Hiroshima

In the 2020 Population Census, Hiroshima’s population is 1,200,754. At about 1.2 million, it added some seven thousand over the five years from 1,194,034 in 2015. Already past 1.2 million, it is a designated city that has entered a stage of gentle growth.

What is worth seeing here is that the number of children points the other way from the total. Those under 15 fell from 166,427 (2015) to 158,290 (2020), more than eight thousand fewer. Over the same five years the share aged 65 and over rose from 23.4% to 25.1%. Behind a total that grows gently, the composition is steadily shifting its center of gravity toward the older end. The published residential land price is around 51,650 yen per m². The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.78 — a structure in which part of standard expenditure is filled through the local allocation tax. Households with children make up 20.1% (2020), and the childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025). What is worth keeping in view, though, is that these are averages for a city of 1.2 million. The municipal area is divided into eight wards — Naka, Higashi, Minami, Nishi, Asaminami, Asakita, Aki and Saeki — differing greatly in character from the central built-up area on the delta to the old county districts in the mountains. 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 the delta castle town and the military city.

At the foot of the city of Hiroshima lies a delta built by a river. The Ota River, splitting at its mouth into many channels before pouring into the Seto Inland Sea — this landform of water is the foundation of everything in the city.

The first foundation is the castle town. At the end of the Warring States period, Mori Terumoto built Hiroshima Castle on this delta. The later lords — Fukushima Masanori, and the Asano house that governed the domain for long — ran the Saigoku Kaido highway through, advanced river control and reclamation, and gradually widened the built-up area below the castle. The accumulated work of reworking a low delta ringed by sea and river into habitable land, through embankments and streets, was Hiroshima in the early modern period.

The second foundation is the military. After the Meiji Restoration, in 1873 the Army’s Hiroshima Garrison was placed in Hiroshima Castle, becoming the Fifth Division in 1888. And in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894, the Imperial General Headquarters that commanded the army was moved from Tokyo to Hiroshima, and even the Imperial Diet was convened here. The port of Ujina was developed as a base for sending troops to the continent, and the Clothing Depot handling uniforms, the Supply Depot handling munitions, and the Provisions Depot handling food were placed one after another. The delta castle town turned into a military city facing the continent. In historical geography, it is a textbook case of a port and a military base concentrated in one city.

And on August 6, 1945, that military city was destroyed in an instant by a single atomic bomb. The city was remade literally from zero. In 1946 it received designation as a war-damage reconstruction city under the Special City Planning Act, and in 1949 the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law was passed unanimously by the Diet. The present urban plan, with the broad Peace Boulevard and the Peace Memorial Park as its skeleton, was settled then. A castle was built on the delta, the castle summoned the military, the military city was erased, and over its ashes a city plan that raised the banner of peace was drawn. The city of Hiroshima is a place remade time and again.

What characterizes Hiroshima is that while the total population rose by seven thousand in five years, the number of children fell by more than eight thousand. Two flows — a slight increase in the total and a decline in children — run at once in the same city. Households with children make up 20.1% (2020), about one household in five in the child-rearing stage.

The childcare waitlist has reached 0 children (2025). But this “zero” is read differently from the “zero from a thinned absolute number of children” common in regional cities of population decline. Even though the absolute number of children is falling, a 1.2-million city still holds a considerable childcare demand, and the zero can be read as the result of supply catching up fully to that demand. Even the same “zero waitlist” changes entirely in meaning depending on whether demand itself has shrunk small, or whether supply caught up to a large demand. Children gently decline, the elderly share crosses a quarter, and yet the total holds at a slight increase. In a large city where this many different movements run at once, the result of a zero waitlist, too, stands on a flattening of the circumstances of each of the eight wards. The circumstances of children and childcare cannot be the same in the central built-up area on the delta and the old county districts in the mountains. Take the zero result as identical across all eight wards, and the discord inside the city falls out of view.

Upon the Ota River delta, many functions of its own are inscribed in Hiroshima. One is the area at the center of the delta, cored on the Peace Memorial Park and the Atomic Bomb Dome, still inscribing the origin of the atomic bomb on the map. Another is the hundred-meter-wide Peace Boulevard drawn by the reconstruction plan, still running through the center of the built-up area the skeleton of a city plan remade from zero out of the ashes. And the port of Ujina, developed in the military era as a base for sending troops to the continent, took over after the war as a hub of shipping and logistics on the Seto Inland Sea.

Hiroshima became a designated city in 1980, and the city holds, on its own, administrative authority as the hub of the Chugoku region. From a delta castle town to a military city, and through destruction to a city that raised the banner of peace — on the same landform of “a delta built by a river,” different functions have been swapped in, era by era. The castle, the military facilities and the Peace Memorial Park all rest, in the end, on the same low delta. Following the natural landform, people drew lines on it, were burned, and drew them again. The city of Hiroshima is that repetition of redrawing itself.