Bunkyo-ku

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 240,000 (240,069 in 2020). Over the five years from 219,724 in 2015 it added some twenty thousand, holding an upward trend for a central ward.

What is worth seeing here is that the number of children is rising too. Those under 15 rose from 23,478 (2015) to 28,065 (2020), some four thousand six hundred more in five years. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over fell from 19.1% to 17.5%. Households with children make up 15.6% (2020). The residential land price is in the 1.23-million-yen-per-m² range. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.62, but because the special wards have much of their tax base pooled at the metropolitan level and redistributed through the Tokyo Metropolitan–Ward Financial Adjustment System, this figure does not directly express the ward’s self-sufficiency. The childcare waitlist moved at a low level, from 2 children (2024) to 4 (2025). This ward’s rare central-Tokyo profile of rising children cannot be read apart from how five terraces, poor in flat land, turned away large-scale industry and instead gathered a place of learning, universities and publishing.

Bunkyo-ku’s skeleton is a history in which places of learning stacked atop a terraced plateau of relief. Bunkyo-ku is land of many slopes, made of five terraces of the Musashino plateau — Sekiguchi, Kohinata, Koishikawa, Hakusan and Hongo — and the valley the Kanda River carved. That the flat land does not run continuously nurtured a character of scattered residence sites and places of learning rather than a clustering of large factories and commerce.

In the Edo period this plateau held the shogunate’s place of learning, temple schools and samurai residences. With the Meiji Restoration, on the sites of those schools and residences, universities including the University of Tokyo settled one after another. The path dependence, in the terms of economic geography, by which an existing clustering of learning draws the next — one academic institution gathers, and related institutions and people gather further — grew this town into the center of education and scholarship called the “capital of letters.” And being an academic town summoned another industry: the printing and publishing that support scholarly books and periodicals. TOPPAN places its headquarters in Suido within the ward and runs the adjoining Printing Museum, which conveys the course of printing. In 1947 the former Hongo Ward and Koishikawa Ward merged to form Bunkyo Ward. A place of learning atop the plateau summoned universities, and universities summoned publishing and printing — this town’s character stands on a landform poor in flat land and on the origins of learning stacked there.

What characterizes Bunkyo-ku is that, while being a town of education and scholarship, the number of children is rising too. That appears in the figures for living infrastructure in a form opposite to the consolidations common in regional cities that lost large populations. Into the residential areas of the plateau where universities, printing and publishing gather, households with children moved in.

The result is a figure of those under 15 up four thousand six hundred in five years, with the aging rate actually falling. The childcare waitlist moved at a low level, from 2 children (2024) to 4 (2025). It has not been pressed all the way to 0 as in Chuo-ku or Minato-ku, but it reads as a figure swinging slightly around the point where supply and demand roughly balance amid rising children. Children increase, the aging rate falls, the waitlist runs at a low level — Bunkyo-ku’s living-infrastructure figures read straight as the consequence of households with children gathering onto the plateau of an academic town. How far childcare supply keeps pace with rising children, though, should show in the future movement of that small figure of 4.

Bunkyo-ku holds several functions of its own. One is its face as a center of scholarship where many universities, beginning with the University of Tokyo, gather, standing on the origin of Edo-era places of learning and samurai-residence sites. Another is the clustering of printing and publishing that an academic town summoned — TOPPAN’s headquarters and the Printing Museum among them — with related firms gathered in the ward. Further, the very landform of five terraces and the valley of the Kanda River supports a residential character of many slopes and gardens.

Bunkyo-ku has had its clustering of learning summon the next function, from the Edo-era place of learning to universities, and from universities to publishing and printing. Universities, publishers and printing companies alike branch from the same source: a place of learning set atop the plateau. A landform poor in flat land, which would not permit large-scale industrial clustering, instead gathered the character of learning and publishing into one ward. Climb and descend the slopes and there is a university gate, and beyond it the sign of a publisher — Bunkyo-ku is that plateau where places of learning run on with the slopes.