Kanazawa-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 463,000 (463,254 in 2020). Over the five years from 465,699 in 2015, it fell by about two thousand four hundred. It is a prefectural capital that has turned to a slight decline while keeping a scale representative of the Hokuriku region.

What I want to note here is that the number of children is thinning faster than the total. Those under 15 fell by nearly four thousand over five years, from 59,946 in 2015 to 56,073 in 2020. In the same span the share aged 65 and over rose from 24.6% to 26.2%. Behind the quiet figure of a slight decline in total population, the composition is surely shifting its center of gravity toward the older side. The household-with-children share is 19.4% (2020). The land price of residential areas, at about 87,000 yen per m² (86,500 yen/m² in 2026), sits at a thick level for a Hokuriku prefectural capital. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.86 (2023) — a level whose own tax revenue covers most of standard expenditure, but it does not reach 1.0, and the shortfall is filled by the local allocation tax within the structure of a regional city. The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025). Why these numbers take this shape cannot be read without going back over the history of the castle town and of being “not destroyed.”

Kanazawa’s skeleton is the very continuity by which the blocks drawn as a castle town grew old without being destroyed. To begin with, it was the land where in 1546 the Kanazawa-mido (Oyama Gobo) was set as a stronghold of the Kaga Ikko ikki, and a stronghold of faith became the town’s core. It is one example, in historical geography, of “a castle town with a religious city as its matrix.”

In 1583, Maeda Toshiie entered the castle here. From then on, as the castle town of the million-koku Maeda family of the Kaga domain — a great domain holding some 1,025,000 koku across Kaga, Noto and Etchu — Kanazawa grew to a scale ranking after Edo, Osaka and Kyoto, and became a town of more than a hundred thousand people. The wealth of the million koku gave birth to a vast castle town that laid out warrior quarters, townsmen’s quarters and temple clusters around the castle, and left a daimyo garden such as Kenrokuen and an agglomeration of craftsmen who sustained the handicrafts. The blocks of the castle town and the crafts and culture rooted there are this town’s first foundation.

The second foundation is the fact of being “not destroyed” in war. While many regional cities were burned in the air raids of the Second World War, Kanazawa suffered no large-scale air raid. As a result, much of the street layout and the blocks drawn in the Edo era — the Higashi Chaya district, the remains of the Nagamachi samurai residences and the rest — remained just as they were in the present urban area. In contrast to cities once leveled by war that redrew their plots in the postwar reconstruction, Kanazawa lays the present over the Edo-era skeleton. And with the opening of the Hokuriku Shinkansen in 2015, this town was linked directly to Tokyo. The blocks of the castle town, the chance of not being burned, and the new axis of the Shinkansen shape the present city of tourism and culture.

What characterizes Kanazawa is that, while the total population falls by two thousand four hundred, the number of children falls by nearly four thousand. That children thin faster than the total is a flow common to many regional cities across the country, and Kanazawa is no exception. The share of the elderly passes a quarter, and the household-with-children share holds at 19.4%. Behind the quiet figure of a slight decline in total population, the composition of the generations is surely sliding upward.

Even so, the Childcare Waitlist is 0. Here a re-reading is needed. A zero waitlist in a town where the absolute number of children is falling is neither the “outcome of children thinning heavily,” as in a regional city losing population, nor the “outcome of supply being made to catch up with ever-growing demand,” as in Urayasu. It can be read as the result of childcare supply settling above its demand as children gently decline. Even with the same “zero waitlist,” the meaning changes wholly depending on whether children are decreasing or increasing behind it. Children fall first, aging advances, and yet the supply and demand of childcare are in balance — that several such flows advance at once is the figure of a matured prefectural capital. This number too, if not read together with its background, has its meaning mistaken.

Kanazawa holds several functions of its own. One is the castle town itself, where the blocks of the Edo era remained without being destroyed; historic sites such as Kenrokuen, Kanazawa Castle, the Higashi Chaya district and the remains of the Nagamachi samurai residences cluster at the city’s center. Another is the agglomeration of crafts rooted in the million-koku castle town; traditional crafts such as Kaga yuzen and gold leaf still sustain the town’s industry and its self-definition. Further, the Hokuriku Shinkansen, which opened in 2015, drew the time-distance to Tokyo sharply in.

As a central city of the Hokuriku region, Kanazawa gathers in itself the functions of administration, economy and culture. From a stronghold of the Ikko ikki to a castle town of the Maeda family, on to a historic city spared war, and then to a tourist city linked by the Shinkansen — the origin of “a castle town that remained without being destroyed” has swapped a different function onto itself in each age. The garden, the chaya districts and the crafts are all, to begin with, set upon the same foundation of the million-koku castle town. The chance of not being leveled by war carried the Edo-era skeleton through to the present. Kanazawa is a town that lays the present over a castle town that was not burned.