Coalfield, said to be one of the largest in Honshu, and was a region whose mainstays were coal and fisheries. But as the leading role in energy shifted from coal to oil, the coalfield turned to decline and the fisheries too were pressed to convert. What to set in place after the prime of an industry had passed — that became this region’s task.

One answer was a wide-area merger. To gain designation as a New Industrial City (the Joban–Koriyama region) under the national Comprehensive National Development Plan, the prefecture led a large-scale municipal merger. On October 1, 1966, the five cities of Iwaki, Uchigo, Joban, Taira and Nakoso, together with three towns and four villages, and a further two towns and villages of Futaba County — fourteen municipalities in all — became one, and Iwaki City was born. In the terms of economic geography it is a case of receiving an industrial structural shift by rearranging the administrative framework. To avoid the image of absorption into the existing “Iwaki (Iwaki kanji) City,” the city’s name was set in hiragana as “Iwaki.”

The area of the city born this way exceeded 1,230 square kilometers, making it then the widest city in Japan. It held that place for thirty-seven years, until it was overtaken by Shizuoka City in 2003. And to the question of how to convert the coal mines’ decline there was another symbolic answer. In that same year, 1966, using the hot spring welling abundantly from beneath Joban Yumoto, the Joban Hawaiian Center (now Spa Resort Hawaiians) opened. A company that had been digging coal shifted its line of business to the hot spring, a resource lying in the same underground. The declining coal mines, the prefecture-led great merger, and the turn to hot-spring tourism — to the question of what to set in place after an industry’s prime had passed, this land answered with the two answers of merger and tourism.

What characterizes Iwaki is that, while the total population falls by seventeen thousand, the number of children too falls by four thousand four hundred. It differs in scale from the small cities of population decline where heavy consolidation advances, but the flow common to regional cities in a phase of population decline appears here as well.

The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025). Yet reading this “zero” calls for care. The path by which a waitlist reaches zero is not single. Some towns reach zero by building the receiving capacity of childcare thicker than demand, while in others the absolute number of children itself thins and the supply-demand balance loosens, converging on zero. In Iwaki, those under 15 fell by a little over four thousand four hundred in five years, and the household-with-children share stays at 19.3%. That is, the zero waitlist here cannot be separated from the aspect of supply and demand loosening as children gently decline. With the same “zero waitlist,” the reading changes wholly depending on whether children are increasing or thinning behind it. This re-reading, which we saw in Fukushima City (7201) too, cannot be skipped here either.

The functions Iwaki holds within a single municipal area are not single. One is the vast municipal area itself, exceeding 1,230 square kilometers. Cores that were once separate cities and towns — Taira, Onahama, Yumoto, Nakoso — lie scattered at a distance within a single city. Rather than a center gathered at one point as in an ordinary city, the multi-core structure in which the centers of several old cities and towns are dispersed is left just as it is on the map by the history of the merger.

The other is the hot-spring tourism born from the coal mines’ conversion. Spa Resort Hawaiians, using the hot spring of Joban Yumoto, still gathers people from across the country as a symbol of a coal-mining company switching its underground resource to hot water. Further, there is a coastal zone centered on the port of Onahama, where fisheries and industry, and attractions such as an aquarium, line up. From the merger of the coal towns to a multi-core wide-area city — to the question of “how to receive a declining industry,” this land put out the two answers of a wide-area merger and a tourism conversion. Those two answers still remain in the shape of the municipal area and in the hot-spring grounds.