Naka-ku

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 151,000 (151,388 in 2020). Over the five years from 148,312 in 2015 it added some three thousand. It is one of the eighteen wards that make up Yokohama, the ward where the Kanagawa Prefectural Office and the Yokohama City Hall sit. Because it is a ward and not a city, figures of the kind a city carries — the Fiscal Capacity Index or the childcare waitlist — cannot be treated here. What can be read are the indicators that mirror what sort of people live in this central ward.

Households with children make up 14.3% (2020), low against a suburban residential area such as Aoba-ku. In a central ward where government offices, the harbor and business functions gather, the share of single-person and working households runs relatively high, and the share of households with children is thinned by that much. Looking at the absolute number of children, those under 15 fell from 15,460 (2015) to 14,687 (2020), some eight hundred fewer in five years. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over edged down from 22.8% to 22.5%, nearly flat. Total population slightly up, children slightly down, the aging rate held — as young workers keep flowing into a central business district, the makeup as a whole stays one of little movement. The residential land price is in the 357,000-yen-per-m² range. Why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of the port opening and Kannai.

Naka-ku’s skeleton is set on a single turning point: the 1859 opening of the port. Before that, this stretch was the half-farming, half-fishing village of Yokohama. Even after Edo-era reclamation of new paddy, it was not land that would become the center of a great city. But in 1859, when Yokohama was opened under the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States, a customs house was set in this once-poor hamlet, and it turned at a stroke into a trading center where Japanese shops and foreign trading houses lined up. It is a textbook case, in the terms of historical geography, of a port opening that raised a city from nothing.

The make-up of the place is carved into its place names too. A barrier gate was set at the edge of the treaty-port district, and with the Yoshidabashi bridge as the boundary, the seaward side (toward Bashamichi) was called “Kannai” — inside the barrier — and the landward side (toward Isezakicho) “Kangai,” outside it. This Kannai is the central district of Yokohama since the port opening, and still the administrative core of prefecture and city, where the Kanagawa Prefectural Office and the Yokohama City Hall sit. A city rose from a port, and its center was fixed, just so, as the administrative center.

Then in October 1927, with the institution of the ward system, Naka Ward was founded. That it was the center of Yokohama administratively and geographically alike was folded into the ward’s very name. The Great Kanto Earthquake, the Yokohama air raids, the long postwar requisition by the Allied forces — being central, it took heavy damage and occupation again and again, yet developed without letting go of its role as the center of harbor and administration. A port opened in a half-farming village, that port’s center became the administrative core, and through disaster and requisition it remained the center — this ward’s shape stands on the origin of the port opening.

What characterizes Naka-ku is that, while the total population rose by three thousand, the number of children fell by some eight hundred. This is a movement peculiar to a central business district — unlike suburban Aoba-ku, and unlike a depopulating city. Into a ward where government offices, the harbor and business functions gather, working-age single people and young households keep flowing. What pushes the total population up is mainly this inflow, not a thickness of child-rearing households. So people increase, yet the absolute number of children thins instead, and the household-with-children rate stays at a low 14.3%.

That the share aged 65 and over edged down from 22.8% to 22.5% is another face of the same inflow. That the aging rate does not climb even as children fall reads as the working-age layer coming in from outside and holding up the denominator. In a depopulating region, when children fall the aging rate leaps; in central Naka-ku, the young inflow offsets it. Read the same “children decreasing,” and its meaning faces entirely the other way depending on whether the population as a whole is rising or thinning behind it. See population, children and the aging rate separately and you mistake them — overlay the three, and only then does the backbone of inflow come into view.

Naka-ku holds several functions of its own. One is Kannai, the central district since the port opening — the administrative core of prefecture and city, where the Kanagawa Prefectural Office and the Yokohama City Hall sit. Another is the Port of Yokohama, whose harbor function, begun with the treaty-port customs house, still gives the ward’s waterfront its character. Further there are districts shaped through the history of the port opening, such as Yamashita Park and Yokohama Chinatown. Yokohama Chinatown, known nationwide, has its roots in a corner of the foreign settlement that began after the port opened.

Naka-ku is one of the administrative wards making up the city of Yokohama, not a city in itself. It is the side of Yokohama (14100), a Designated City, that holds powers on a par with a prefecture; the ward is the central unit within it that carries the administrative-center, harbor and tourism functions. From a half-farming village to a treaty port, to the central district of Kannai, and on to a central ward holding the harbor and the prefectural office — the condition of being “well-suited ground for a good port near Edo” summoned the decision to open the port, and that decision set the town’s functions in place one after another. Rather than the natural landform, a single decision — the port opening — set this ward’s functions in turn. Had it not happened in that half-farming village, Kannai, the prefectural office and Chinatown would all have been set on some other ground.