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The story
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has reported a Toyama city official to the Toyama Prefectural Police on suspicion of violating the Statistics Act, alleging the city inflated its population figures in the 2025 national census. In an editorial, the Yomiuri Shimbun called this “a serious matter that shakes public trust in the nation’s statistical surveys.” On the thread, users speculated about the motive — whether it was to secure more subsidy funding or to preserve the city’s “400,000-population city” status — while others pointed out an 800,000-person gap between the census figures and the resident registry, and debated whether Japan’s My Number ID system could be used to track residents’ actual whereabouts instead.
[Yomiuri Shimbun Editorial]
Fraud involving the inflation of population figures has come to light in the national census — a survey that forms the foundation for policymaking in areas like social welfare and urban planning. This is a serious matter that shakes public trust in the nation’s statistical surveys.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has reported a Toyama city official — whose name remains undisclosed — to the Toyama Prefectural Police on suspicion of violating the Statistics Act, alleging the city inflated its population figures in the 2025 national census.
Source: yomiuri.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Probably not. I bet they're inflating the population to calculate bigger subsidies and skim off the top.
I heard it's actually the opposite for China — thanks to the one-child policy, rural areas are full of people without household registration (hukou), so the real population is far higher than what's officially reported.
You could just use the My Number system for this… are you stupid?
This survey is about checking whether people actually live at the address registered under their My Number. Do you seriously not understand what the survey is even for?
Re: #56
It was probably city higher-ups behind this, lol.
●Census population
122,973,000
(as of October 1, 2025)
●Resident registry population
123,767,642
(as of January 1, 2026)
Where on earth are these 800,000 people?
So they can keep collecting pension payments without reporting when a parent dies. And there's a never-ending stream of people who eventually get caught.
Me. I've never once answered the census.
The whole point of the census is to catch people who aren't actually living where their family register or resident card says they are.
It's a question of which is more trustworthy: a country where scandals never surface at all, or a country where a single incident in just one city becomes a huge deal. That's exactly how much Japan values quality, safety, and reliability. Look at countries whose companies never seem to have scandals — their products are the ones that catch fire, collapse, or turn out to be spec-sheet fraud.
Is there even a point to tracking that?
It's precisely because we survey that fraud like this gets caught.
Isn't it the opposite? There's fraud happening within the census itself, so the census has no meaning.
Sounds like someone's hiding their parent's body.
This is actually a great chance to flush out lying bureaucrats. It also works for catching people hiding the death of a parent or child in the same way. I'd love to know who's behind the "stop doing this!" crowd.
> Population size directly affects how much subsidy funding a city receives from the national government. It's been pointed out that the inflation could have resulted in tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yen in excess funding being allocated.
> Preserving '400,000-city' status: Toyama is said to have had an internal mindset that dropping below the 400,000 population threshold would be "painful" or "embarrassing." Analysts suggest an atmosphere of unspoken pressure to please superiors (sontaku) and an almost top-priority directive spread through the ranks to protect the city's scale and brand as a core city.
Both of those are just what you get from pasting "so in the end, what was the point of inflating the numbers?" into the address bar and Google-searching it — see Re: #120 and Re: #122.
Sometimes people are listed as "living" somewhere just so someone can keep collecting their pension.
Takaoka City: "Leave it to us!"
It's precisely because the data is actually used for something that criminal outfits like Toyama City's end up emerging.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The national census is a population survey conducted every five years by the Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and its results form the basis for calculating local allocation tax grants — meaning the larger a municipality’s population, the bigger its share of funding. There’s also a structural incentive to inflate numbers tied to population-based classifications and “brands,” such as being a “core city” or a “400,000-population city,” which directly affect a municipality’s budget and authority. Commenters were split between those focused on the motive behind the inflation (subsidy money versus preserving the “400,000-city” brand) and those debating whether systems like My Number or the resident registry could replace the census altogether. Some pointed out that a resident card merely registers where someone is supposed to be living, while the census’s actual role is to verify real-world residency — a distinction that led to a mix of comments conflating the two systems and rebuttals grounded in how the system actually works, which is worth untangling for readers. Note that some exchanges containing content unrelated to the article and tinged with xenophobia were excluded from this writeup.
*This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Population Inflation] Trust in the National Census Shaken.”
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