Sakai-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 826,000 (826,161 in 2020). Over the five years from 839,310 in 2015 it lost more than thirteen thousand. It is a designated city already in a gentle phase of decline.

The number of children mirrors that decline at a steeper angle. Those under 15 fell from 112,964 (2015) to 102,091 (2020), nearly eleven thousand fewer in five years. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 26.7% to 28.2%. Behind a gently falling total, the composition is shifting its center of gravity toward the older end. Households with children make up 20.1%, placing it mid-range among designated cities. The residential land price is around 78,000 yen per m², a level much different from central Osaka City in the same Osaka Prefecture. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.76 — short of 1.0, a structure in which the shortfall is filled through the local allocation tax. The childcare waitlist has been resolved to 0 (2025). What is worth keeping in view, though, is that these are averages for a city of 800,000. The municipal area is divided into seven wards — Sakai, Naka, Higashi, Nishi, Minami, Kita and Mihara — differing greatly in character from the old moated built-up area to the new 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 a trading port and a self-governing city.

Sakai’s skeleton is the memory of a self-governing city the merchants built at a junction where sea routes and land routes crossed. In 1469, Sakai became a port of call for trading ships to Ming China. This ground, where two sea routes — the Seto Inland Sea and the Pacific — and land routes binding several highways crossed, grew into a trading city ranking with Kyoto and Hakata. Medieval Sakai was a self-governing city run by powerful merchants called the egoshu, a moated city enclosed by water on three sides. Rather than an administration setting the city down from outside, merchants ran the city by their own interest — this is what decides Sakai’s origin.

That wealth and skill gave rise to a concentration of manufacturing. Soon after the matchlock reached Tanegashima in 1543, a Sakai merchant learned the method on Tanegashima, organized a system of mass production by division of labor, and Sakai became a leading center of matchlock production. The warlords of the Sengoku period sought Sakai’s matchlocks, and the commanders who contended for the realm weighed this ground heavily. In time, beginning from demand for the “tobacco knife” used to cut the newly arrived tobacco, Sakai forged blades developed, and for their fine cutting edge they were granted the “Sakai-kiwami” seal authorized by the Edo shogunate and circulated nationwide. Sen no Rikyu, who perfected the tea ceremony, was also born of this ground. Sakai burned in the 1615 summer siege of Osaka but was rebuilt afterward as a grid of blocks known as the Genna town division. Growing rich on trade, the merchants governing themselves, giving birth to matchlocks, blades and the tea ceremony — beneath Sakai’s numbers lies this origin of self-government and skill.

What characterizes Sakai is that while the total population fell by thirteen thousand, the number of children fell by nearly eleven thousand. The movement in which children thin at a steeper angle than the total is a form observed across the country when a mature residential city of the metropolitan ring enters a phase of falling births. It traces an angle close to the way the population of Kitakyushu declines.

Meanwhile, the childcare waitlist has been resolved to 0 (2025). A reading-across is needed here. A zero waitlist can be a zero reached by keeping supply abreast as children increase, or a zero resulting from the absolute number of children itself thinning. In Sakai’s case, set against the fact that those under 15 fell by more than ten thousand in five years, the latter shade is present. Even the same “zero” shifts entirely in meaning with whether children behind it are rising or falling. Children decline, the elderly share nears thirty percent, and the total too gently falls — in an 800,000 city where those several flows run at once, the waitlist too converges toward zero. But this too is an average across seven wards; between the old moated quarter and the newly developed residential areas, the circumstances of children and childcare cannot be the same. Pull out the single word “zero” alone, and you misread the dynamics behind it.

Sakai holds many functions of its own. One is the Mozu tomb cluster, built in the Kofun period, where more than two hundred tombs stand, beginning with the Tomb of Emperor Nintoku, registered as a World Heritage site in 2019. Cities holding a cluster of giant tombs in their very midst can be counted on one hand across the country. Another is the moated old quarter that holds the memory of the medieval self-governing city, and the concentration of manufacturing that inherited the metalworking skill beginning with matchlocks and blades — Sakai forged blades remain even now as the handwork of artisans.

Sakai became a designated city in 2006, holding prefecture-level administrative authority on its own. From a trading port to Ming China, to a free city the merchants governed themselves, to a ground of matchlock and blade manufacturing — the condition of “a junction where sea routes and land routes cross” has carried different functions in each era. The tombs, the moats and the blade skill all rest, in the end, on this location where people and goods gather easily. Sakai still holds at its base the memory that, rather than an administration drawing lines from outside, merchants ran this city by their own interest. Cities where a World Heritage tomb cluster, the traces of a self-governing city’s moat, and the artisans’ blades coexist in the same municipal area are not many.