Nerima-ku

In the latest Population Census the population is about 753,000 (752,608 in 2020). Over the five years from 721,722 in 2015, it gained more than thirty thousand. Holding the second-largest population among the twenty-three wards after Setagaya-ku, it is a ward still keeping an upward trend.

What I want to note here is that the number of children is held nearly flat. Those under 15 hardly changed, from 86,105 (2015) to 85,920 (2020). The household-with-children share is 17.3% (2020), a level higher than Itabashi-ku’s 14.4%. In the same span, the share aged 65 and over fell slightly, from 21.9% to 21.2%, placing it on the gentle side of aging for a ward holding a large population. The land price of residential areas is in the low four-hundred-seventy-thousands per m² (474,000 yen, 2026). The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.46 (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 is held at 0 (2025). The twist of this ward — holding the second population among the twenty-three wards yet born last — cannot be swallowed without going back to the course of separating from neighboring Itabashi.

Nerima’s skeleton is the very course by which a farming village became a ward last among the twenty-three. Originally this land was a farming district of Kita-toshima county, known as a chief producing region of the Nerima daikon. The geographical condition that large-scale farmland remained without being turned into housing land long shaped this ward’s character.

In 1932, the Nerima area was incorporated into Tokyo City as part of Itabashi-ku. The Itabashi-ku of the time held the largest area among the twenty-two wards, and that the distance to the ward office was far and inconvenient became one reason for the later separation. On August 1, 1947, the area on the former Kita-toshima county side separated from Itabashi-ku and Nerima-ku came into being. After the other twenty-two wards shifted to special wards all at once with the enforcement of the Local Autonomy Act, it was the one ward born afterward, and with this the twenty-three wards were complete. An area that had been a farming village became independent, as the last of the twenty-three wards, out of the circumstance of its neighbor’s size.

After the war, housing-land conversion advanced in Nerima. Whereas neighboring Itabashi headed toward a town of printing factories, Nerima gathered people as residential land centered along the rail lines. But not all the farmland turned into housing land. Nerima keeps holding the largest farmland area among the twenty-three wards, and shifting its crops from daikon to cabbage, it has continued agriculture within the city. A farming village became the last ward out of its neighbor’s size, became residential land, and still left farmland — this ward’s form stands upon the history of a farming village, separation, and urban agriculture.

What characterizes Nerima-ku is that, while the total population rose by thirty thousand, the number of children is held nearly flat. It appears in the figures of living infrastructure as a quiet stability, different both from the consolidation common to regional cities in population decline and from the sway of the waitlist that occurred in neighboring Itabashi. The household-with-children share is 17.3%, a higher level among the twenty-three wards. In a ward where the absolute number of children does not move greatly, demand for childcare and schools too does not move suddenly.

The Childcare Waitlist is held at 0. Whereas Itabashi moved from zero to 7 in 2025, Nerima held zero in the same year. Amid the number of children moving flat, it can be read as a zero as the result of keeping supply caught up to demand. Its meaning differs from the zero of “the result of the absolute number of children thinning,” as in regional cities in population decline; it is a zero amid children being held. The number of children does not move, the share of the elderly falls slightly, and yet the total population keeps rising — that these three align in a seven-hundred-fifty-thousand city is rare. Gazing only at the increase of the total population, the inner steadiness of children holding their ground without collapsing falls entirely out of view.

Nerima-ku holds several functions of its own. One is urban agriculture keeping the largest farmland area among the twenty-three wards, which, while a place of production beginning with the Nerima daikon and continuing to cabbage, also bears the role of a temporary place of refuge in disaster and a place to experience touching the soil. Another is the residential land spreading along the rail lines, supporting the second population among the twenty-three wards after Setagaya-ku. Further, the Toei Oedo Line runs in with Hikarigaoka as its terminus, and from there an extension toward the Oizumi direction is planned.

Nerima has, from a farming village of Kita-toshima county, become the last ward among the twenty-three, become residential land, and still left farmland. Urban agriculture, residential land, and the railway whose extension is planned are, at root, set in order upon the same condition — the wide farmland that remained, escaping housing-land conversion. That it was born last among the twenty-three wards because its neighbor was too large and the office was far — a ward independent from such a plain circumstance now holds the second population among the twenty-three and still leaves the largest farmland within the wards. The gap between the plainness of the starting point and the present scale tells this ward’s history.