Nagaoka-shi

In the 2020 Population Census the population is 266,936. Over the five years from 275,133 in 2015 it fell by some eight thousand. It is a city that, while holding a scale second only to Niigata City within the prefecture, gently thins its population.

The number of children is falling faster than the total. Those under 15 fell from 34,453 (2015) to 31,270 (2020), some three thousand fewer in five years. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 28.8% to 31.2%, with the elderly reaching one in three. Households with children make up 21.9% (2020). The residential land price is about 47,000 yen per m² (47,400 yen/m², 2026), a level held down for a regional core city. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.59 (2023), short of 1.0. Its own tax revenue alone cannot cover standard expenditure, and the shortfall is filled with the local allocation tax — it stands within the same fiscal structure as many regional cities. The childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025). What is worth seeing here is that, in a town where the absolute number of children is falling, a zero waitlist can be read not only as “supply having caught up with demand” but also as a consequence of “demand itself having thinned.” Why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of the castle town and the two fires of war.

Nagaoka’s skeleton is the very history of a castle town burned and rebuilt. In the Edo period, this ground was the castle town where the Makino — a fudai house since Mikawa — governed seventy-four thousand koku, known for a plain, sturdy spirit that held “ever on the battlefield” as the domain’s creed. At a pivot of the plain where the river transport of the Shinano River and the northern highway crossed, the warrior quarter and the townspeople’s quarter were laid out — a castle town standing, in the terms of economic geography, at the node of water transport and highway.

The first fire came at the end of the shogunate. In the Hokuetsu Boshin War of 1868, the Nagaoka domain, led by Kawai Tsugunosuke, played out some three months of fierce fighting against the new government’s forces, and in time Nagaoka Castle fell. At this time some two thousand five hundred townhouses, samurai residences, and foot-soldiers’ houses burned down. To the domain in extreme distress, a hundred sacks of rice were sent as relief from the Mineyama branch domain. Rather than for food to relieve the retainers’ destitution, Kobayashi Torasaburo sold these and put them toward the cost of founding a school — the anecdote called “the hundred sacks of rice,” of choosing the education of the next generation over the destitution at hand.

The second fire came in the modern era. In the Nagaoka air raid of August 1, 1945, about eighty percent of the old town center burned, and nearly fifteen hundred people perished. The next year, in 1946, a festival held in the ashes in hope of recovery became the origin of the later Nagaoka Festival. Opening as a castle town, falling in the fires of the Boshin War, burned in the air raid, and rebuilt each time — Nagaoka’s townscape was not built up naturally, but stands on an origin by which people rewove the burned ground.

What characterizes Nagaoka is that, while the total population fell by eight thousand, the number of children fell by some three thousand — the children falling faster than the total. This is a form typical of regional cities where, in the terms of population dynamics, a thinning of births and the outflow of the young generation take effect at once.

On top of that, the childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025). What must not be misread here is the meaning of this “zero.” In a town where the absolute number of children has fallen by some three thousand in five years, a zero waitlist can be read as a consequence of demand having outrun supply’s reach — that is, the very number of children to be placed having thinned. The underlying dynamics face the opposite way from a zero attained amid rising children near the center. Even the same “zero waitlist” changes wholly in meaning depending on whether the town behind it is one where children rise or one where they fall. Children gently falling, the elderly reaching one in three, the household-with-children rate staying at barely two-tenths — in a regional core city where these three run at once, take out the single point of a zero waitlist alone and you mistake it for the opposite meaning of a zero attained near the center.

Nagaoka holds several functions of its own. One is the Shinano River. Japan’s longest river pierces the city’s center, of old the axis of river transport that nourished the castle town, and now the watery backbone supporting the farming and living of the plain. Another is the great fireworks of the Nagaoka Festival, sent up over that riverbed every August. These did not begin as a spectacle. To console the victims of the air raid, and with gratitude to those who took on the recovery and a prayer for peace, white fireworks are sent up to match the hour the air raid began — the town’s second fire of war is set at the very root of the town’s annual event.

Nagaoka is also a regional industrial city where machinery and metals gather along the Shinano River basin. Opening as a castle town, passing through the fires of the Boshin War and the air raid, inheriting an attitude toward education symbolized by the anecdote of the hundred sacks of rice, and setting the Shinano River and the memorial fireworks at the town’s core — the origin of “rebuilding even after burning” binds together the present functions of river, fireworks, and industry. Unlike a mountain post-town whose fate was held by a single highway, Nagaoka, on the condition of a node of river and highway, has reloaded its functions each time even after burning twice. That the memorial fireworks sit at the root of the town’s annual event is because this town took the second fire of war itself into its keeping as memory.