Yokohama

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 3.78 million (3,777,491 in 2020). Over the twenty years from 3,426,651 in 2000 it added some 350,000 — the largest of any municipality nationwide, roughly three times the size of Saitama.

Yet the number of children points the other way. Those under 15 fell from 474,656 (2000) to 441,810 (2020), a drop of more than thirty thousand. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over nearly doubled, from 13.9% to 24.4%. Behind a total that holds at a slight increase, the composition is steadily shifting its center of gravity toward the older end. The residential land price is around 125,000 yen per m² (2026), and the Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.94 (FY2023), a level at which the city covers most of its expenditure from its own tax revenue. The childcare waitlist fell from 5 children (2024) to 0 (2025). What is worth keeping in view, though, is that these are averages for a city of 3.77 million. Flatten the coastal business districts and the inland residential areas of all eighteen wards into one figure, and the gaps between wards are leveled out of view. Why the city takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the opening of a single port.

Yokohama was built outward from the opening of a single port. In 1859, a harbor was opened at what was then the small village of Yokohama, and it became one of Japan’s first windows for exchanging goods with the world. The largest export at the outset was raw silk, and Yokohama swelled rapidly as the central port of a silk trade that linked the inland sericulture districts to world markets. In the terms of economic geography, the “advantage of the gateway” was this city’s first foundation.

The trading city then layered on a second face — that of an industrial city. After the Great Kanto Earthquake the center of the silk trade shifted to other ports, while reclamation advanced along the coast, and Yokohama strengthened its character as an industrial port at the core of the Keihin Industrial Zone. The city, narrow when it adopted municipal status in 1889, widened through six rounds of boundary expansion and coastal reclamation, and in 1956 was designated a government-ordinance city. A concentration of people rooted in the port kept enlarging the administrative vessel that held them.

The number of wards grew with that expansion. Beginning with five wards in 1927, the ward system passed through mergers of surrounding areas and subdivisions driven by population growth, reaching its present eighteen in 1994. And Minato Mirai 21, begun in 1983, turned the sites of former shipyards and freight yards into a district of offices, commerce and housing, inserting a new urban core at the heart of the port town. Four phases — the port’s opening, raw silk, industry and redevelopment — are stacked around the same harbor.

What characterizes Yokohama is that while the total population rose by some 350,000, the number of children fell by thirty thousand. Even so, the figures for living infrastructure appear in a form different from the sweeping consolidations common in regional cities that lost large populations. Elementary schools in the city fell only from 359 (2000) to 349 (2023), ten fewer over twenty years. The sheer scale of a 3.77-million city keeps the school network nearly intact against a slight decline in children.

The childcare waitlist fell from 5 children (2024) to 0 (2025), settling at near balance. But this is neither a “zero from a thinned absolute number of children” nor the kind of Chiyoda zero kept chasing rising demand. In a giant city where children gently decline, the elderly share doubles, and the total still keeps rising — all three running at once — the waitlist figure too settles at a low level as a citywide average. And this too is an average across eighteen wards; the gap in childcare supply and demand between wards does not appear in a single citywide number.

Yokohama holds many functions of its own. One is the harbor that has carried the nation’s logistics as a trading and industrial port ever since the port opened. Another is Minato Mirai 21, born from the sites of former shipyards and set at the heart of the port town as a new urban core where business, commerce and tourism gather. Look further inland, and each of the eighteen wards spread along the rail network wears a different face, from business districts to suburban housing.

Yokohama was designated a government-ordinance city in 1956, and the city holds prefecture-level administrative authority on its own. From the gateway of the port’s opening, to a port of the raw-silk trade, to the core of the Keihin Industrial Zone, and on to a city of eighteen wards holding Minato Mirai — the quality of being a “gateway open to the sea” has carried different functions in each era. Even as the role shifted from trade to industry and on to business and tourism, the single fact of being open toward the sea did not change, and that location kept summoning the next function. The eighteen wards and Minato Mirai are strata laid down, era by era, on that same opening toward the sea.