Fujisawa-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 437,000 (436,905 in 2020). Over the five years from 423,894 in 2015 it added some thirteen thousand. It is a city that has steadily grown its people even along the Kanagawa coast.

What is worth seeing here is that the number of children has held nearly steady. Those under 15 fell only from 57,615 (2015) to 56,803 (2020), some eight hundred fewer. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 23.4% to 24.4%. Two flows run at once — aging advancing, while the absolute number of children barely moves. Households with children make up 21.7% (2020), on the side thick with child-rearing households. The residential land price is in the 206,000-yen-per-m² range (2026). The Fiscal Capacity Index is 1.05 (FY2023), exceeding 1.0 — a self-standing fiscal structure that can cover standard expenditure on its own tax revenue alone, all but free of the local allocation tax. The childcare waitlist rose from 11 children (2024) to 17 (2025). Why these figures take this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of the post town, the highways, and the postwar turn to a residential city.

Fujisawa’s skeleton is its origin as a junction where highways met. First, as the gate-town of Yugyoji — the head temple of the Ji sect — a place where people gathered opened on this ground. What historical geography calls “the rise of a settlement around a place of worship” was the first foundation.

The second foundation is the highways. In 1601, when a post-station system was set on the Tokaido, Fujisawa was laid out as a post town — Fujisawa-juku, the sixth of the fifty-three stations of the Tokaido. Here gathered not only the Tokaido but the Enoshima road down to Enoshima, the Kamakura road toward Kamakura, the Oyama road toward Oyama, and the road toward Hachioji; Fujisawa-juku became a center for the flow of people and goods. The very condition of a junction — where several highways cross at a single point — decided this town’s character.

The third phase is the railway and residential urbanization from the modern era on. In 1916 Tsujido Station on the Tokaido Main Line opened, and in 1940 the city system was instituted. After the war, Fujisawa developed as a city of housing, tourism, industry and learning. Large housing estates such as the Tsujido and Zengyo estates, built by the Japan Housing Corporation, arose from the late 1950s into the 1960s; factory invitation advanced too, and major plants located here one after another. A ground that opened as a highway junction drew in, with the sea and the railway behind it, both residents and workplaces. From a temple gate-town, to a junction of post station and highways, to a residential city linked by rail — this town’s numbers stand on the origin of being a junction where highways crossed.

What characterizes Fujisawa is that, while the population rose by thirteen thousand, the number of children held nearly steady. It surfaces in the living-infrastructure figures as a gentle holding — unlike the consolidation common to depopulating regional cities, and unlike a sharp build-up such as Urayasu’s. With a thick household-with-children rate of 21.7%, the origin of having gathered young households on the strength of the sea and the railway keeps the absolute number of children from falling much.

What is worth seeing here is that the childcare waitlist rose from 11 children (2024) to 17 (2025). In a town where the number of children holds steady and the household-with-children rate stays thick, childcare demand stays high, and supply follows in a tug-of-war over the balance. The fact that the waitlist rose is wholly different in its underlying structure from the figures of a town where children fall and demand thins. It reads, rather, as a tug-of-war between supply and demand continuing in the high single digits precisely because the child-rearing layer is held thick. In a coastal city where population rises, children hold and aging also advances all at once, the waitlist number moves as an index mirroring the thickness of demand, not a shortfall in supply. So even a figure in the high single digits is read correctly only with the population growth and the household-with-children rate set beside it.

Fujisawa holds several functions of its own. One is its origin as a junction where several highways, the Tokaido foremost, gathered; it still remains a transport hub where several railways — the Tokaido Main Line, the Odakyu Enoshima Line and the Enoden — gather around Fujisawa Station. Another is the coastal stretch holding Enoshima and the shores of Katase, Kugenuma and Tsujido, a face that supports both tourism and housing. Further, the postwar cluster of large housing estates and factories adds the character of a residential and industrial city.

Fujisawa opened as the gate-town of Yugyoji, became a junction of highways, and changed its form into a residential city with the sea and the railway behind it. The gate-town, the post station, the coastal sightseeing area and the postwar estates all rest, in the end, on the same site — “a ground where highways crossed and which opened onto the sea.” That site summoned, era by era, the differing functions of worship, distribution, tourism and housing. The gate-town of Yugyoji, Fujisawa-juku, the sea at Enoshima, and the station where three railways meet are all set on the same single point — a place where highways crossed and which opened onto the sea.