A falsification of numbers that did not go unnoticed. On Saturday, October 3, 2026, regional police raided Toyama City Hall in western Japan after a ministry of the central government uncovered inconsistencies in the census data.
A few days earlier, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications had filed complaints against municipal officials involved in the census, accusing them of inflating population figures by including unoccupied households.
According to the New York Times, the falsification was carried out to mask signs of demographic decline. Government authorities are often under pressure to curb this trend, which can lead to budget cuts and fuel a sense of public shame.
The mayor of Toyama compelled to publicly apologize
In the wake of the developments, Toyama’s mayor, Hirohisa Fujii, publicly offered his apologies. In a press release, he stated that municipal authorities would fully cooperate with the police investigation. Moreover, under Japanese law, officials involved in this type of falsification face fines or imprisonment of up to six months. The affair came to light after inconsistencies were identified during the final phase of census data verification, as explained to our reporters by Kenta Tsuji, head of the Population Census Service within the ministry.
A discrepancy of nearly 3,000 people was observed between the population estimate released in May and the final census figure for Toyama, published in September. The city, located at the foot of the Japanese Alps, has about 400,000 residents. But in May, when a separate census revealed that the city’s population had fallen below 400,000, Mr. Fujii said he was worried. “Even though I view the 400,000 threshold as a mere milestone, I believe it carries considerable significance. The fact that we slipped under that figure has left a deep impression on me,” he confided.
A crime driven by the fear of losing subsidies
In Japan, the central government provides subsidies to local authorities based on their population. Some small regions have thus suffered substantial budget cuts after recording a decline in resident numbers. The Toyama mayor therefore feared that the city’s demographic decline would have severe financial consequences. He even acknowledged that subsidies provided by the central government could fall by about $380,000 due to the drop in population and the number of schoolchildren.
According to Nobuo Sasaki, an economist at Chuo University and a specialist in urban administration, the city would have frantically attempted to preserve its status in the face of neighboring cities such as Kanazawa and Niigata, which have become increasingly popular tourist destinations. “Another possibility is that some staff members, fearing that the city’s reputation as a successful model of compact urban development would be tarnished, resorted to wrongdoing in an attempt to save face,” he said.
