Toshima-ku

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 302,000 (301,599). Over the ten years from 249,017 it added some fifty thousand. Even among the wards near the center, it is a ward that greatly grew its population.

What is worth seeing here is that the number of children is rising too. Those under 15 rose from 20,918 to 26,489, some fifty-five hundred more. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over moved nearly flat, from 18.4% to 19.4%. The residential land price is around 780,000 yen per m², high even within the wards. The childcare waitlist is zero. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.53, below 1.0 — mirroring a structure common to the special wards, in which the ward’s own tax revenue alone cannot cover standard expenditure and it is supported by revenue through the Tokyo Metropolitan–Ward Financial Adjustment System and the like. Why a ward holding Ikebukuro increased its children — to answer that, there is no choice but to turn the clock back to a single projection in 2014.

Toshima’s skeleton lies atop the presence of the vast terminal of Ikebukuro and the shock a single population projection gave to policy. Ikebukuro Station at the ward’s center is a vast transfer hub where several railways gather, forming a bustling town where commerce and business cluster at high density. The maxim of economic geography — that a city draws commerce to a transport node — is this town’s first foundation.

The second foundation, the one that turned policy, is the 2014 projection. That year the Japan Policy Council called municipalities projected to lose more than half of their women aged 20 to 39 between 2010 and 2040 “cities at risk of disappearing,” and named Toshima-ku as the only one of the 23 wards among them. That a ward holding a bustling terminal was so named became an occasion prompting a shift in the ward’s policy.

Responding to the point, the ward set up an analysis team within the administration and concluded the factor to be “a decline in the in-migration of young women.” It then steered toward policy weighting childcare and women’s lives — advancing the resolution of childcare waitlists and the making of after-school places for children at elementary and junior high schools. In 2020 the ward was chosen as a Tokyo SDGs Future City. A vast terminal, and a policy shift occasioned by a single projection — these two origins recompose into the movement of today’s population and number of children.

What characterizes Toshima-ku is that, while the total population rose by fifty thousand, the number of children rose by fifty-five hundred. That appears in the figures for living infrastructure on the side opposite to the consolidations common in regional cities that lost large populations, though not in a simple form. Elementary schools in the ward fell from 30 to 24, six fewer over ten years. That schools fall even as the absolute number of children rises looks at first the wrong way around, but it reads as a movement common to central wards that have taken in rising children anew while sorting out, by consolidation and rebuilding, old small schools dating from before the war.

The childcare waitlist is zero. Opposite in meaning to the “zero from a thinned absolute number of children” common in regional cities of population decline, it reads as a zero where, amid rising children, the waitlist-resolution policy occasioned by the 2014 point balanced supply and demand. Children increase, the waitlist holds at zero, yet the number of schools falls through consolidation — these three, seemingly at odds, can rather occur at once in the residential area of a central ward such as the one holding Ikebukuro. The twist of schools falling while children rise teaches that it is too early to rest easy by pulling out a single upward marker.

Toshima-ku holds several functions of its own. One is the vast terminal of Ikebukuro, which as a transfer hub where several railways gather goes on drawing commerce and business at high density. Another is the accumulation of policy weighting childcare and women’s lives, advanced after the 2014 point — taking root in the town as the resolution of childcare waitlists and the making of after-school places for children.

Toshima adjoins the center and sits in a position where, from Ikebukuro, several railways extend in several directions. From the bustle of a vast terminal to a policy shift occasioned by a single projection — the condition of “holding a vast transfer hub” and the event of “being named” form this ward’s present. The clustering of commerce and the accumulation of childcare policy alike rest, in the end, atop one ward centered on the terminal of Ikebukuro. A terminal of utmost bustle, and a childcare policy steered after a projection pushed it from behind — these two stand side by side in the same ward, branched from the single core of Ikebukuro.