Yao-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 265,000 (264,642 in 2020). In the five years from 268,800 in 2015 it fell by some four thousand. A city of a scale neighboring a great metropolitan sphere has entered a stage of gentle decline.

The number of children thins faster than the total. Those under 15 fell by some two thousand five hundred over five years, from 34,379 in 2015 to 31,874 in 2020. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 27.0% to 28.3%, and aging advances bit by bit. The household-with-children share is at 20.3% (2020). The land price of the residential area is around 134,000 yen per m², a low level for a city of the Osaka metropolitan sphere. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.70, showing a structure in which the share of standard expenditure it can cover with its own tax revenue is roughly seven-tenths. The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025), and in the flow of the absolute number of children thinning, supply is catching up with demand. What I want to see here is that whether the waitlist of zero is "children increased and supply caught up" or "children decreased and supply caught up" cannot be settled by this single number alone. Why it takes this shape cannot be read without going back over the history of the rerouted river and cotton cultivation.

Yao’s skeleton begins where people moved the flow of a river. In 1704, the Yamato River, which had repeatedly flooded, was largely rerouted through the petition of the villages of Kawachi, and its course was swung greatly to the west. As a result, the riverbed left as the old channel was opened as new rice fields, and there cotton cultivation grew greatly. In the terms of economic geography, it is a case in which the conditions of a land born of civil engineering became, as they were, the seedbed of a local industry.

The cotton raised on the new fields of the old channel was woven throughout Yao, beginning with Kyuhoji Village, and flowed across the nation as "Kawachi cotton." This cotton, thick and durable with stout thread, was used in many places not only as everyday clothing for the common people but as noren curtains, futon ticking, and sake bags. But once the Meiji era came, pressed by cheap thread from mechanical spinning and by imported cotton flowing in with the abolition of tariffs, the hand-spun, hand-woven Kawachi cotton gradually disappeared. It is the form in which one local industry collapsed from its foundation through changes of technology and trade.

Onto the collapsed foundation, the next industry was loaded. The interests of farmers seeking a side trade to replace cotton and of the Osaka brush industry seeking cheap labor matched, and from the mid-Meiji era on, the manufacture of toothbrushes and brushes spread throughout Yao. The production of toothbrushes came to occupy first place in the nation for Osaka Prefecture, and within that, a local industry concentrated in Yao. From Kawachi cotton to the manufacturing of small factories — Yao is a town that once leveled its local industry to bare ground and then reloaded it, and its present figure as an industrial town where small and medium enterprises gather stands at the end of this passing-on.

What characterizes Yao is that, while the total population fell by four thousand, the number of children fell by two thousand five hundred. The form in which children thin faster than the total shows that a neighboring city of Osaka has entered a phase of gentle shrinkage. The share of the elderly rose from 27.0% to 28.3%, and the household-with-children share stays at 20.3%. In a town where the absolute number of children decreases, demand for living infrastructure such as childcare and schools too slowly turns downward.

The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025). But it is too early to read this only as "child-rearing has become easier." It is the same reading touched on in the article on Kobe (28100): a waitlist of zero also holds the aspect of being the result of supply catching up with demand while the absolute number of children thins. The direction of population behind it is the reverse of Urayasu or Chofu, which pushed it down to zero while children kept increasing. Children decrease, the share of the elderly rises, and yet the waitlist converges to zero — in this mid-sized city of Osaka, where several flows advance at once, the meaning of one number can be read only together with the population dynamics behind it. Take out the number "zero" on its own, and one mistakes its direction.

Yao holds several functions of its own. One is the field division of the Kawachi plain that the rerouting of the Yamato River and the new-field development of the old channel left, which gave birth to the producing area of Kawachi cotton and later became the ground on which small factories lined up. Another is the agglomeration of small and medium manufacturing passed on from Kawachi cotton, where local industries beginning with toothbrushes and brushes gather within the city.

Yao, neither a castle town nor a port town, is a town that has reloaded its local industry upon a plain born of the civil engineering of rerouting a river. The new fields of the old channel, Kawachi cotton, and the small factories are all, when one traces back, set upon the same plain that the river moved by human hands made. This town, neither a castle town nor a port town, begins where the civil engineering of rerouting the Yamato River westward by human hands ordered the plain. On the new fields of that old channel Kawachi cotton ripened, and after the cotton retreated, pressed by imported cotton, small factories lined up on the same plain. Not as it was by nature, but upon a land ordered by people, industry was once leveled to bare ground and reloaded again.