Toyama-shi

In the 2020 Population Census the population is 413,938. Over the five years from 418,686 in 2015, it fell by about five thousand. As a prefectural capital of more than four hundred thousand, it has entered a phase of gentle decline.

The way it falls is steeper on the side of children. Those under 15 fell by more than four thousand five hundred over five years, from 52,626 in 2015 to 48,134 in 2020. In the same span the share aged 65 and over rose from 28.2% to 29.7%, drawing near three in ten. As the total population falls by five thousand, children drop out at that speed. The land price of residential areas sits at a level low for a prefectural capital, around 16,000 yen per m² (16,300 yen/m² in 2026). The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.80, and the shortfall below 1.0 is filled by the local allocation tax — this is not a ranking of the merit of local governments, but the very mechanism of local public finance by which the nation levels out the gap between tax sources and expenditure. Households with children make up 20.7% (2020), and the Childcare Waitlist was 0 (2025). What I want to note here is that a zero waitlist may also be the result of supply and demand balancing as the absolute number of children thins by four thousand five hundred over five years. Why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back over the history of the castle town and the selling of medicine, and over the modern choice to fold the city back toward the center.

What set Toyama down was a castle that used a river as its moat, and a single industry born of fiscal straits. This castle town, with Toyama Castle at its core, was built using the meandering Jinzu River as a natural moat. The Jinzu was a swift current that flooded again and again, and so its course was rerouted in the Meiji era — the contest with the river has governed the very landform of the city.

The first decisive foundation is the selling of medicine. In 1639 the Toyama domain was established by splitting off from the Kaga domain, but it bore fiscal straits from the start. The second lord, Maeda Masatoshi, under the philosophy of “service first, profit after” — first be of use to people, profit comes after — encouraged medicine as an industry. In 1690, the anecdote goes, when Masatoshi offered the hangontan in his inro to a daimyo suffering from a stomachache at Edo Castle and the symptoms eased, this prompted various daimyo to wish for its sale within their domains, and this is held to be the origin of placed medicine (consignment medicine). This arrangement of “use first, pay later” — leaving the medicine in advance and receiving payment afterward only for what was used — became the foundation on which the medicine peddlers of Etchu-Toyama built a vast network of itinerant trade circling all of Japan. Placed medicine reached its peak from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, when about six in ten households nationwide used it. A single philosophy raised by a domain in fiscal straits gave birth to a core industry that supported the city’s economy over centuries — a textbook case, in economic geography, of an institutional choice directing the agglomeration of an industry.

And in the present, Toyama chose anew the very form of the city. The city advanced a city-building of concentration on hubs centered on public transport (the compact city), and in April 2006 opened the Toyama Light Rail as Japan’s first full-scale LRT. By way of a loop line in December 2009 and others, it shaped a network of LRT, and in 2012 it was chosen by the OECD as one of its model cities of the advanced compact city. A core industry of selling medicine grew in a castle town that used a river as its moat, and then, in an age of population decline, the city folds itself back toward the center — this is Toyama’s history.

What characterizes Toyama is that, as the total population falls by five thousand over five years, the number of children falls by more than four thousand five hundred. In those same five years the share aged 65 and over rose from 28.2% to 29.7%, drawing near three in ten. Children drop out at nearly the same speed as the decline of the total, and the age composition of the city keeps tilting to the older side.

This movement appears in the figures for living infrastructure in a distinctive form. The Childcare Waitlist was 0 (2025), but to read this only as “proof that it is easy to raise children” is hasty. Households with children make up 20.7%, and since the absolute number of children is thinning by four thousand five hundred over five years, one cannot rule out the reading that a zero waitlist is the result of demand balancing on the shrinking side against supply. On the other hand, the city-building of concentration on hubs that Toyama advances is also a movement, in a city where population falls and aging advances, to gather living functions such as schools, medical care, and transport into the center and along transit lines. To the question of how a city where children decrease and the elderly increase should rearrange its functions, one choice appears, in this city, as the very form of the city. Even with the same “zero waitlist,” the reading changes depending on whether children are increasing or thinning behind it, and on how the city is being folded back. This number too, if not read together with its background, has its meaning mistaken.

Toyama holds several functions of its own. One is the central urban district of a castle town with Toyama Castle at its core, which used the Jinzu River as a natural moat. Another is the industry of selling and making medicine, which grew from the philosophy of “service first, profit after” and supported the city over centuries; the itinerant network of the medicine peddlers of Etchu-Toyama inscribed this city’s name across the nation.

And the third is the modern function of the compact city and the LRT. In 2006 the Toyama Light Rail opened as Japan’s first full-scale LRT, and together with a loop line and others a network of public transport was shaped, and in 2012 it was chosen as an OECD model city of the advanced compact city. From a castle town to a city of medicine, and then, in an age of population decline, to a city folding itself back toward the center — the condition of “a hub on the bank of the Jinzu River” has swapped a different function onto itself in each age. The castle, the selling of medicine, and the hub arrangement with the LRT as its axis are each the form of the city its age chose. A castle town stood upon the contest with the river, fiscal straits gave birth to the selling of medicine, and population decline made the city choose the compact city. On the bank of a single river, the Jinzu, Toyama has tried to be a different city in each age.