Hiratsuka-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 258,000 (258,422 in 2020). From 254,633 in 2000 there has been almost no rise or fall over twenty years, a settled flat course.

What is worth seeing here is that, behind a total population that does not move, the age makeup moves greatly. The share aged 65 and over rose from 14.0% in 2000 to 28.1% in 2020, nearly doubling in twenty years. Those under 15 fell from 36,771 to 29,331, some seven thousand fewer. Households with children make up 19.3% (2020), a level befitting a town where aging has advanced. Elementary schools held nearly flat, from 28 to 29, and the childcare waitlist stays at a few children. Together with the residential land price and the Fiscal Capacity Index (0.94 in FY2023), the numbers show a town that holds its total population while quietly aging. Why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of the post town, munitions and the air raid.

Three origins lie layered in Hiratsuka’s skeleton. The first is the highway. Hiratsuka opened as a post town on the Tokaido, growing as a relay point where people and goods passed along the road linking Edo and Kyoto. After the railway came through, the urban area spread out from Hiratsuka Station. It is a common flow, of a highway post handing its role on to a railway town.

The second is modern munitions. In wartime, military-direct munitions plants crowded the city’s area — the Second Naval Powder Works foremost, along with a branch plant of the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, the Second Naval Air Depot, and an aircraft plant that built fighters. Hiratsuka came to wear the face of an industrial city carrying munitions production. But that cluster summoned the third origin. On 16 July 1945, munitions-dense Hiratsuka took a large-scale air raid, losing about eighty percent of the city’s area of the time and about sixty percent of its dwellings. Holding munitions plants led, just so, to a fierce war disaster.

Then the town was rebuilt from the ruins. In 1950 a “reconstruction festival” was held, and the next year, in 1951, the first Tanabata festival was held on the model of Sendai’s. A festival begun in the wish for recovery from war disaster grew in time into one of Japan’s representative Tanabata festivals. From a highway post to a munitions industrial city, then burned in an air raid and rebuilt together with a reconstruction festival — this town’s shape stands on the origin of having been burned to nothing and yet remade.

What characterizes Hiratsuka is that, while the total population holds nearly flat, the aging rate has risen to almost double in twenty years. This is the form common to a mature regional city where, with no large inflow or outflow, the generation already living ages in place. The real number of children fell by some seven thousand, but it is not the fierce shrinking common to depopulating regional cities — it stays a gentle thinning.

The living-infrastructure figures mirror this gentleness. Elementary schools barely moved, from 28 to 29, the school network all but held even against the fall in children. The childcare waitlist stays at a few children, very small for the scale of a 260,000 city. A town rebuilt from the ruins swelled greatly in the postwar reconstruction period, and has now entered a settled phase with little inflow or outflow. The total population holds, children thin gently, only aging advances — these three running at once is the figure of a regional city that swelled greatly in the reconstruction period and where inflow then settled. The numbers mirror the town’s structure, not its merit.

Hiratsuka holds several functions of its own. One is the urban area that spread from the Tokaido post town and Hiratsuka Station, one of the core cities of Shonan, opened on the plain near the mouth of the Sagami River. Another is the Tanabata festival rooted in recovery from war disaster, in which the very course of a town rebuilt from the ruins is carried on as a festival now known nationwide.

Hiratsuka is a town that opened as a highway post, became a munitions industrial city, was burned in an air raid, and was rebuilt together with a reconstruction festival. The post town, the munitions plants and the reconstruction from the ruins all arose, in the end, on the same foundation — “a plain that opened along the Tokaido near the mouth of the Sagami River.” Burned almost entirely once, it remade the town on that same plain. The Tanabata festival is not a spectacle; it is the memory of that remaking itself, left in the form of a festival.