Kofu-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about one hundred and ninety thousand (189,591 in 2020). Over the five years from 193,125 in 2015 it fell by about three thousand five hundred, and it is a prefectural capital moving at a level that has dropped below two hundred thousand.

What I want to note here is that the number of children is thinning faster than the total. Those under 15 fell by more than one thousand seven hundred over five years, from 23,105 in 2015 to 21,391 in 2020. In the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 27.5% to 28.7%. The household-with-children share was 18.1% in 2020. Behind the slight decline of the total population, the age composition is shifting surely upward. The land price of residential areas is around 43,000 yen per m² (43,100 yen in 2026). The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.71 (2023) — 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 Takeda clan’s castle town and the geography of a basin.

Kofu’s skeleton is the continuity by which the seat of the basin’s center was handed on from a fallen power to the next. In 1519 Takeda Nobutora built the Tsutsujigasaki Residence (the Takeda Clan Residence) and gathered his retainers around it, shaping a castle town. The place name “Kofu” is said to be a shortening, at that time, of “the provincial seat of Kai” — the center of Kai Province. In Shingen’s generation, a central city of the basin, with the residence as its core, was built up through such works as the Shingen Embankment, which guarded the Kofu Basin from floods, the minting of Koshu gold, and the relocation of Zenkoji temple. The townscape as a castle town, and the siting at the center of the basin, were this town’s first foundation.

After the Takeda clan fell, the center of the town moves. The Asano father and son, of the Toyotomi side, built Kofu Castle (Maizuru Castle) on Ichijo-koyama, a place apart from the Tsutsujigasaki Residence, and laid out a new castle town. In the Edo period, Kofu Castle was positioned as the castle of a related domain close to the Tokugawa, and as a stronghold guarding Edo from the west. Within the same basin, the center was handed on while moving in place, from the Takeda residence to the castle of the Tokugawa period. And in the 1945 Kofu Air Raid, about seventy-four percent of the urban area was lost by fire. The castle-town townscape was once leveled to bare ground, and in the postwar recovery the present urban area was laid over it. Furthermore, the Kofu Basin, blessed by the terrain of an alluvial fan and by sunlight, is known across the country as a region of grapes, peaches and wine. A history of residence, castle, air raid and fruit shapes the present role of the seat of the basin.

What characterizes Kofu-shi is that, while the total population falls by about three thousand five hundred, the number of children falls by more than one thousand seven hundred. That children thin at a faster pace than the total is a flow common to many regional cities across the country, and Kofu is no exception. The share of the elderly draws near three in ten, and the household-with-children share stays at 18.1%. It does not have the severity of the regional cities where a sharp population plunge and school consolidations chain together, but even in a prefectural capital the age composition is quietly shifting 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 can be read not as the outcome of supply catching up with rising demand, but as the result of childcare supply settling above demand while children thin gently. While lying within the same prefecture where population decline advances, it has not yet reached such a severe population-decline stage — a gentleness particular to a prefectural capital. Children fall first, aging advances, and yet the supply and demand of childcare are in balance. Behind the slight decline of the total population, the age composition shifts surely upward — the numbers of this prefectural capital, which inherited the seat of the basin held since the Takeda, mirror that quiet shift. A single glance at the total population does not reach this inner gradient.

In Kofu, two castle ruins remain — the Takeda Clan Residence ruins and the Kofu Castle ruins. The two castle ruins tell that the center of the basin was handed on while moving in place with the ages. That basin, blessed by an alluvial fan and by sunlight, has upheld the economy of the town’s edges as a region of grapes, peaches and wine. As the prefectural capital of Yamanashi Prefecture, Kofu gathers the functions of government and economy at the center of the basin. And in the south of the city, the Yamanashi Prefecture station of the Linear Chuo Shinkansen is planned.

From Takeda Nobutora’s residence, to the castle town the Asano family built in the Tokugawa period, to the prefectural capital rebuilt even after seventy-four percent was burned in the war — the seat of the basin’s center has been handed on, moving in place, from a fallen power to the next. The townscape of the castle town, the fruit-growing region, and the function of government all arose, in origin, from the same siting at the center of the Kofu Basin. The Takeda residence and the castle of the Tokugawa period both contended for the same seat of the seat of the basin. The seat of the basin that a former master let go, the next master took up, and now the turn has come round for the prefectural capital to bear that role.