Hirakata-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 397,000 (397,289 in 2020). In the five years from 404,152 in 2015 it fell by some seven thousand. A town that swelled after the war to a four-hundred-thousand scale is at the stage of having passed its peak and entered a phase of decline.

The fall in the number of children is faster than the fall in the total. Those under 15 fell by some six thousand six hundred, from 51,925 in 2015 to 45,276 in 2020. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 26.1% to 27.8%. The household-with-children share is 19.3% (2020). The land price of the residential area is around 124,000 yen per m², at the level of a suburban residential area caught between Osaka and Kyoto. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.76 (2023) — a structure in which standard expenditure cannot be covered by its own tax revenue alone, and the difference is made up by local allocation tax, a standing common to suburban cities that developed as bedroom towns. The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025). But a waitlist of zero is also the flip side of the absolute number of children falling by six thousand six hundred over five years. Why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back over the history of the highway and the danchi.

Hirakata’s skeleton is a history in which, along one river, the Yodo, the role was passed from a post town on the highway to postwar danchi. The beginning is the levee. The Bunroku Levee, which Toyotomi Hideyoshi built on the left bank of the Yodo River around 1596, came in the early Edo era to be used as the Kyo-kaido linking Osaka with Kyoto and Fushimi, and when, after the Summer Siege of Osaka, Tokugawa Ieyasu extended the Tokaido to Osaka, Hirakata was designated as one of the post towns.

Hirakata-juku flourished as a junction of both highway and river. The Kii Tokugawa house lodged there on alternate-attendance journeys, it became a relay port for the thirty-koku boats plying the Yodo River, and the "Kurawanka boats," which sold goods to the boats, became its specialty. In the Tenpo era the post town is said to have counted 378 houses, a population of 1,549, and 69 inns. In the terms of economic geography, it is an agglomeration peculiar to a relay point, where people and goods pooled at the point where the land highway and the river water transport crossed. The position of being "between" the two great cities of Osaka and Kyoto has consistently decided this town’s character.

This character of "the land between" appears after the war as danchi. In Hirakata, where military land such as the former army’s powder-manufacturing facilities had remained in many places, that site was converted into residential land. Among them, Kori Danchi was built from 1958 on the site of the former army’s Kori works and became a large-scale danchi called at the time "the Orient’s finest." The land that had been the post town of the highway linking Osaka and Kyoto this time swelled its population, as a bedroom town between Osaka and Kyoto, from about forty thousand at the start of city status to a four-hundred-thousand scale — the origin of a relay point on the highway is passed on, as it is, to the siting conditions of a residential city.

What characterizes Hirakata is that, while the total population fell by seven thousand, the number of children fell by six thousand six hundred. Most of the fall in the total is taken up by the fall in children. This is also a form common to suburban-danchi towns that swelled all at once after the war. The households that moved in at the same period raise their years together, children leave the nest, and the share of the elderly passes one in four — a danchi-type shrinkage, in the terms of population dynamics, that matures all at once. It is a different phase, even within the same Osaka Prefecture, from the neighboring Osaka City, which shows another movement through population concentration into the city center.

What appears as the flip side is the figure of a waitlist of zero (2025). Here too a reading is needed. To make the waitlist zero in the city center of a great city is the result of supply overtaking demand, but Hirakata’s is inseparable from the absolute number of children falling by six thousand six hundred over five years. The household-with-children share of 19.3% too will be misread unless one takes into account that it is a share while the total of children thins. Even with the same "waitlist of zero," the meaning becomes the exact opposite depending on whether children are increasing or thinning behind it. Take out the single word "zero" on its own, and one misreads even the direction of the town’s population.

Hirakata holds several functions of its own. One is the townscape of the Kyo-kaido Hirakata-juku remaining along the Yodo River, where the memory of the post town and the "Kurawanka boats" still remains as the scenery of the highway. Another is the large-scale residential land, beginning with Kori Danchi, born from former military land after the war, which forms the character of a suburban residential city supporting the commuting sphere of Osaka and Kyoto.

Further, in Hirakata is Hirakata Park, one of the oldest existing amusement parks, run by the Keihan Electric Railway, long bound to the town as a crowd-drawing device along the line. The Keihan trains run through the city, and the commuting axes extend to both Osaka and Kyoto — this siting of "between the two great cities" has consistently decided Hirakata’s role from the post town of the highway to the postwar danchi. The river-road of the Yodo first called in the highway and the water transport, and onto it the postwar danchi and railways rode. When the danchi that swelled at the same period mature all at once, children leave the nest and thin out first, the share of the elderly rises, and the waitlist converges toward zero.