Tachikawa Population and Family Life: A Guide to the Town’s Future

Tachikawa’s population is at a record high. Why a 2015 forecast missed by 40,000, what the 2028 peak means, and how the town is raising its children.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

In the middle of the Edo period, in the ninth year of Horeki (1759), 1,065 people lived in Shibasaki Village. The number survives in a village register, and the city’s statistical yearbook puts it at the very top of the column headed “Former Tachikawa City (Shibasaki Village)”.

Two hundred and sixty-seven years later, on 1 January 2026, the City of Tachikawa’s resident register lists 187,440 people. A record high. That is 1,183 more than the year before. Japan’s population began to shrink long ago, and yet this town is still quietly gathering people in.

Yet leaf through the city’s documents from not so long ago, and they read like the story of a different town. The “Tachikawa Revitalisation Comprehensive Strategy”, put together by the city in fiscal 2015, expected the total population to fall to 123,800 by 2060. About 30% down on 2010, a loss of 56,000 people. In the new projection, the Tachikawa of that same 2060 has 164,935 people. A gap of roughly 40,000. It seems there is such a thing in this world as a prophecy everyone is glad to see fail.

Why did the prophecy fail? And beyond the “2028 peak” that today’s projection shows, will young people and families keep living in this town? I decided to spread out the city’s plans and statistics like a walking map, and go for a walk through them.

(Some orientation first. Tachikawa (立川) is a city in the Tama area, the long western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards, about a single Chuo Line ride from Shinjuku. By day, more people are in the city than live in it.)

What is Tachikawa’s population now? 187,440, a record-breaking winter

On the resident register of 1 January 2026, Tachikawa had 187,440 people in 98,970 households. The table in the city’s statistical yearbook begins with the Edo-period village register and runs in one unbroken line to this year, in the Reiwa era. For a government table, it makes remarkably patient reading.

Follow the line and there are a few steps in it. In the eleventh year of Taisho (1922), the population of the land that had changed from Shibasaki Village into Tachikawa Village jumped 28% on the previous year to 6,115. The remarks column of the table says: “Tachikawa Airfield opened”. When the aircraft came, so did the people. When the town became a city, Tachikawa City, in Showa 15 (1940), its population was 34,729. It merged with the town of Sunagawa in Showa 38 (1963), and the following year it leapt to 97,479. (Japanese local records count years by imperial era: Taisho ran from 1912 to 1926, Showa from 1926 to 1989, Heisei from 1989 to 2019, and the current era, Reiwa, began in 2019. I give both.)

Then / now: moving into the housing estates, and the sound of children

In the 1960s and 70s, the remarks column reads like a record of house moves. Showa 41 (1966): “Keyakidai estate occupied”. Showa 42: “Fujimicho housing occupied”. Showa 46: “Wakaba, Saiwai, Kashiwa and Matsunaka estates occupied”. (These danchi, large blocks of public and semi-public flats, were how postwar Japan housed its growing families.) In Showa 47 the population rose by a tenth in a single year, to 129,395. The remarks column for that year also reads “Self-Defense Forces moved in”. And in Showa 52 the words “Base returned” sit there quietly.

When estates go up, schools go up. The city writes that the two elementary schools that opened next to the Keyakidai estate and the estates in Wakabacho both had more than 1,000 pupils at their peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A thousand children in a schoolyard. I wonder whether the head teacher’s talk at morning assembly ever reached the back rows.

Back then, Tachikawa grew because whole estates of families moved in at once. Now, what is growing is not the number of people being born, but the number of people moving in. In the whole of 2025, 1,112 people were born and 1,999 died. On balance, a decrease of 887. The population still rose because 11,207 people moved in, well above the 9,403 who moved out. Look month by month, and 1,972 people moved in during March alone. (Japan’s school and business year starts in April, so March is the great month of moving house.) In spring, cardboard boxes gather in Tachikawa.

So how long will this “pull” last?

The failed prophecy: where did the 123,800 people of 2060 go?

