Kumamoto-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 739,000 (738,865 in 2020). Over the five years from 740,822 in 2015 it lost some two thousand. It is a designated city at a stage where, holding a scale beyond 700,000, its gains have stopped and it has turned to slight decline.

What is worth seeing here is that the number of children is declining faster than the total. Those under 15 fell from 103,433 (2015) to 99,199 (2020), more than four thousand fewer. Over the same five years the share aged 65 and over rose from 23.9% to 25.9%. Behind a slight decline in the total, the composition is shifting its center of gravity toward the older end faster still. The published residential land price is around 27,000 yen per m² (27,250 yen/m²), about thirty percent of the level of Fukuoka in the same Kyushu. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.69, a structure in which a considerable part of standard expenditure is filled through the local allocation tax. Households with children make up 20.8% (2020), and the childcare waitlist is 0 (2025). But these are averages for a city of 700,000; the municipal area is divided into five wards — Chuo, Higashi, Nishi, Minami and Kita — differing in character from the central built-up area of the castle town to the suburbs. 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 castle town, the groundwater and the earthquake.

Kumamoto’s skeleton stands on lines drawn by one master castle-builder and on water nurtured by a volcano.

The first foundation was the castle town. In 1607, Kato Kiyomasa completed Kumamoto Castle on the plateau called Chausuyama, pouring in the most advanced technology and labor of the time. Together with the castle, the castle town known as Shinmachi and Furumachi was built. Kiyomasa also put effort into flood control and the development of paddy fields, and for setting a disordered Higo back on its feet he was beloved by the people as “Seishoko-san,” a memory that still remains at the base of citizens’ lives. The skeleton of a castle and a castle town was this city’s starting point four hundred years ago.

The second foundation was groundwater. Kumamoto is blessed with abundant subsoil water nurtured by the volcanic activity of Aso, and the city’s waterworks source is 100 percent groundwater. There is no other city in Japan with a population beyond five hundred thousand that supports its entire waterworks with groundwater. Turn the tap and natural groundwater flows — this is a condition, hard to obtain elsewhere, that the volcanic landform gave the city. And in April 2012 Kumamoto became the country’s twentieth designated city.

Third, what decided this city’s recent memory was an earthquake. In the Kumamoto earthquake of April 2016, the stone walls of Kumamoto Castle collapsed in several places, and the Nagabei wall, a national Important Cultural Property, toppled over a long stretch. The restoration of the keep, made a symbol of recovery, was completed in March 2021. Beginning with a castle town, supported by groundwater, shaken by an earthquake and rebuilt — the city of Kumamoto stands on an origin where nature and the human hand crossed again and again.

What characterizes Kumamoto is that while the total population fell by two thousand in five years, the number of children fell by more than four thousand. The decline in children outpaces the slight decline in the total. Households with children make up 20.8% (2020), about one household in five in a child-rearing phase. As a large city the ratio of households with children is still held at its level, but the absolute number of children itself is thinning.

The childcare waitlist has reached 0 (2025). But it is worth noting that this “zero” is the zero of a city where the absolute number of children has begun to decline. It can be read as a figure moving around the point where supply caught up as demand itself gently tapers, and the two balanced. If Fukuoka’s waitlist is one at the end of “supply chasing ever-rising demand,” Kumamoto’s is a zero at the end of “supply lining up with tapering demand,” and even the same “zero” faces the opposite direction behind it. Children decline faster, the elderly share crosses a quarter, and the total too turns to slight decline — in a 700,000 city where these run at once, the result of a zero waitlist too stands on a flattening of the circumstances of each of the five wards. The circumstances of children and childcare in the central built-up area of the castle town and in the suburbs cannot be the same. A figure, on its own, does not fix its own meaning.

The functions Kumamoto holds are not one. Kumamoto Castle, which Kato Kiyomasa raised on a plateau, and the Shinmachi and Furumachi castle town spreading at its foot, keep inscribing a four-hundred-year origin at the city’s center. The groundwater nurtured by the volcano of Aso is drawn up from wells within the city to fill every tap, carrying the function, found nowhere else, of supporting the waterworks of a city beyond five hundred thousand with 100 percent groundwater.

Kumamoto became a designated city in 2012, holding on its own the administrative authority of a hub of central Kyushu. Beginning with a castle town, supported by groundwater, shaken hard by the 2016 earthquake, and rebuilding the castle keep — on the landform of “a plateau holding water that a volcano nurtured,” different functions have been carried in each era. The castle, the castle town and the wells that draw the groundwater all rest, in the end, on the same condition of a plateau at the foot of Aso. In a city where natural water flows when you turn the tap, a four-hundred-year-old castle stands. The water and landform the volcano brought have shaped both daily life and calamity.