Kawasaki-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 1.54 million (1,538,262 in 2020). Over the twenty years from 1,249,905 in 2000 it added nearly 300,000. While many large cities slowed their gains, Kawasaki is one of the designated cities that greatly grew its population.

What is worth seeing here is that not only the total but even the number of children rose. Those under 15 rose from 170,670 (2000) to 189,490 (2020), nearly twenty thousand more. Designated cities whose absolute number of children is rising are not many, even across the whole country. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 12.4% to 19.6%, placing it on the younger side among designated cities. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 1.03 (FY2023) — exceeding 1.0 means covering standard expenditure from its own tax revenue alone, without leaning on the local allocation tax, which is rare among large cities. The childcare waitlist is zero at the latest reading. What is worth keeping in view, though, is that these are averages for a city of 1.54 million. From the coastal industrial belt to the inland residential areas, they flatten seven wards of differing character into one, and the gaps between wards are leveled out of view. Why the city takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of a highway and an industrial zone.

Kawasaki’s skeleton is a long, narrow band drawn between two giant cities, Tokyo and Yokohama. In the Edo period this ground held a Tokaido post town (Kawasaki-juku). Established in 1623, the post town passed people and goods as a relay point on the highway before the ferry across the Tama River. The “node of a highway,” in the terms of economic geography, was this city’s first foundation.

The second foundation, the one that long symbolized the city, was industry. From the modern era, a stretch from the mouth of the Tama River along Tokyo Bay was reclaimed in succession, and heavy industry beginning with steel and petrochemicals gathered, so that Kawasaki swelled into the core city of the Keihin Industrial Zone. The city, which adopted municipal status in 1924, drew in factories and the people who worked them and grew its population, and in 1972 it was designated a designated city. A two-layer structure — coastal industry and the housing of those who commuted to it — was stacked on a long, narrow municipal area.

In recent years the industrial city has been layering on a third face. In the Tonomachi district of the coastal area, across the Tama River from Haneda Airport, King Skyfront has been developed, gathering research institutions and firms in the life-science field, and the coast of heavy industry has begun to recompose itself into a base for research and development. A highway, heavy industry and research and development are stacked, era by era, on the same band pinched between Tokyo and Yokohama.

What characterizes Kawasaki is that while the total population rose by 300,000, even the number of children rose, by nearly twenty thousand. That appears in the figures for living infrastructure in a form opposite to the consolidations common in regional cities that lost large populations. Elementary schools in the city have held at around 118. In a city where the absolute number of children keeps rising, the school network is maintained rather than reduced.

The childcare waitlist is zero at the latest reading, but this zero is the opposite in meaning from the “zero from a thinned absolute number of children” common in regional cities of population decline. It is a zero reached by keeping supply abreast of demand in a large city where children keep rising and the population keeps growing. In part, a fiscal capacity above 1.0 is supporting the supply against ever-rising childcare demand. Even the same “zero waitlist” reads in entirely opposite ways depending on whether children behind it are rising or thinning. And this too is an average across seven wards; between the coastal industrial belt and the inland residential areas, the way children increase cannot be the same. A figure takes on meaning only with the population dynamics and the particular ward set beside it.

Kawasaki holds many functions of its own. One is the industrial belt along Tokyo Bay, where heavy industry such as steel and petrochemicals has long carried the nation’s production. Another is King Skyfront, born in the Tonomachi district of that coast, where a base for life-science research and development was set on a site looking across the Tama River to Haneda Airport. Look further inland, and along the rail network linking Tokyo and Yokohama spread wards — Tama, Miyamae, Asao — that wear the face of residential areas.

Kawasaki was designated a designated city in 1972, holding prefecture-level administrative authority on its own. From a Tokaido post town, to the core of the Keihin Industrial Zone, and on to a seven-ward city holding a research-and-development base — the landform of “a long, narrow band pinched between Tokyo and Yokohama” has carried different functions in each era. Even as the role moved from a highway relay point to a heavy-industry belt, and on to residential areas and a research-and-development base, the single fact of being a band pinched between two giant cities did not change, and that position kept summoning the next function. The post town, the factories and King Skyfront are all strata stacked, era by era, on the same long, narrow band.