Kagoshima-shi

In the 2020 Population Census the population is 593,128 — 593 thousand. From the 599,814 of 2015, over five years, it fell by some six thousand seven hundred. It is the largest prefectural capital of southern Kyushu, at the stage where, having capped out just short of six hundred thousand, it has turned to a slight decline.

What I want to note here is that the number of children is thinning faster than the total. The under-15 population decreased from 80,965 (2015) to 75,680 (2020), by more than five thousand over five years. In the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 24.2% to 26.8%. Behind the quiet number of a slight decline in total population, the composition of the generations is surely shifting upward. The household-with-children share is 18.6% (2020). The residential land price is around 86,000 yen per square meter (86,350 yen in 2026), at a middling level for a prefectural capital of Kyushu. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.70 (2023): a level able to cover seven-tenths of standard expenditure with its own tax revenue, but not reaching 1.0, with the shortfall made up by the local allocation tax — within the structure of a regional city. The Childcare Waitlist is 0 (2025). Why these numbers take this form cannot be read without going back to the past of a castle town and modernization.

Kagoshima’s frame is the continuity itself of one daimyo family keeping its base here for roughly seven hundred years. From around 1340, when Shimazu Ujihisa made Tofukuji Castle his residence, this land took on the character of the center of the Shimazu family’s castle quarter. It is a typical example of what historical geography calls "a castle town set with a particular lord’s family as its core."

Around 1601, Shimazu Tadatsune (Iehisa) began the construction of Tsurumaru Castle — Kagoshima Castle — and thereafter, until the abolition of the domains, this castle remained the residence of the Shimazu family. The Shimazu family held a great domain of roughly 778,000 koku in Satsuma, Osumi and Hyuga, and Kagoshima grew, as its castle town, into the largest city of southern Kyushu. Then, at the end of the shogunate, through the Shuseikan enterprise — a cluster of works equipped with reverberatory furnaces and blast furnaces — advanced under the twenty-eighth head, Shimazu Nariakira, this town became one of the birthplaces of modern industrialization in Japan. It was also this castle town that, beginning with Saigo Takamori and Okubo Toshimichi, sent out in succession the talent that moved the nation-building of Meiji. The street blocks of the castle town, and the memory of an industry that ran ahead into modernization, are this town’s first foundation.

Another thing that cannot be left out in speaking of this town’s site is the volcano Sakurajima, facing it across Kinko Bay. The town has widened its city area while neighboring an active volcano. And in 1945, Kagoshima City suffered eight air raids in all from March to August; in particular the raid of June 17 caused immense damage, and roughly nine-tenths of the urban area burned down. The frame drawn as a castle town, once largely leveled by war damage, has the present urban area laid over it. The origin of a great domain’s castle town, a site neighboring a volcano, and recovery from a burned plain form the present prefectural capital.

What characterizes Kagoshima is that, while the total population falls by six thousand seven hundred, the number of children falls by more than five thousand. That children thin at a faster pace than the total is a current common to many of the nation’s regional cities, and Kagoshima is no exception. The share of the elderly passes a quarter, and the household-with-children share stays at 18.6%. Behind the quiet number of a slight decline in total population, the composition of the generations is surely shifting upward.

Even so, the Childcare Waitlist is 0. Here a reading-over is needed. A zero waitlist in a town where the absolute number of children is decreasing is neither the consequence of "the number of children thinning greatly," as in a population-shrinking regional city, nor the consequence of "supply catching up to ever-growing demand," as in Urayasu. It can be read as the result of the supply of childcare settling above its demand while children decrease gently. Even the same "zero waitlist" means something entirely different depending on whether children behind it are decreasing or increasing. Children decrease first, aging advances, and yet the supply and demand of childcare are in balance. That these three advance at once is the figure of a mature prefectural capital. Cut out only one, and even the meaning of a zero waitlist is mistaken.

The roles Kagoshima has gathered on this land can be counted in several. One is the urban area drawn as the castle town of the Shimazu family, where the ruins of Kagoshima Castle and the Shuseikan (the Shoko Shuseikan), a relic of modern industrialization, remain in the town and keep inscribing the memory of the castle quarter and of modernization. Another is the site facing Sakurajima across Kinko Bay, where the distance to an active volcano is built into the premise of the town’s scenery and life. Further, Kagoshima gathers the prefecture’s functions onto itself as the node of administration and economy in southern Kyushu.

Kagoshima gathers the functions of administration, economy and transport as the Satsuma prefectural capital. From a great domain’s castle town, to a birthplace of modern industrialization, to a town that sent out the driving force of the Meiji Restoration, and further to a prefectural capital recovered from a burned plain — the origin of "a castle quarter where the Shimazu family kept its base for roughly seven hundred years" has changed its functions era by era. Both the castle ruins and the relics of modernization are, traced to their source, stacked upon the same foundation of a great domain’s castle quarter. While neighboring a volcano, the Shimazu family kept its base in the same place for roughly seven hundred years. That continuity itself has been the foundation that, in turn, changed over the functions of castle quarter, modernization and prefectural capital.