Wakayama-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 357,000 (356,729 in 2020). Over the five years from 364,154 in 2015 it lost some seven thousand four hundred. While holding a scale that represents the Kii Peninsula, it is a prefectural capital that has entered a phase of slight decline.

What is worth seeing here is that the number of children is thinning faster than the total. Those under 15 fell from 44,519 (2015) to 42,340 (2020), some two thousand fewer in five years. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 29.1% to 30.8%, reaching one in three. Households with children make up 19.4% (2020). The residential land price is around 51,000 yen per m² (50,650 yen in 2026). The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.77 (2023); below 1.0, with the shortfall covered by the local allocation tax, it sits within the structure common to regional cities. The childcare waitlist fell from 22 children (2024) to 18 (2025). Why these numbers take this shape cannot be read without tracing the two origins of a castle town and steelmaking.

Wakayama’s skeleton is a two-layer structure, in which modern heavy industry laid a second foundation onto the foundation of an Edo-period castle town. In 1585 Toyotomi Hidenaga built a castle on Mount Torafusu — the beginning of Wakayama Castle — and after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 Asano Yoshinaga entered and laid out the castle and its town. Then in 1619 Yorinobu, the tenth son of Tokugawa Ieyasu, entered this land with 555,000 koku, and the Kishu domain was established. The Kishu Tokugawa house was one of the three Tokugawa main branches alongside Owari and Mito, and produced the eighth shogun Yoshimune and the fourteenth shogun Iemochi. A castle town laid out around Honmachi-dori, with samurai quarters, temples and shrines, and merchant quarters, took shape, and the wealth of 555,000 koku set the scale of the town. The blocks of the castle town are this town’s first foundation.

The second foundation is modern steelmaking. In 1942 the Wakayama Steelworks of Sumitomo Metal Industries began operating on the waterfront of Wakayama Bay. In 1961 the first blast furnace was completed, establishing an integrated iron-and-steel system, and through the high-growth era new blast furnaces were built every two years to expand output. At the peak in 1970 five blast furnaces produced about 9.2 million tons, and the steelworks became the symbol of Wakayama-shi’s economy. Onto land where people and blocks had gathered as a castle town, the modern conditions of a harbor and a coastal industrial zone were layered, and the castle town swelled into an industrial city. Onto the blocks the castle had set, steel loaded employment and population — the scale of this town stands on the accumulation of two origins, castle and steel.

What characterizes Wakayama-shi is that a city of 350,000 swelled by castle town and steelmaking is now quietly losing population. The population fell by seven thousand four hundred in five years, and the number of children by some two thousand. The share of older residents reaches one in three, and households with children stay at 19.4%. It is the figure of a town that thickened through the high-growth era around steelmaking, now shifting from maturity toward contraction amid changes in industrial structure and the population decline common to the whole country.

The childcare waitlist fell from 22 children to 18. With the absolute number of children thinning, a falling waitlist reads less as a large rise in supply than as supply chasing a demand that is itself shrinking. It has not reached zero; 18 children remain. This is not a figure to be alarmed by, but one showing the fact that even in a town where children are thinning, the supply-and-demand of childcare does not balance out easily, with regional differences folded in. Children thin, aging advances, and the waitlist falls while a remainder lingers — the living infrastructure of a town swelled by castle and steel has entered a phase of gentle contraction. This figure, too, will be misread unless read together with its background.

Wakayama still holds land of differing roles folded over many times. One is the blocks of the castle town of the 555,000-koku Kishu Tokugawa house, where the urban area centered on Wakayama Castle along Honmachi-dori still carries the prefecture’s administrative and economic center. The other is the steelmaking-centered industrial zone spread along the waterfront of Wakayama Bay, which supported postwar Wakayama-shi’s economy and still sits on the coast as the Wakayama Area of Nippon Steel’s Kansai Works. Further, the geography of a harbor facing the Kii Channel and the mouth of the Kii River has supported both castle town and industry.

As the capital of Wakayama Prefecture, Wakayama gathers administrative functions into itself. From the castle town of the Kishu main-branch house, to an industrial city holding steelmaking, and on to a regional city heading toward contraction — onto the origin of “blocks set by a castle of 555,000 koku,” modern coastal industry laid a second foundation. Both the castle and the steelworks rest, in the end, on the same condition: a site on the flat land of the Kii River mouth facing the Kii Channel. Onto land where the castle gathered people, steel loaded employment, and both are now contracting at once. The present standing of Wakayama-shi reads, in step with the facts, as the overlap of these two foundations.