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The story
An interview with Mayor Fujii has revealed that Toyama City reported a higher population than the actual figure to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in the 2025 national census. The issue reportedly came to light after the Ministry raised a concern that “the survey method might be wrong.” On 5ch, discussion centered on why a city known as a success story for compact-city policy would over-report its population, with users citing the roughly 450-person gap between the 399,759 population listed on Toyama City’s official website as of the end of August, Reiwa 8 (2026), and the census result of 400,213. Some speculated the motive was preserving local allocation tax funding or the city’s pride as a core city, while others pushed back, noting that the 400,000 figure itself isn’t actually a threshold for allocation tax payments — leaving opinion divided.
It has come to light that in last year’s national census, Toyama City reported a population to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications that was higher than the actual figure.
This was revealed by Toyama Mayor Fujii in an interview.
According to the mayor, the Ministry had pointed out that “the survey method might be mistaken.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
They probably had to save face.
They'd been loudly touting it as a success story for compact-city policy, after all.
Have the entire city hall staff go door-to-door and check each one properly.
Under-reporting because residents didn't cooperate, sure, that I could see happening — but this?
Their local allocation tax grant would get cut.
Whether it's paid out depends on the shortfall between the standard fiscal need amount (calculated from population, etc.) and estimated tax revenue.
If population drops, the standard amount drops too.
So the grant paid to cover the shortfall shrinks.
Apparently it's recommended as a place to relocate to.
Nature aside, you can't get anywhere without a car.
You've clearly never been to Toyama City.
Hint: think about where Favore (a big local shopping mall) is.
Who's the governor?
And that's Toyama's population even after the Heisei-era municipal mergers.
Poor Oita — bigger population than Kanazawa and more passenger traffic than Nagasaki, yet still no shinkansen line.
Well, I guess 40 years ago when the plans were decided, Hokuriku and Nagasaki had overwhelmingly more clout.
Can't they just check the population at the push of a button these days?
Why do they need to fiddle with the numbers so much?
Electoral district boundaries, local allocation tax, subsidies, and so on —
I think they should just have municipalities submit this data,
since they update it every month anyway.
Politics/administration basics —
Electoral district boundaries: House of Representatives single-member district boundaries are revised to track population changes.
Local allocation tax calculation: determines how much money (local allocation tax) the national government distributes to each municipality.
Welfare/disaster-prevention planning: used to expand welfare services in aging areas, plan disaster evacuations, and guide infrastructure development.
Can't be done.
Family registers and residence records are filed by the person or their family, so
the census is what actually investigates who's really living where,
how many people, and what they're doing.
Residents self-report for the census too, but the rule is that
census takers actually go out and check the location in person.
Like how many people it went up or down this month.
Toyama City's population (per its official website, as of end of August, Reiwa 8 [2026]): 399,759
2025 National Census: 400,213
So padded by about 450 people?
Isn't that just plain population outflow?
The national government has no authority to do that.
It would shrink through municipal mergers.
Of course there's stuff like commute-time surveys too, so it's not that simple, but…
Is the census even really necessary?
Students in rented rooms or people on solo job transfers often don't transfer their residence registration.
For things like population, the census treats the real situation at survey time as the correct figure.
For infrastructure data, I think they could just have the railway and bus companies provide it.
That would cover the people who don't transfer their residence registration too — and honestly, people who don't transfer it probably just end up counted as still living at their parents' place anyway
(students especially could pull that off).
Population's shrinking anyway, so maybe it's fine to focus on maintaining what exists over building new stuff.
It just feels like this system doesn't fit the times — or rather, it's failing to keep improving along with them.
lol, meanwhile all the young women are fleeing
Guess young people just uniformly have no eye for a good place, huh?
Well, maybe they'll do a U-turn back home once they're older (lol)
Aren't they surveying the same way every year?
Ever since the Hokuriku Shinkansen was built, [the region] started getting sucked straight into Tokyo,
and it's now all but certain Hokuriku will turn into a depopulated backwater like Tohoku.
Being at a comfortable distance between Tokyo and Osaka used to be a good thing, but they threw that away themselves — nothing but decline from here.
It's just that the people who used to move out to the Kansai region shifted to Tokyo instead, so the net balance hasn't actually changed.
Background and key points of this discussion
The national census determines population not from residence registrations but from census takers confirming the real situation on the ground — data that underpins things like electoral district boundaries and the calculation basis for the local allocation tax. What makes this case notable is that it came to light because the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications pointed out that “the survey method might be wrong” — the city didn’t volunteer the correction on its own. On the thread, two competing theories about the motive for over-reporting remain unresolved: one that the city wanted to avoid a cut to its local allocation tax, versus a counter-argument that hitting 400,000 isn’t actually a requirement for receiving that grant. In reality, the size of the allocation tax grant is determined by the gap between standard fiscal need (which factors in population) and tax revenue, so reaching 400,000 is thought to carry more symbolic weight — like the city’s standing as a core city, or leverage in attracting shinkansen lines and major national projects — than any direct fiscal payoff. The article cites a roughly 450-person gap between the resident-registry population (399,759) and the census population (400,213), but it’s worth noting this figure doesn’t reveal the specific method behind the over-reporting or whose numbers were padded.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt/summary from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “[Toyama] In the 2025 National Census, Toyama City Over-Reported Its Population to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.”
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