Osaka

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 2.752 million (2,752,412 in 2020). Over the five years from 2,691,185 in 2015 it added more than sixty thousand. At a scale beyond 2.7 million, it is a designated city still holding an upward trend.

What is worth seeing here is that while the total rose, the number of children fell slightly. Those under 15 fell from 295,298 (2015) to 290,649 (2020), more than four thousand fewer in five years. The share aged 65 and over is 24.6% (2020). Households with children make up 14.6% (2020), lower than Kobe, seen later. The residential land price is around 78,000 yen per m², the lowest when set beside Kyoto and Kobe. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.92, the highest of the three cities, close to a level at which the city covers the bulk of its expenditure from its own tax revenue. The childcare waitlist fell from 2 children (2024) to 0 (2025). What is worth keeping in view, though, is that these are averages for a city of 2.75 million. Osaka is divided into twenty-four wards, differing greatly in character from central office districts to old downtown residential areas. 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 the Uemachi Plateau and water transport.

Osaka’s skeleton was decided by a single plateau, the silt carried by rivers, and the canals drawn across it. In the Jomon period much of today’s Osaka Plain lay at the bottom of a sea called the Kawachi Bay, and only the present Uemachi Plateau jutted out into it like a peninsula. In time the silt carried by the Yodo and Yamato rivers extended sandbars, closed off the bay into a lake, and then turned it to land. This city sits on an old backbone of plateau and on the delta the two rivers built. In the terms of economic geography, it is a textbook case of a city sited on lowland formed by rivers.

People reworked that landform into a city of water transport. In the Edo period the Tokugawa shogunate designated Osaka a nationwide logistics hub, dredged canals and widened a network of water transport. Domains across the country placed warehouse residences along the riverbanks, gathering land-tax rice and local products here first. The rice market at Dojima, the produce market at Tenma and the fresh-fish market at Zakoba were lively enough to be called the three great markets, and the prices set at the Osaka rice market even became the national benchmark. Goods from across the country gathered here and scattered again — this city was called “the nation’s kitchen.” The byname itself is said to have been spread by a historian in the Taisho era, continuing from records that called Edo-period Osaka “the kitchen of the provinces.”

The origin as a city of commerce and logistics was carried straight into the present. The concentration of commerce and people gathered at a node of water transport became, through postwar economic growth, the base of a city beyond 2.7 million, and in recent years housing demand has returned to the center, with homes supplied near the office districts. On the plateau of the Kawachi Bay, the delta the rivers built, and the canals drawn across it, the present of the merchant city stands.

What characterizes Osaka is that while the total population rose by sixty thousand, the number of children fell by four thousand — a reversal in the composition that can occur even in a growing city. And Osaka’s waitlist fell from 2 children (2024) to 0 (2025). Households with children stay at 14.6%, and the absolute number of those under 15 is also edging down. So rather than a zero in which supply caught up amid ever-rising children, as in Urayasu, it fits the figures better to read this zero as settling near where supply and demand are roughly balanced in a city where the total stock of children scarcely grows.

The main driver of the rising total lies not in more children but on the side of people returning to the center and workers flowing in. The share of households with children is the lowest of the three cities, and the elderly share is close to a quarter. People return to the center, the total rises, and yet the absolute number of children edges down — in a 2.75-million city where several such flows run at once, the waitlist figure too converges on a small value. And this too is an average across twenty-four wards: between central wards with many single-person households and peripheral wards where households with children remain, the circumstances of children and childcare cannot be the same. Looking at a single average alone does not read through to the reality of a city split ward by ward.

Osaka holds many functions of its own. One is a center whose skeleton is the Uemachi Plateau and the traces of the canals laid out in the Edo period, where the memory of old markets such as Dojima still inscribes the city’s origin as a merchant city. Another is the commercial and business concentration of the largest city in western Japan, holding 2.75 million, where office and commercial districts overlap at high density. And in recent years housing demand has returned to that center, with places to live supplied near the places to work.

Osaka has stacked the functions of water transport, commerce and business across eras on the landform of a plateau jutting into the Kawachi Bay and a delta the rivers built. The Edo-period warehouse residences, the three great markets and the modern office districts all rest, in the end, on the same condition of being a node of water transport. Being a place where the nation’s goods gathered and scattered kept drawing people and trade, and that water transport decided the very shape of the city. Where warehouse residences once lined the riverbanks at which boats brought rice and goods, on that same lowland now stand high-rise offices and homes returning to the center.