The reasons the fiscal 2015 prophecy failed are written in the city’s own look back. The “Tachikawa City Third Comprehensive Strategy”, which began in fiscal 2025, sums up the results of the earlier strategies like this. Net migration has been positive throughout, and that was a success. On the other hand, falling births have sped up the decline in children, and the arrival of young people has not necessarily led to natural increase, more births than deaths.

More people have moved in than out every year since Heisei 25 (2013). Since Reiwa 2 (2020), the net gain has been around 1,000 people a year. Look by age group, and people in their 30s, who in 2015 were more likely to move out, had by 2023 switched to moving in. In other words, people at the age of starting families began to choose Tachikawa.

There are numbers that do not allow unqualified celebration, though. The same strategy writes that people in their 20s continue to move out to Tokyo’s 23 wards. The movement of women in their 20s to the 23 wards stands out in particular. Young people come from the regions. But some of those just starting out in working life move on into the centre. Tachikawa is also a stop on the way to the big city.

The 2028 peak, and a projection already overtaken

The new projection was made in 2023 to draw up the Fifth Long-Term Comprehensive Plan. According to it, Tachikawa’s total population peaks at 186,390 in Reiwa 10 (2028), then levels off and begins to fall. Over the 20 years from 2025 to 2045 it drops by 8,046, to 178,211 in 2045. In 2065 it will be 159,150.

Here I noticed a small fact and stopped. The actual population of January 2026, 187,440, is already higher than the 186,390 that the projection saw as the peak in 2028. The projection gives figures for 1 January, and the actual figure is for 1 January too. Perhaps the summit stands a little higher than expected. That is my own reading; the city has not revised its projection.

Beyond the projection lies a change in the shape of the age pyramid. The share of people aged 15 to 64, 64.0% in 2025, falls to 53.1% by 2065. Children aged 14 and under drop to 9.4% in 2065, below one in ten. The second-baby-boom generation, aged 50 to 53 in 2024, will be 65 or older by 2040. The share of people aged 65 and over goes from 24.8% in 2024 to 30.7% in 2040 and 37.4% in 2065.

Let’s look at the number of children too. The total fertility rate is lower than the national average; in 2023 Tachikawa ranked 31st among Tokyo’s municipalities, and 18th among its cities outside the 23 wards. Births fell from 1,439 in 2013 to 1,102 in 2023. Although the number of women aged 20 to 39 has shown signs of recovering since 2020, the number of children born keeps falling. The city’s strategy writes down this mismatch without hiding it.

That is why the city set out a remarkably clear sentence as the basic policy of its Third Comprehensive Strategy: “We will transform Tachikawa into a town where young people want to marry, have and raise children, and keep living, and make it a sustainable town.” The word “transform” is in there. For a government text, that is strong.

The strategy also writes down the yardstick for that “transformation”. Under the basic goal of fulfilling people’s hopes for marriage, childbirth and child-rearing, there are three numerical targets. Keep births, 1,102 in 2023, at 1,102 or more in 2029. Raise the total fertility rate, 1.07 in 2023, to a level above Tokyo’s by 2029. And bring the population aged 14 and under, 21,194 in fiscal 2023, to 20,042 or more in fiscal 2029. That last target assumes a fall. It does not say “increase”; it says the decline will be gentler than projected. I think it is an honest target. As a plan, talking about the gradient of the slope is more trustworthy than talking about dreams.

Tachikawa’s future in numbers

• 1,065 — the population of Shibasaki Village in Horeki 9 (1759). If I said that was about three tower blocks’ worth by today’s Tachikawa Station, I would probably get told off.
• 187,440 — the population on 1 January 2026. A record. Already above the figure the projection saw as the “peak” in 2028.
• 11,207 — people who moved in during 2025. Of them, 1,972 arrived in March. In spring, removal firms do not sleep in Tachikawa.
• 113.2 — the daytime-to-night-time population ratio in 2020. The highest of Tama’s 26 cities. There are 13% more people here by day than live here at night.
• 9.4% — the projected share of the population aged 14 and under in 2065. Today’s children will be the ones holding up the Tachikawa of those days.

