Yamato-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 239,000 (239,169 in 2020). Over the five years from 232,922 in 2015 it added some six thousand. It is a city that, already past two hundred thousand in scale, still keeps gaining people little by little.

What is worth seeing here is that, while the total rises, the number of children is slightly falling. Those under 15 fell from 29,806 (2015) to 28,937 (2020), some nine hundred fewer. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 22.8% to 23.7%. Households with children make up 19.3% (2020); the total population holds a slight rise, yet the makeup shifts its weight little by little toward the older side. The residential land price is in the 212,500-yen-per-m² range (2026). The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.93 (2023), falling just short of 1.0 — on the side that fills the shortfall with the local allocation tax. The childcare waitlist rose from 0 children (2024) to 7 (2025). It is a shape in which, the year after demand was pushed all the way down to zero, demand again outran supply. Why these figures take this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of the crossing of railways and the airfield.

Yamato’s skeleton is made of three lines drawn over cropland from the outside — two railways and one airfield. This stretch, on the southern edge of the Sagamihara plateau, was originally poor in water and, until the railways ran through, was land spread with cropland.

The first and second lines are railways. In 1926 the Jinchu Railway (today’s Sotetsu Main Line) opened and stations such as Yamato were placed; the following year, in 1929, the Odakyu Enoshima Line opened, and stations such as Chuo-Rinkan and Minami-Rinkan were set. The name “toshi” (city) on these stations comes from a “forest-city” plan by which the Odakyu sought to build an ideal residential city along its line. The plan itself failed, but the stations and place-names remained. It is a textbook case, in economic geography, of the suburban formation by which a railway runs first and a town afterward clings along the line.

The third line is the airfield. In 1942 the Imperial Navy set down Atsugi Airfield, straddling the city area. After the war this airfield was requisitioned by the Allied forces, and it is now Atsugi base, jointly used by the U.S. Navy and the Maritime Self-Defense Force. Over cropland, two private railways crossed to form a residential core, and onto it a vast airfield was placed — this town’s shape was not born of geography on its own, but stands on the overlay of man-made lines drawn from the outside, the railways and the airfield. After city status in 1959, when the Tokyu Den-en-toshi Line reached Chuo-Rinkan in 1984, the development of the garden city advanced rapidly, and the path to a city of two hundred thousand was set.

What characterizes Yamato is that, while the total population holds a slight rise, the absolute number of children is slightly falling. Where this surfaces in the living-infrastructure figures is the movement of the childcare waitlist. The waitlist was once pushed down to 0 children in 2024, but the next year, 2025, it rose again to 7. This shows that, even as the total number of children gently falls, there are moments when the childcare demand of dual-income households locally outruns supply.

This is neither the zero common to depopulating regional cities — “a consequence of the absolute number of children thinning” — nor a form like Kawasaki’s, where building more keeps absorbing demand. In a town where the total holds a slight rise in the range of two hundred thirty thousand, children slightly fall, and the share of the elderly nears a quarter — when these three run at once, the waitlist number sways small from year to year. A zero is the obverse of supply-demand sitting close to its balance point, not a value fixed once it is reached. Within the present makeup of a 19.3% household-with-children rate, the supply-demand of childcare sways on a delicate balance. The numbers mirror the town’s structure, not its merit or fault.

Yamato holds several functions of its own. One is its character as a railway junction — at Yamato Station the Sotetsu Main Line and the Odakyu Enoshima Line cross, and further north, at Chuo-Rinkan, the Odakyu connects with the Tokyu Den-en-toshi Line. That several private railways drawn from the outside meet within the city supports this town’s skeleton as a residential city. Another is Atsugi base, which originated as a wartime naval airfield and is still jointly used by the U.S. Navy and the Maritime Self-Defense Force; as a facility straddling the city area, it keeps carving this town’s origin onto the map.

Further, in 2016 the cultural creation hub Sirius opened in front of Yamato Station. A complex centered on a library, it is tied to the “health city” efforts the city sets forth. From cropland to a crossing of railways, to a town of the airfield, and on to a residential city that set a cultural hub in front of its station — the condition of “land onto which lines are drawn from the outside” has carried differing functions era by era. The two private railways, the airfield, and the cultural facility in front of the station were all, in the end, placed in turn from the outside upon the same condition — cropland poor in water. Geography did not give birth to the town; lines drawn from the outside rewrote the geography into a residential city — there lies the crux of how Yamato came to be.