Saitama-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 1.32 million (1,324,025 in 2020). Over the fifteen years from 1,176,314 in 2005 it added some 150,000. While many municipalities have turned to population decline, Saitama is one of the few large cities still holding an upward trend.

Yet the number of children has not risen as readily as the total. Those under 15 edged down slightly from 170,239 (2005) to 168,805 (2020), nearly flat. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 15.9% to 23.0%. Behind a rising total, the composition is gradually shifting its center of gravity toward the older end. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.95 (FY2023), a level at which the city covers most of its expenditure from its own tax revenue. The childcare waitlist was 0 children in both 2024 and 2025. What is worth keeping in view, though, is that these are averages for a city of 1.32 million. They flatten ten wards of differing origin — the former Urawa, Omiya, Yono and Iwatsuki — into one, and the gaps between wards are leveled out of view. Why the city takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of three cities joined into one.

Saitama’s skeleton is three lines, originally drawn separately, bound together after the fact. At its center stood the former Urawa, which in the Edo period held a Nakasendo post town (Urawa-juku) — a highway town — and which from the modern era fixed its character as a center of administration and learning, holding the Saitama prefectural government. The “node of a highway,” in the terms of economic geography, was this city’s first foundation.

The second foundation was the former Omiya. It opened as the shrine-gate town of Hikawa Shrine, known as the first shrine of Musashi, and once the railway came through it swelled into a “railway town” holding the National Railways’ Omiya marshalling yard. The gathering point of faith at the shrine gate passed its role straight to the gathering point of the railway. Later the site of that marshalling yard took in national agencies and was redeveloped as Saitama Shintoshin. Faith, railway and administration were layered on the same ground, era by era.

The third was the former Yono, which long prospered as a market town along the Kamakura Kaido. These three cities of differing character merged on May 1, 2001 to form the City of Saitama, and on April 1, 2003 it became a designated city. In 2005 the former City of Iwatsuki was incorporated, adding the Iwatsuki ward, with its own origin as an old castle town and a center of doll-making, to make ten wards. Centers that had originally grown up independently — a highway town, a shrine-gate town, a market town and a castle town — were stitched together under the name of a single city; that is this city’s first making.

What characterizes Saitama is that while the total population rose by 150,000, the number of children stayed nearly flat. Even so, the figures for living infrastructure move in the opposite direction from the consolidations common in regional cities that lost large populations. Elementary schools in the city rose from 89 (2003) to 108 (2023), nineteen more over twenty years. Even with the absolute number of children flat, the added population sought housing across the city, and the school network moved toward expansion.

The childcare waitlist has been zero for two straight years. But this zero differs in meaning from the “zero from a thinned absolute number of children” common in regional cities of population decline. It is a zero reached by keeping supply abreast in a 1.32-million city where the number of children holds high and the population keeps rising. In part, a high fiscal capacity is supporting the supply of childcare against ever-rising demand. Even the same “zero waitlist” reads entirely differently depending on whether the population behind it is rising or thinning. Read the same “zero,” and its meaning flips with the direction of the population behind it.

Saitama still holds two centers that grew up separately. One, with its origin in the former Urawa, is a center of administration and learning built around the Saitama prefectural government. The other is Saitama Shintoshin, born on the site of the former Omiya marshalling yard, where national agencies relocated and a new district of business and exchange took shape. A center as a prefectural capital and a center grown from a former rail site stand side by side within one city.

Saitama became a designated city on April 1, 2003, and the city holds prefecture-level administrative authority on its own. From a Nakasendo post town, to a Hikawa shrine-gate town, to a rail marshalling yard, and on to a designated city — even when centers of separate origin were bound into one, they did not converge on a single core. Holding the two poles of the Urawa government seat and the Omiya new city, this city grew large. The very quality of holding several centers carries the merger’s origin into the present.