Takatsuki-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 353,000 (352,698 in 2020). In the five years from 351,829 in 2015 it rose by about a thousand and moved nearly level. It is at the stage of a landing, in the three-hundred-fifty-thousand range, with small rise and fall.

What I want to see here is that, though the total population is nearly level, the number of children is decreasing. Those under 15 fell by some two thousand over five years, from 45,483 in 2015 to 43,042 in 2020. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 27.5% to 29.0%, nearing three in ten. Behind the total not moving, the inside is surely shifting its center of gravity toward the elderly. The land price of the residential area is around 173,000 yen per m², a high level reflecting the Kyoto-Osaka siting. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.76, not reaching 1.0 — a structure in which standard expenditure cannot be covered by its own tax revenue alone, and the shortfall is made up by local allocation tax. The household-with-children share is 20.5% (2020). The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025). Why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back over the siting of the Kyoto-Osaka strategic point and the history of postwar suburbanization.

Takatsuki’s skeleton is a history in which the siting just midway between Kyoto and Osaka has called in a different role in each age. This land is a strategic point where two great arteries of water and land — the Yodo River and the San’yo Road (later the Saigoku Road) — crossed, and from of old people and goods passed through it. The antiquity of that siting goes back to the Yayoi period. Some two-thousand-odd years ago, people bearing rice cultivation came up the Yodo River into this land and built the Ama Site, a great moated settlement (designated a national historic site in 1993). The condition of being a strategic point had called in a settlement from far back.

The second footing is the castle. In the early-modern era, Takatsuki Castle was placed on this land, which commanded the Saigoku Road and the Yodo River midway between Kyoto and Osaka, and a castle town was formed as the only early-modern castle in Hokusetsu. Highway, river and castle overlapped, and commerce and people gathered in the town.

The third is postwar suburbanization. Takatsuki, which enforced city status in 1943, increased its population rapidly during the high-growth period of the late 1950s and 1960s as a commuting sphere for both Osaka and Kyoto. Convenience rose once the national-railway (now JR) rapid trains came to stop, and danchi clusters were developed one after another along the northern mountain edge. It passed two hundred thousand in 1969 and three hundred thousand in 1973 — meaning that nearly two hundred thousand flowed in over little more than a decade. The siting of the Kyoto-Osaka strategic point has called the Yayoi settlement, the castle town, and the postwar danchi alike to the same single point — this is the history of this town.

What characterizes Takatsuki is that, with the total population nearly level, the number of children alone is decreasing by some two thousand. This is the flip side of the households that flowed in all at once during the high-growth period now entering old age together after half a century. While the share of the elderly nears three in ten, children quietly thin out. It is the figure of a mature suburb where, even as a bedroom town, the way the living infrastructure moves differs from a town not long after development.

The Childcare Waitlist is 0. The reading here is this. In a phase where the absolute number of children is decreasing, demand for childcare too heads toward a ceiling. A waitlist of zero makes more sense read as an equilibrium where supply caught up while the growth of demand stops, rather than as the result of keeping supply abreast while children increase. On the other hand, unlike a regional city where the absolute number of people itself thins fiercely, Takatsuki keeps its total population while only the inside ages. Even with the same "waitlist of zero," the meaning changes depending on which phase the town is in. The total population does not move, children quietly decrease, and the share of the elderly nears three in ten — in this mature bedroom town, where several flows advance at once, the number of the waitlist too settles at a small value. Take out the single word "zero," and one misreads even the phase of the town.

Takatsuki holds several functions of its own. One is the siting of being midway between Kyoto and Osaka itself. The central urban district lies around Takatsuki Station of the JR Kyoto Line and Takatsuki-shi Station of the Hankyu Kyoto Line, and the two railways support commuting to both great cities. Another is the Ama Site, the trace of a settlement of the far-off Yayoi period, developed as a park of about twenty-two hectares, conveying to today the antiquity of being a strategic point.

Takatsuki opened as a strategic point of water and land, the Yodo River and the Saigoku Road, and through a castle town became, after the war, a bedroom town for the two great cities. From the Yayoi settlement to the castle town, and further to the commuting-sphere residential city — the siting of "the Kyoto-Osaka strategic point" has reloaded a different role in each age. The Yayoi people, Takatsuki Castle, and the postwar danchi are all, when one traces back, set upon the same siting where the roads of water and land cross midway between the two great cities. The Yayoi people bearing rice cultivation came up the Yodo River and built a settlement, in the early-modern era a castle was placed, and after the war danchi filled the mountain edge. The single point where the roads of water and land cross midway between the two great cities has called in people and the town, in turn, over two-thousand-odd years.