Matsudo-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 498,000 (498,232 in 2020). Over the five years from 483,480 in 2015, it rose by about fifteen thousand. At a scale nearing half a million, it is a Chiba city still increasing its population.

What I want to note here is that the number of children has not decreased either. Those under 15 rose slightly, from 56,055 (2015) to 56,850 (2020). In the same span the share aged 65 and over stayed nearly flat, from 25.2% to 25.6%. Unlike many urban areas where aging advances, here neither the number of children nor the share of the elderly has moved greatly. The household-with-children share is 18.5% (2020). The land price of residential areas is about 165,000 yen per m², a restrained level for a city within commuting distance of the city center. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.84, a level that covers much of expenditure with its own tax revenue. And the Childcare Waitlist has reached 0 (2025). What I want to be careful of, however, is that the figure of a zero waitlist has a different meaning from the zero of a regional city in population decline, reached after the absolute number of children has thinned. Here the zero is reached while the number of children is held. Why it took this form cannot be read without going back over the history of a post town, a crossing, and a railway.

Matsudo’s skeleton is drawn from a single highway joining Edo and Mito and from a single river crossing. In the Edo era, when the Mito Kaido — branching from the Nikko Kaido at Senju — was laid out, post towns were placed along it. Matsudo-juku was the second post town counting from Senju, and it was also a river port controlling the Edo River crossing — the so-called Yagiri ferry. As a post town where people and goods stayed, and where cargo was transshipped by the river crossing and river transport, the geography of being a node of land and water routes was this town’s first foundation. It is the type, in economic geography, of a settlement that grows at the node of transport.

The second foundation is the railway. When the Joban Line opened in 1896, the line was laid over the Matsudo of the era of highway and crossing, and the population began to rise. The town, which enacted city status in 1943, changed its form greatly during the postwar period of high economic growth. From the 1960s on, large-scale housing complexes were built one after another across the city, and the areas around the stations of the Joban Line and the Shin-Keisei Line grew into commercial built-up districts. The post town, which had stretched thinly along the highway, spread out as a plane around the railway stations and was remade into a town where people commuting to Tokyo live. What I want to note here is that Matsudo is not a case where “the town came first and the railway came later,” but a latecomer city where railway development and becoming a bedtown advanced almost together. Over the old node of the post town and the crossing, the railway redrew a new node — this town’s form stands upon the layering, era by era, of three kinds of transport: highway, river, and rail line.

What characterizes Matsudo-shi is that, while the population rose by fifteen thousand, the number of children too has been held without decreasing. It appears in the figures of living infrastructure in a form different from the consolidation common to regional cities where population has greatly fallen. Those under 15 rose slightly over five years, and the aging rate too stayed nearly flat. In a city that has kept gathering households with children within commuting distance of the city center, the absolute number of children has not greatly thinned.

Upon that, the Childcare Waitlist has reached 0 (2025). Even with the same “zero waitlist,” the meaning is the opposite of the “zero that is the result of the absolute number of children thinning,” common to regional cities in population decline. In Matsudo the number of children is held, and while the household-with-children share keeps at 18.5%, supply was made to catch up to demand and reached zero — so it can be read. The children do not decrease, the share of the elderly does not move, and yet the total population keeps rising and the waitlist reaches zero. A zero waitlist, however, is no more than a one-point figure for the whole city, and the circumstances of children and childcare need not be the same between the built-up areas along the Joban Line and the areas thick with housing complexes. With the background that the children do not decrease in place first, the figure of zero takes on its meaning.

Matsudo, as a town opened at the node of a highway and a river, holds several functions of its own. One is its origin as a post town and river port of the Mito Kaido, including the Edo River crossing — the Yagiri ferry — keeping to this day the history of having been a node of river and highway. Another is the commercial built-up areas that spread around the stations of the Joban Line and the Shin-Keisei Line, together with the large-scale housing complexes built across the city from the 1960s on, supporting its face as a town where people commuting to Tokyo live.

Matsudo lies within commuting distance of central Tokyo, and built-up areas and housing complexes spread out as a plane along the railway. From a post town and crossing to a railway bedtown — over the old condition of “a node of highway and river,” the new node of the railway was redrawn, and different functions have been loaded on era by era. The traffic of the post town, the river transport of the crossing, and the housing complexes along the line are all, at root, set upon the same condition of a node where people and goods come and go. It is not a town that arose by itself. Because there was a single condition — a transport node — different functions have chosen this land one after another, era by era. Laid beside Nagareyama, which likewise has its origin as a post town and changed into a residential city joined to the city center by railway, the thread by which the towns of northwestern Chiba shifted from highway post towns to railway bedtowns comes into view.