Itabashi-ku

In the latest Population Census the population is about 584,000 (584,483 in 2020). Over the five years from 561,916 in 2015, it gained more than twenty thousand. A near-city-center ward already holding a large population is still in a stage of gathering people.

What I want to note here is that the number of children too increases a little. Those under 15 rose from 59,238 (2015) to 60,014 (2020), about eight hundred. The household-with-children share is 14.4% (2020), staying somewhat low among the twenty-three wards. In the same span, the share aged 65 and over moved nearly flat, from 22.8% to 22.7%, with aging stable at a level approaching a quarter. The land price of residential areas is in the low five-hundred-thousands per m² (512,000 yen, 2026), a calm level among the twenty-three wards. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.43 (2023), which is due to the mechanism by which special wards receive a redistribution of part of the metropolitan tax under the ward-finance adjustment system, and cannot be measured on the same scale as an ordinary city. The Childcare Waitlist rose from 0 (2024) to 7 (2025). That this five-hundred-eighty-thousand city, which looks calm, was originally the Nakasendo’s first post town and later a town of more than five thousand printing factories, does not form an image without following the history of the highway and industry.

Itabashi’s skeleton is the history of carrying functions over, from a highway post town to a town of factories. In the Edo era, the first post town placed after leaving Edo on the Nakasendo was Itabashi-juku. One of Edo’s four post towns alongside Shinagawa, Naito-shinjuku, and Senju, it functioned as a relay place for people and goods passing to and fro on the inland highway linking Edo and Kyoto. The ward’s name itself derives from this post town. The advantage of a highway junction that economic geography speaks of is this town’s first foundation.

In 1932, by the merger of city and counties, the surrounding towns and villages were incorporated into Tokyo City, and Itabashi-ku came into being. The Itabashi-ku of that time held the largest area among the twenty-two wards of the day. Then in 1947, the ward shifted to a special ward. And in August of the same year, the area of the former Kita-toshima county on the ward’s northwest side separated as Nerima-ku. An area centered on a highway post town was first bundled into one large ward, and eventually split into two.

After the war, the third foundation that gave this ward its character is industry. Near the city center and holding consolidated land and a labor force, Itabashi gathered urban factories centered on printing. In the 1960s printing factories rapidly increased, and in 1978 the number of factories within the ward exceeded five thousand. A highway post town became a ward and a town of printing factories — this ward’s form stands upon the history of the Nakasendo, the ward system, and urban industry.

What characterizes Itabashi-ku is that, amid population and children both increasing gently, the waitlist moved in a single year. The Childcare Waitlist rose from 0 in 2024 to 7 in 2025. This is not a large number, but in the sense that zero could no longer be held, it is not a small change. In a ward where the household-with-children share is somewhat low at 14.4% among the twenty-three, the number of children rose by about eight hundred, and as childcare demand piled up on that, supply temporarily could not fully keep up — that is the likely reading.

Even with the same “waitlist,” the increase amid children increasing, and the flat trend amid children thinning, differ entirely in meaning. Itabashi’s 7 is the opposite in background to the regional city where the absolute number of children itself decreases and the waitlist settles to zero. In Itabashi, precisely because children are increasing, whether supply keeps up is being put to the question. Children increase gently, aging is nearly flat, and the waitlist moves from zero into the single digits — in this five-hundred-eighty-thousand city, the figure of 7 is a small sound of supply and demand creaking, and reading it itself like a report card will misjudge the town’s real circumstances.

Itabashi-ku still holds several characters of its own. One is the urban area along the old highway, deriving from the Nakasendo’s Itabashi-juku, which keeps the origin of the ward’s name on the map. Another is the urban industry concentrated centered on printing, which shapes a townscape distinctive even among near-city-center wards — factories and housing mingling within one ward. On the ward’s north side flows the Arakawa, and along the river spread industrial and logistics sites as well.

Itabashi began as a highway post town and has carried over functions era by era — the ward system, separation, and industry. The printing factories and the mingling housing are, at root, set in order upon the same condition — near the city center, a place where a highway gathered people and goods. When it was the first post town after leaving Edo on the Nakasendo, when printing factories exceeded five thousand in the Showa era, and now when factories and housing mingle, only the fact of being a place where people and goods pass to and fro stays unchanged. That unchangingness has called in the next function era by era.