Funabashi-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 643,000 (642,907 in 2020). Over the twenty years from 550,074 in 2000, it rose by about ninety thousand. Excepting the Designated Cities, it is a city holding a population among the largest in the nation, and within Chiba Prefecture it is of a scale second to the prefectural capital, Chiba City.

What I want to note here is that not only the total but the number of children too is increasing. Those under 15 rose by about seven thousand, from 73,692 (2000) to 80,576 (2020). Cities where the absolute number of children is increasing are not many even surveying the whole nation. In the same span the share aged 65 and over rose from 12.6% to 23.8%. While children increase, the aging too advances — both-direction flows run at the same time. The land price of residential areas is about 161,000 yen per m², lower than neighboring Ichikawa. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.92 (fiscal 2023), a level covering much of expenditure with its own tax revenue. On the other hand, the Childcare Waitlist rose from 24 (around 2000) to 34 (recently). That the waitlist is increasing is the flip side of the absolute number of children itself continuing to increase. Why it took this form cannot be read without going back over the history of the highway and the fishing ground.

Funabashi’s skeleton is formed of the node where several highways gather at a single point and the fishing ground opening at the inner reach of Tokyo Bay. In the Edo era, the largest post town of the Sakura road (Narita Kaido) was placed at Funabashi. The Sakura, Kazusa and Gyotoku roads concentrated here, and as a relay point where people and goods came and went along many threads of road, it flourished enough to reach thirty inns. What economic geography would call “a node where several highways cross” was this town’s first foundation.

The second foundation is the sea. The fishing ground of this area, called Funabashi-ura, was, as the Osai-no-ura offering fish to the shogun’s house, an outstanding presence even within the inner bay. As one of the few areas where full-scale fishing still continues at the inner reach of Tokyo’s inland bay, Funabashi has lived together with the sea. The two faces of land and sea — the node of highways and the fishing ground — supported this town from the Edo era.

The third foundation is postwar proximity to Tokyo. The town that enacted city status in 1937 through the merger of five towns and villages, after the war, through the conversion of former military land into housing and the building of housing complexes and the development of the rail network, increased its population as a bedtown against the backdrop of closeness to central Tokyo. The central built-up area opened around Funabashi Station of the Sobu Line, and now, as a Core City, the city carries a part of administrative authority near that of a prefecture. The functions of the node of highways, the fishing ground, and housing are piled in layers across the eras upon the same town.

What characterizes Funabashi-shi is that, while the total population increases by ninety thousand, the number of children too increases by close to seven thousand. It appears in the figures of living infrastructure in the very opposite form to the consolidation common to regional cities where population has greatly decreased. The elementary schools in the city have moved in the mid-fifties. In a town where the absolute number of children keeps increasing, the school network too is maintained without greatly decreasing.

And in a town where children increase, the Childcare Waitlist moves in another way. Funabashi’s waitlist rose from the twenties to the thirties. Different both from the “zero that is the result of the absolute number of children thinning,” common to regional cities of population decline, and from Ichikawa’s “zero that settled to a low level as children slightly decreased,” Funabashi holds a phase in which, while children keep increasing, supply does not quite catch up with demand. Even in the same northwestern Chiba Prefecture, Ichikawa has zero waitlisted and Funabashi several dozen — the difference in the direction of children’s increase or decrease appears just so as the difference in the waitlist figure. Take out only the single word that the waitlist “increased” and it looks like a weakness, but behind it lies the background that children themselves keep increasing. Laid out singly, a figure leads to misreading its direction.

Funabashi, as a town standing upon the node where several highways gather at a single point and the fishing ground opening at the inner reach of Tokyo Bay, holds functions of its own. One is the face of a transport node: the land where the Sakura, Kazusa and Gyotoku roads gathered in the Edo era has continued, from the modern era on, to be a strategic point joining Tokyo and various places within Chiba Prefecture, with railways crossing around Funabashi Station of the Sobu Line. Another is the fishing ground opening at the inner reach of Tokyo Bay, which draws the lineage of the Osai-no-ura that offered fish to the shogun’s house, and is one of the few areas where full-scale fishing still remains at the inner part of the bay.

Funabashi moved from a post town of the highway, through a town holding a fishing ground and a bedtown of proximity to Tokyo, to a Core City — the landform of “a node where several highways cross” has swapped on different functions era by era. Even as the role moved from a relay point of the highway to a node of railways, and further to a residential city of over six hundred thousand, the very character of being a node where people and goods cross did not change, and called in the next function. It is a town where, on land the highways and railways, and at sea the fishing ground, gathered people and goods separately.