Sagamihara-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 725,000 (725,493 in 2020). Over the ten years from 717,544 in 2010 it added some eight thousand. At a scale already beyond 700,000, it is a designated city whose gains have entered a gentle stage.

Yet the number of children points the other way. Those under 15 fell from 93,750 (2010) to 82,532 (2020), more than eleven thousand fewer. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 19.3% to 25.5%. Behind a gently rising total, the composition is steadily shifting its center of gravity toward the older end. The residential land price is around 125,000 yen per m², a lower level than the coastal cities of the same Kanagawa Prefecture. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.83, a level at which the city covers much of its expenditure from its own tax revenue. The childcare waitlist moved nearly flat, from 7 children (previous) to 8 (latest). What is worth keeping in view, though, is that these are averages for a city of 700,000. The inland municipal area is divided into three wards — Midori, Chuo and Minami — differing greatly in character from the mountainous former Tsukui district to the residential areas on the flat. The gaps between wards are flattened out and do not appear in this single figure. Why the city takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of the mulberry-field plateau and the military-city plan.

Sagamihara’s skeleton is lines drawn by human hands on an empty plateau. The Sagamihara plateau was poor in water, and even after development from the early modern period it remained a stretch spread with mulberry fields and dry-field farmland. The geographic condition that a large expanse of flatland lay untouched is precisely what decided this city’s fate.

The first foundation was the army. In the late 1930s the former Imperial Army turned its attention to the Sagamihara plateau, with its expanse of flatland, and placed military facilities there in succession — a military academy, a hospital, an arsenal, a weapons school, a signal corps. In 1939 Kanagawa Prefecture decided on the Sagamihara urban-construction land-readjustment project (the so-called military-city plan), and from the following year the plateau was laid out in a grid across about 17.7 square kilometers. The skeleton of the streets and blocks was drawn artificially then. In the terms of economic geography, it is a textbook case of a city established by design rather than arising naturally.

After the war, much of the military land was requisitioned by the U.S. forces, and Sagamihara became a city of bases. The city, which adopted municipal status in 1954, set up an ordinance to attract factories, oriented itself toward an inland industrial city, and workers and their families gathered there in search of housing. The plateau, whose skeleton alone had been drawn early by the military plan, filled rapidly as it drew in factories and housing. And in 2010 Sagamihara became the first city born after the war to be designated a designated city, divided into three wards — Midori, Chuo and Minami. The army drew lines on a mulberry-field plateau, and the bases, the factories and the housing filled those lines — this city’s form stands more on the origins of a plan and a requisition than on natural landform.

What characterizes Sagamihara is that while the total population rose by eight thousand, the number of children fell by more than eleven thousand. That appears in the figures for living infrastructure in a form unlike either the sharp consolidations of regional cities of population decline or the additions of Kawasaki. Elementary schools in the city fell from 75 (2010) to 72 (2020), some three fewer over ten years. As the number of children gently thinned, the school network too moved a little toward contraction.

The childcare waitlist has moved nearly flat, from 7 to 8. It has not pressed the waitlist all the way to zero as Kawasaki or Urayasu have, but it can be read as a figure moving around the point where supply and demand are roughly balanced amid a declining absolute number of children. In a 700,000 city where children gently decline, the elderly share crosses a quarter, and yet the total holds at a slight gain — all three running at once — the waitlist too moves within a small band. And this too is an average across three wards; between the residential areas on the flat and the mountainous former Tsukui district, the circumstances of children and schools cannot be the same. To read a single figure, there is no choice but to view the population dynamics and the particular ward together.

Sagamihara holds many functions of its own. One is the inland built-up area, with the grid streets and blocks the military-city plan drew, which filled in as an industrial and residential area after the war. Another is the bases, handed over to the U.S. forces after the war and still remaining within the city as U.S. military facilities such as Camp Zama, which keep inscribing this city’s origin on the map. Further to the west of the municipal area lies a vast expanse of nature — the mountains of the former Tsukui district and Lakes Sagami and Tsukui.

Sagamihara was designated a designated city in 2010, holding prefecture-level administrative authority on its own. From a mulberry-field plateau to a military city, to a city of bases, and on to a three-ward city of industry and housing — the origin of “a plateau whose lines were drawn by a plan” has carried different functions in each era. The military facilities, the U.S. bases, the factories and the housing were all set, in the end, on the same condition of untouched flatland. Rather than following the natural landform, the condition of a large expanse of flatland took on the army, the bases, the factories and the housing one after another. The grid streets are lines that people drew first, to carry each successive function.