Nobeoka-shi

In the latest Population Census the population is about 118,000 (118,394 in 2020). Over the five years from the 125,159 of 2015, it fell by some seven thousand. It is a core city of northern Miyazaki, partway into the phase of decline.

The number of children is thinning faster still than the total. Those under fifteen fell by a little over two thousand, from 16,510 (2015) to 14,483 (2020). In the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 31.1% to 34.4%. It has entered a phase where the elderly occupy a third of the population. The household-with-children share is 18.6% (2020). The land price of residential land is around 26,000 yen per m², a level low compared with the urban parts of Kyushu. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.52 (2023), a structure in which the part not reaching 1.0 is made up by the local allocation tax. With its own tax revenue alone it can cover only about half of standard expenditure. The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025), which can be read as a balance amid the absolute number of children falling. Why these numbers take this form cannot be read without going back to the past surrounding the castle town and a single company.

Nobeoka’s skeleton is a two-layer structure, a modern chemical factory laid over a castle town. In the Edo period, here was the castle town of the Nobeoka domain. The lord’s families changed — Takahashi, Arima, Miura, Makino — and in 1747 the Naito family entered from Iwaki and continued until the Meiji Restoration. The town blocks as a castle town are this town’s first foundation.

What decided this town’s fortune a second time is water. In the Taisho era, Noguchi Shitagau, who would later form the source of Asahi Kasei, took note of the abundant water obtainable from rivers such as the Gokase and the Ose, and of the consolidated land where a factory could be placed. The chemical industry, ammonia synthesis in particular, requires a great quantity of electric power and water. The very geographical condition of Nobeoka’s river water drew the factory’s location. In 1923 Nippon Nitrogen Fertilizer succeeded here in the industrialization of Casale-method ammonia synthesis. This became the founding place of Asahi Kasei. It is a typical case of, as economic geography would say, the location of a resource deciding industrial agglomeration.

The factory grew as if to swallow the town. Around 1951 it is recorded that about half of Nobeoka’s population and about two-thirds of the city’s tax revenue were related to Asahi Kasei. A company castle town in the literal sense. A chemical factory was set in the riverside castle town, workers and their families gathered there, and a structure formed in which the rise and fall of a single company tied directly to the rise and fall of the town. The Nippo Main Line, renamed from the Miyazaki Main Line in 1923, pierced the town and carried people and goods. Later, from this factory cluster came a researcher who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2019) for the lithium-ion battery. Yet dependence on a single industry echoes through the whole town when that industry transforms — today’s numbers of population decline are not unrelated to this past of dependence on a single company.

What characterizes Nobeoka is that, while the total population falls by some seven thousand, the number of children thins at a faster pace than that. Those under fifteen fell by a little over two thousand over five years, and the share of the elderly passed a third. A town that swelled as people gathered with the factory is shifting its center of gravity toward the shrinking side, within the change of industrial structure and the nationwide current of population decline. The household-with-children share is 18.6%, reflecting the thinness of the child-raising layer amid advancing aging.

The Childcare Waitlist is 0. But this differs in meaning from the zero reached after catching supply up amid children increasing, as in Urayasu or Kawasaki. In Nobeoka, where the absolute number of children itself is falling, it can be read, the same as in a regional town where children thin, as a zero settled around where supply and demand balanced through demand shrinking. Even the same "zero waitlist" reads entirely differently depending on whether, behind it, children are increasing or thinning. The children fall, the share of the elderly rises, and the waitlist settles at zero — the numbers of Nobeoka’s living infrastructure can be read as the very consequence, just as it is, of the past in which a town that swelled in dependence on a single company entered the phase of shrinking. The numbers mirror the town’s structure, not its good or bad.

The functions Nobeoka holds are not one. The geography of a land of rivers, where several rivers — the Gokase, the Ose, the Hori and others — flow through the city, is what drew in the chemical factory in the first place. The agglomeration of the chemical industry that continues as the founding place of Asahi Kasei has formed the skeleton of the town’s employment and tax revenue. Moreover, the castle ruins and town blocks deriving from the castle town of the Edo-period Nobeoka domain leave this town’s origin before it was an industrial city. As a core of northern Miyazaki, Nobeoka is linked by the Nippo Main Line in both the Oita and Miyazaki directions, and is also a node of people and goods for the prefecture’s north.

From a castle town to a chemical industrial city relying on the river’s water — the condition of "abundant water and consolidated land" has swapped on a different function age by age. Both the castle and the factory are, in origin, set upon the same condition of this land blessed with rivers. That geography drew in a single company’s factory, remade the town itself, and set the present form of Nobeoka.