Takaoka-shi

In the 2020 Population Census the population is 166,393. Over the five years from 172,125 in 2015, it fell by close to six thousand. It is a city thinning its population while keeping the second-largest scale in Toyama Prefecture, after Toyama City.

The number of children is falling faster than the total. Those under 15 fell by more than two thousand over five years, from 19,223 in 2015 to 16,902 in 2020. In the same span the share aged 65 and over rose from 31.4% to 33.0%, and the elderly pass more than one in three. Households with children make up 19.4% (2020). The land price of residential areas, at about 29,000 yen per m² (29,200 yen/m² in 2026), sits at the low level even among the three cities laid out here. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.71 (2023); it does not reach 1.0, but among regional cities it is on the side with a comparatively thick tax base — within a structure where the shortfall is filled by the allocation tax, yet the share it can cover by itself is higher than Nagaoka’s or Kure’s. The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025). Here too, what I want to note is that a zero waitlist in a city where the absolute number of children falls can contain both the outcome of supply catching up with demand and the outcome of demand itself thinning. Why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back over the history of the castle town and the abolished castle.

Takaoka’s skeleton is the very history of a town of craftsmen that kept going even after losing its castle. In 1609, Maeda Toshinaga, the second of the Kaga Maeda family, built Takaoka Castle as his castle of retirement and entered it. Toshinaga drew the Hokuriku Road into the town and laid out warrior quarters, townsmen’s quarters, and shrine-and-temple quarters in a planned grid — a planned castle-town building that drew in a highway to set the town’s blocks.

What decided this city’s fate was not the castle itself but the craftsmen Toshinaga summoned to the castle town. Toshinaga invited seven casters from Kanaya in the western part of Tonami County, gave them generous protection and privileges such as tax-free land, and set up a casters’ town (Kanayamachi) where casting was done. This is the origin of what would become Takaoka copperware. Further, that Toshinaga had armor and household goods such as chests and trays made became the basis of Takaoka lacquerware. An agglomeration of handwork was planted in the castle town.

But the castle did not last long. Under the one-castle-per-province decree of 1615, Takaoka Castle was abolished a mere six years after its building. Lose the castle and the castle town declines — that this did not happen is because the third lord, Maeda Toshitsune, adopted a policy restricting the townspeople from moving out and turning Takaoka into a city of commerce. Though the castle vanished, the craftsmen who bore cast metal and lacquerware and the town’s grid remained, and Takaoka survived as a town of commerce and industry. From a castle town with a castle as its backbone to a town with the craftsmen’s handwork as its backbone — Takaoka’s four hundred years were rebuilt onto a different axis at the moment it lost its castle.

What characterizes Takaoka-shi is that, as the total population falls by close to six thousand, the number of children falls by more than two thousand. The way children fall is faster than the way the total falls. It is the shape typical of a regional city, where a thinning of births and an outflow of the younger generation work at once.

On that basis, the Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025). Here too I want to read the meaning of “zero” carefully. In a city where the absolute number of children has fallen by more than two thousand over five years, a zero waitlist can be read both as the outcome of childcare supply catching up and as the outcome of the very number of children one wishes to entrust thinning. It faces the opposite dynamics from a zero in the near-metropolitan suburbs where children increase. Even with the same “zero waitlist,” the meaning changes wholly depending on whether children are increasing or decreasing. Children decline gently, the elderly pass more than one in three, the household-with-children share dips below two in ten — in a Gosei core city where these several indicators advance in the same direction, the single number of the waitlist too does not fix its meaning on its own.

Takaoka-shi holds several functions of its own. One is the agglomeration of metal handwork that began four hundred years ago with seven casters. Cast metal, which at first made iron daily goods, in time came to handle copper art crafts and spread across the nation as Takaoka copperware. Together with lacquerware, Takaoka is a town where the townsmen’s culture connected to the Maeda family has accumulated, and that history is positioned as a national Japan Heritage. Another is the Takaoka Castle ruins, where the castle site was left as a park after the castle’s abolition — a town that lost its castle barely keeps its memory on the map.

Takaoka lies at a transport node of the Gosei region and has kept on from old as a town of craftsmen and merchants. It built a castle, lost a castle, and yet survived, with cast metal and lacquerware as its backbone, as a town of commerce and industry — the origin of “setting handwork, not a castle, as its axis” binds the present functions of metal craft and the castle-ruins park. A town whose fate might well have run out the moment it lost its castle switched onto a different axis, the agglomeration of craftsmen, and kept going for four hundred years. The town of Takaoka is a town that rebuilt its backbone and stood up again even after the castle vanished.