Machida-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 431,000 (431,079 in 2020). Over the five years from 432,348 in 2015, it fell by about a thousand. It is a Tokyo / Tama city of a scale exceeding four hundred thousand, at the stage where the rising trend has stopped and turned to a slight decline.

What I want to note here is that the number of children is falling faster than that. Those under 15 fell from 55,649 (2015) to 51,174 (2020), about forty-five hundred. In the same span, the share aged 65 and over rose from 25.3% to 27.0%. Behind the total population turning to a slight decline, the inside is surely shifting its center of gravity toward the older side. The household-with-children share is 20.0% (2020). The land price of residential areas is about 160,000 yen per m². The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.93, a level that covers much of expenditure with its own tax revenue. The Childcare Waitlist rose from 28 (2024) to 40 (2025). That the waitlist rises while the absolute number of children is falling shows the possibility that, apart from the total number of children, a geographic mismatch between the layer needing childcare and the supply is at work. Why it takes this form cannot be read without going back over the history of the silk road and the Yokohama Line.

Machida’s skeleton has been drawn as a place of commerce, carrying and buying and selling goods. In the Edo era, Hara-machida opened as a commercial district where a market stood on days bearing the numbers two and six, becoming a place where the goods of the surrounding villages gathered and were traded. What economic geography calls “the rise of a country town cored on a periodic market” is this town’s first foundation.

The second foundation, the one that spread this town’s name, is silk. When the port of Yokohama opened with the opening of the country, demand from abroad for raw silk surged. As a relay place on the highway carrying raw silk produced in Hachioji and Kofu to the port of Yokohama — the Machida Kaido, later called the “silk road” — Hara-machida greatly bustled. Great quantities of raw silk passed through this land, changing loads. It is a period when the geography of a commercial district along the highway, bound to the outside circumstance of the opening of Yokohama, enriched the town. And when the Yokohama Line opened in 1908, the role of carrying raw silk shifted from highway to railway, and the silk road quietly ended its role.

Administrative belonging too moved greatly. The three Tama counties were transferred from Kanagawa Prefecture to Tokyo Prefecture in 1893, and Machida became a municipality of Tokyo. The present positioning — the southern tip of Tokyo, jutting like a peninsula into Kanagawa Prefecture — was fixed at this time. After the war, from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, housing-land development advanced through the large-scale construction of housing complexes and land-readjustment projects, and the population surged. From a commercial district, to a post town of the silk road, and further to a residential city of the Yokohama Line and the housing complexes — this town’s form stands upon a history where commerce, raw silk, railway, and housing complexes are layered across a prefectural boundary.

What characterizes Machida-shi is that, while the total population turns to a slight decline, the number of children falls faster than that, and meanwhile the waitlist increases. It appears in the figures of living infrastructure in a form different from “towns where children are held,” such as Matsudo or Chofu. Those under 15 fell by forty-five hundred over five years, and the share of the elderly rose by 1.7 points. It can be read as the stage where the generation raised in the housing complexes developed from the 1960s on enters old age, and the town’s whole center of gravity is shifting.

Upon that, the Childcare Waitlist rose from 28 (2024) to 40 (2025). It is a seemingly twisted movement — the waitlist rises even though the absolute number of children is falling. This shows that the falling of the total number of children, and how many childcare-needing households are where, are separate problems. If the very use rate of childcare rises with the increase of dual-income households, demand for childcare can rise even as children fall; and on the hilly land thick with housing complexes, demand and supply readily mismatch geographically. Children fall, aging proceeds, yet the waitlist increases — read without sensationalizing, this combination shows the fact that the shortfall of childcare cannot be measured by the decrease of the total number alone.

Machida-shi holds several functions of its own. One is its commercial origin as the periodic market of Hara-machida and a relay place of the silk road, which it still retains as a commercial concentration around the station where the Yokohama Line and the Odakyu Line cross. Another is the large-scale housing complexes developed on the hilly land from the 1960s on, which formed its face as a residential city of Tama. And what stands out geographically is its position as the southern tip of Tokyo, jutting like a peninsula into Kanagawa Prefecture. To the north it borders Hachioji City and Tama City; to the east, south, and west it borders cities of Kanagawa Prefecture.

Machida was transferred from Kanagawa Prefecture to Tokyo Prefecture in 1893 and became administratively Tokyo, but as the origin of a relay place on the silk road carrying raw silk to the port of Yokohama shows, it was a land originally with strong ties to the Kanagawa side. From a commercial district, to a post town of the silk road, and further to a residential city of the Yokohama Line and the housing complexes — the condition of “a node on the highway linking Hachioji and Yokohama” has carried over different functions era by era. The commerce of the periodic market, the relay of raw silk, and the hillside housing complexes are all, at root, set upon the same condition — a node where people and goods pass north and south. Being Tokyo yet surrounded on three sides by Kanagawa, linked to Yokohama by the silk road — how to read that twist of belonging and ties is, from here on, the reader’s domain. Lined up beside Yokohama City, which likewise lay at the terminus of the silk road as the port of shipment for raw silk and changed its form with the opening of the port, the contrast of two towns the silk road linked comes into view.