So how is today’s Tachikawa trying to bring those children up? I’d like to start with the purse.

The family purse: free school lunches, and a medical card to 18

First, school lunch. (In Japanese state schools, every child eats a hot lunch made by the school system, and parents normally pay a fee for it.) The City of Tachikawa has made lunch free at its municipal elementary and junior high schools. There is no income limit. Elementary schools became free from April 2024 under the mayor’s election pledge, and junior high schools from fiscal 2025, using Tokyo’s “Tokyo Public School Lunch Cost Reduction Project”; the city writes that this continues for fiscal 2026. Parents need not apply for anything.

On the same page, however, the city also writes that for fiscal 2027 onwards it will consider school lunch fees again in light of what the national and Tokyo governments do. For now, free lunches are “continuing”, not “promised”. For fairness, I add that here.

Medical costs are generously covered too. To people raising children of high-school age, precisely, from the first 1 April after the child turns 15 until the first 31 March after the child turns 18, the city issues a “Maru-Sei medical certificate”, which covers the patient’s share of costs under health insurance. Since October 2023 there has been no income limit. Children not attending high school are covered too. Together with “Maru-Nyu” for infants and “Maru-Ko” for elementary and junior high school children, a medical certificate follows a child from birth to the spring of their 18th year. From April 2026, the My Number health insurance card can be used in place of the medical certificate.

Around a child’s first birthday, the city gets in touch. Under a scheme called First Birthday Support, it sends families raising children of around one year a questionnaire about child-rearing, and along with information and counselling support, gives them a childcare package. The city writes that this is the age when children start walking and become more self-assertive. It must also be the age when parents start to wilt a little.

Waiting lists for daycare: from 8 to 45

When it comes to daycare, the numbers wobble a little. According to the city’s table, the number of children on waiting lists for licensed daycare peaked at 196 in Heisei 28 (fiscal 2016). From fiscal 2015 to 2019, the city added more than 700 places, by building licensed daycare centres and the like. As a result, on 1 April of Reiwa 7 (fiscal 2025), the number had fallen to 8.

But on 1 April of Reiwa 8 (fiscal 2026), it had risen to 45. Of these, 41 were aged 0 to 2. On further building, the city says it wants to proceed carefully while watching trends in population and childcare needs. There is a waiting list for after-school childcare clubs too: according to the fifth children’s plan, 220 children on 1 April of fiscal 2023. You could call it the kind of worry that only a town with growing numbers of children has, which sounds nice, but for families who are waiting these are pressing numbers.

On 7 May 2026, the counters for daycare, after-school care and so on moved from the city hall in Izumicho to the Kodomo Mirai Center (Children’s Future Centre) in Nishikicho. It is a 13-minute walk from JR Tachikawa Station, or 7 minutes from Nishi-Kunitachi Station on the Nambu Line.

Hearing children’s voices in the council chamber

The backbone of the city’s child-rearing policy is the “Fifth Yume-sodate Tachikawa Kodomo 21 Plan” (“Growing Dreams: Tachikawa Children 21 Plan”), covering the five years from fiscal 2025. This plan has something unusual about it. It comes with separate summary versions, one for elementary school children and one for junior and senior high school students. A column inside the plan says that child members have always taken part in the plan’s committee meetings.

According to the same column, a fund set up jointly by citizens and the city has made an event called “Kodomo to otona no hanashiai in shigikai gijo” (“Children and adults talk it over, in the city council chamber”) a regular fixture. As the name says, it is a forum where children and adults talk things over, staged in the chamber of the city council. The fund is called the “Udora Yumetachi Fund”. Udo is Tokyo udo, the white vegetable Tachikawa grows in pits dug into the earth (see Tokyo udo), and I quietly admired a name so fitting for an udo-growing town. Whether it carries a wish for the children to grow up pale and straight, I was not able to confirm.

The way children are counted is changing, little by little. Not only counted as numbers, but listened to as voices. Having confirmed that, I’d like to turn next to the place children go every day: school.