Kawagoe-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 350,000 (354,571 in 2020). Over the twenty years from 330,766 in 2000, the total rose slightly, by about twenty-four thousand. On the face of the numbers it is “a town that increased,” but the number of children faces the other way. Those under 15 fell by over ten thousand, from 46,989 (2000) to 36,460 (2020).

In the same span the share aged 65 and over nearly doubled, from 12.8% to 25.1%. Behind a slightly increasing total, its inside surely shifts its center of gravity to the high-age side. The land price of residential areas is about 157,000 yen per m² (2026), and the Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.94 (fiscal 2023), at a level covering most of expenditure with its own tax revenue. Taxable income per taxpayer grew from 140,000 yen (in thousands, 2000) to 174,000 yen (in thousands, 2023). “Why these numbers take this form” cannot be read without going back over this town’s history of opening as a castle town and by river transport.

Kawagoe’s skeleton was drawn as a castle town. In 1457, in the Muromachi era, Ota Dokan and his father built Kawagoe Castle, and in the Edo era it was esteemed by the Tokugawa house as a key guarding the north of Edo, with hereditary daimyo who produced grand councillors and senior councillors holding the castle. The town deeply copied the look of Edo, and came later to be called “Little Edo.” The “connection with Edo,” in the language of economic geography, was this town’s first foundation.

What physically supported that connection was the river transport of the Shingashi River. Kawagoe functioned as a collection point where farm produce and goods from Edo gathered, and was even called “the kitchen of Edo.” When sweet potatoes became fashionable in Edo at the end of the eighteenth century, Kawagoe-grown potatoes were carried to Edo by river transport, and it settled as a producing district. The town tied to Edo through the river translated Edo’s demand straight into its own industry.

Entering the Meiji era, the nature of the connection was carried on. In the Kawagoe great fire of 1893, a third of the town burned, but in imitation of the kurazukuri merchant houses that survived the fire, kurazukuri as fireproof architecture advanced, becoming a townscape later chosen as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings. In time the JR Kawagoe Line opened in 1940, and with the Tobu Tojo Line and the Seibu Shinjuku Line (Hon-Kawagoe as its starting station) added, Kawagoe became a junction of railways heading for the city center. The collection point of river transport carried its role straight over to a commuting hub of the railway.

What characterizes Kawagoe is that, while the total population increases slightly, only the number of children decreases greatly. It appears in the figures of living infrastructure in a form different from the abrupt consolidation common in regional cities whose populations fell greatly. The elementary schools within the city moved steadily at 33 in both 2000 and 2023. The absolute number of children fell by ten thousand, but the scale of three hundred and fifty thousand keeps supporting the school network as it is.

The Childcare Waitlist moved recently from 10 (2024) to 9 (2025). It is not zero, but it is nearly balanced. This differs both from the “zero as the result of the absolute number of children thinning,” common in regional cities of population decline, and from the “zero kept by catching up to demand,” of an ever-increasing town. In a town where the total increases slightly, the number of children decreases, and the elderly double — all of which advance slowly — the number on the waitlist too, neither rising nor falling sharply, holds level at a low level. The numbers are a mirror that reflects not good or bad, but structure.

Kawagoe has long held two functions. One is the kurazukuri townscape keeping the memory of a castle town. The block of kurazukuri merchant houses on Ichibangai is designated an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, and as one of the few places keeping the look of Edo, it gathers people even from outside the prefecture. The other is the function of a junction of railways heading for the city center, where the three lines of JR, Tobu and Seibu hold stations within the city, and people still come and go as a hub of commuting to work and school.

And on April 1, 2003, Kawagoe became the first Core City in Saitama Prefecture. The thirty-first nationwide, it means the city itself holds, on its own, prefecture-level administrative authority such as the establishment of a public health center. From castle town to a commercial collection point, to a commuting hub of the railway, and on to the prefecture’s first Core City — the same nature of “a town tied to Edo and Tokyo” has swapped on different vessels era by era. Even as the means of tying moved from river transport to railway, the very nature of being tied remained, calling in the next function.