Nagoya

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 2.33 million (2,332,176 in 2020). Over the five years from 2,295,638 in 2015 it added more than thirty-six thousand. It is one of the three great metropolises alongside Tokyo and Osaka, a designated city still holding a slight increase.

Yet the number of children points the other way. Those under 15 fell from 282,497 (2015) to 275,484 (2020), a drop of more than seven thousand. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 23.7% to 24.3%. Behind a total population that holds at a slight increase, the composition is gradually shifting its center of gravity toward the older end. Households with children make up 17.9% (2020). The residential land price is around 187,000 yen per m². The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.97, one step short of 1.0 — a level at which the city covers almost all of its standard expenditure from its own tax revenue. The childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025). What is worth keeping in view here is that these are averages for a city of 2.3 million. The municipal area is divided into sixteen wards, and the central wards, the suburban wards and the industrial wards differ greatly in character. The gaps between wards are flattened out and do not appear in this single figure. Why the city takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of a castle town set down by the Kiyosu-goshi.

Nagoya’s skeleton is a product of planning — an entire neighboring town moved over and set down for the sake of a single castle. In 1610, Tokugawa Ieyasu built Nagoya Castle and devised a plan for a castle town laid out on a grid around it. Then the “Kiyosu-goshi” began: people, temples and the town itself were moved whole from Kiyosu, which had been the center of Owari, to Nagoya. About sixty thousand people, roughly a hundred temples and shrines, and sixty-seven town blocks were relocated from Kiyosu to Nagoya, and the castle town rose all at once. To transplant an existing town and set down a new castle town — in historical geography, this is a textbook case of a city established by design.

The castle town was arranged with the castle at the northwest edge of the plateau and with samurai, merchant and temple-shrine districts kept separate. The streets were ordered on a grid, and that skeleton was carried into the modern built-up area. The second foundation was the culture of monozukuri craft rooted in this ground. The skills of the artisans and merchants who gathered below the castle ran from traditional crafts such as Yuzen dyeing and folding fans through to the modern manufacturing connected to figures like Sakichi Toyoda. The accumulation of handwork stored up in the castle town became, in time, the base of an automobile industry and more. Onto the castle town set down whole by the Kiyosu-goshi, a concentration of monozukuri was layered, and one of the three great metropolises rose — this city’s form stands on the skeleton of a transplanted castle town.

What characterizes Nagoya is that while the total population rose by thirty-six thousand, the number of children fell by seven thousand. As one of the three great metropolises it keeps gathering people, yet in the absolute number of children the tendency of a mature phase shows through. Over the same five years the share aged 65 and over rose gently from 23.7% to 24.3%. Children thin out gently, the elderly share rises, and yet the total still holds at a slight increase — a stage where several flows run at once.

The childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025). But it is too quick to read this zero simply as “childcare is sufficient.” In Nagoya, where households with children are 17.9% and the absolute number of children is falling, part of it is supply held in balance as the growth of demand levels off. Even the same “zero waitlist” shifts in meaning depending on whether children are rising or thinning behind it. And this too is an average across sixteen wards: the circumstances of children and childcare cannot be the same in a ward near the center, a suburban ward and an industrial ward. The more a city of 2.3 million is flattened into a single figure, the more it swallows the undulations of each ward. A number, on its own, does not fix its own meaning.

Nagoya holds many functions of its own. One is the skeleton of the castle town, set down by the Kiyosu-goshi and ordered on a grid, carried into the modern built-up area and still visible in the shape of the central blocks. Another is the concentration of monozukuri that began below the castle, unfolding from traditional crafts into modern manufacturing and supporting its face as the core of the Chukyo industrial region. Nagoya also carries, as one of the three great metropolises alongside Tokyo and Osaka, the central commercial and economic functions of the Chubu region.

Nagoya is a designated city of sixteen wards, holding in part prefecture-level administrative authority on its own. From the castle town set down by the Kiyosu-goshi, to a concentration of monozukuri, and on to a sixteen-ward city carrying one of the three great metropolises — the origin of a “transplanted, set-down castle town” has carried different functions in each era. The samurai district below the castle, the artisan concentration in the merchant quarter, and the later manufacturing all rest, in the end, on the skeleton of a castle town moved over from Kiyosu. The Kiyosu-goshi that shifted an entire castle town from Kiyosu set down a complete set of samurai and merchant-artisan quarters. That artisan concentration was carried into modern manufacturing, and it remains as the skeleton of a sixteen-ward city. A frame of a city set down all at once has swapped out its contents over four hundred years.