Kita-ku

In the latest Population Census the population is about 355,000 (355,213 in 2020). Over the five years from 341,076 in 2015, it gained more than fourteen thousand. Already exceeding three hundred fifty thousand in scale, it is a ward that has gathered people as a residential area riding the railway network into the city center.

What I want to note here is that the number of children too moves in the same direction. Those under 15 rose from 33,535 (2015) to 36,527 (2020), about three thousand. In the same five years, the share aged 65 and over fell slightly, from 25.5% to 24.6%. Two flows — aging easing, and the absolute number of children increasing — run in the same span. The household-with-children share is 14.5% (2020). The land price of residential areas is about 610,000 yen per m². The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.39 (2023), below 1.0, but this is because the twenty-three wards of Tokyo are under the ward-finance adjustment system, in which much of a ward’s tax revenue is once gathered by the metropolis and redistributed as adjustment resources. It is a design that does not presuppose a ward covering all expenditure on its own, and it cannot be lined up on the same measure as the fiscal capacity index of the cities of Tama. The Childcare Waitlist rose from 8 (2024) to 18 (2025). That this plateau, gathering people as a residential area, was originally a town of paper and gunpowder, does not come into view without turning the clock back to the waterside of Oji.

Kita-ku’s skeleton is Japan’s modern industry itself, which began on the waterside of Oji. In 1873, aiming to domestically produce the Western paper that had been relied on through imports, the Shoshi Gaisha (later Oji Paper) was founded. The site chosen was Oji. The manufacture and transport of paper and the carrying-in of raw materials require a river with abundant water and transport to the urban area. After going around several candidates such as Kanda and Shinagawa, Oji — where the Shakujii River and a highway ran — became the deciding factor. In 1875 the mill was completed, and the Oji branch water, diverted from the Senkawa Josui, was used as industrial water. Shibusawa Eiichi, who led the founding, set up his residence on Asukayama, overlooking that mill. What economic geography would call “a locational condition of water that called in industry” is this ward’s first foundation.

The second foundation is the army. After an engineer corps moved to Akabane in 1887, army-related facilities such as the clothing depot and the Oji works of the gunpowder manufactory transferred into the area one after another. The conditions of wide land, water, and a railway network this time drew in munitions. In the 1930s an industrial district centered on heavy and chemical industry spread, and this area, holding many military facilities and munitions plants, was even called a “military capital.” And on March 15, 1947, with the shift to special wards, Oji-ku and Takinogawa-ku merged and Kita-ku was newly established. At that time the proposal “Asukayama-ku” was a strong candidate for the new ward name, but from discussion that the reading was difficult, it settled on a plainer directional place name. The water of Oji called in papermaking, the same land was covered by munitions, and after the war two wards became one — this ward’s form stands upon a history in which the rise and fall of industry and administrative reorganization are layered many times over.

What characterizes Kita-ku is that, while the total population rose by fourteen thousand, the number of children too rose by three thousand. It appears in the figures of living conditions in the direction opposite to the consolidation common to regional cities where population has greatly fallen. If young households flow in as a residential area riding the railway network into the city center, the absolute number of children is pushed up.

The Childcare Waitlist rose from 8 (2024) to 18 (2025). In a ward where children increase, childcare demand too extends in the same direction. The rise and fall of the waitlist is a figure that appears as the result of a tug-of-war between the movement of the absolute number of children and the state of supply, and on its own its meaning is not fixed. Even with the same “waitlist,” the flat trend in a town where children thin, and the increase in a ward where children rise, have opposite structures behind them. So Kita-ku’s waitlist of 18 is best read as the shadow of demand swollen precisely because children are increasing, and to speak of superiority and inferiority by merely lining up its magnitude with regional cities does not reach the substance of the town.

Kita-ku holds several functions of its own. One is the Oji area where Japan’s making of Western paper began, where the Paper Museum, conveying the history of papermaking, is placed on Asukayama. Another is Asukayama, where Shibusawa Eiichi set up his residence at a spot overlooking the mill, which, as a famous place for cherry blossoms and as the site of modern industrial history, keeps inscribing the ward’s origin on the map. Further, on the ward’s northern edge is Akabane, which, since the transfer of the engineer corps, keeps its character as a railway junction that supported the concentration of military-related facilities and industry.

Kita-ku has changed the functions it carries era by era — from the papermaking that began on the waterside of Oji, to the concentration of munitions, and further to a residential area linked to the city center by railway. The mill of the Shoshi Gaisha, the army warehouses, and the present residential area are all, at root, set upon the same condition — “a plateau blessed with water, through which a highway and a railway run.” Japan’s first Western paper was made on the waterside of Oji, that same land was covered by munitions, and now all of it is folded beneath the residential area — Kita-ku is a plateau that has layered the rise and fall of industry like strata.