Kashiwa-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 430,000 (426,468 in 2020). From 327,851 in 2000, over twenty years it rose by about a hundred thousand, nearly three-tenths. In the same twenty years that Hachioji rode onto a landing and small towns in the hills lost three-tenths of their population, Kashiwa, conversely, rose by three-tenths.

Moreover, the number of children even rose. Those under 15 went from 45,986 (2000) to 53,333 (2020). While many of the nation’s cities reduce their number of children, this is rare. The share aged 65 and over did rise, from 12.4% to 25.8%, but this is an aging diluted by the inflow of young households. The land price of residential areas is about 127,000 yen per m² (2026), surpassing Hachioji, and the Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.91 (fiscal 2023). Why these numbers “kept increasing” cannot be read without going back to what this land was in the first place.

Most of Kashiwa’s land was, in the Edo era, the shogunate’s grazing land called the Kogane-maki. A maki spread over the Shimosa plateau, it was a zone where the settlement of people was avoided in order to raise warhorses. Whereas a post town like Hachioji has a history of gathering people as a strategic point on a highway, the body of Kashiwa begins from “a land where people lived only sparsely.”

The turning point was the Meiji era. In 1869, the new government abolished the maki and advanced reclamation and settlement. Place names such as Hatsutomi and Toyoshiki are remnants of reclaimed lands named by number in the order of settlement, and they remain in the city to this day. On the land cleared from the maki, in 1896, Kashiwa Station of the Joban Line opened. Opposite to a town where a highway post town came first, in Kashiwa the railway came first, and the built-up area formed from there. After the war the population surged as a bedtown of Tokyo, and in 1969 it received the No. 1 designation under the enacted Urban Redevelopment Act, and the redevelopment in front of Kashiwa Station began. In 2005 the Tsukuba Express opened, and a new axis of development was born in the city’s north. The path dependence of a city — maki → reclamation → railway → residential land, built up upon a rail line from nearly bare ground — lies behind the ever-increasing population.

A population increase appears most plainly as the number of living infrastructure. The elementary schools in the city were increased from 33 in 2000 to 42 in 2023. Opposite to a regional city in population decline that closed two schools in three over a quarter century, Kashiwa built up its schools during this span. In a town where children increase, not consolidation but new building occurs.

The Childcare Waitlist was zero in both 2024 and 2025. But this zero has a different meaning from the “zero that is the result of the absolute number of children thinning,” common to regional cities in population decline. In this town, where those under 15 rose into the 50,000 range, the zero is one reached as the result of keeping supply caught up with rising demand. Even with the same figure “zero waitlist,” if the population dynamics behind it face opposite ways, the reading changes entirely. A zero reached after children thinned, and a zero made in time while children increase — the same figure, yet what is happening in the town is exactly opposite.

Kashiwa, as a town supported by two railways, holds a function of its own. The city’s center is Kashiwa Station, where the Joban Line and the Tobu Noda Line (Tobu Urban Park Line) cross; after the war department stores gathered in front of this station, and it has functioned as a commercial hub of Tokyo’s outskirts. The other axis is the Tsukuba Express, which opened in 2005.

After the Tsukuba Express opened, the campuses of the University of Tokyo and Chiba University gathered in the Kashiwa-no-ha district in the city’s north, and industry-academia cooperation and smart-city development advanced. This area too, traced back, was the broad land of a maki or its site where the settlement of people was avoided, and precisely for that reason university campuses and planned urban blocks could be newly laid out. That it was a maki where no people lived — the disadvantage of a hundred and fifty years ago works, turned exactly inside out, as the present strength of being able to develop consolidated bare land in a planned way. Kashiwa’s urban functions stand upon that reversal.