Photo/Illutration Commuters in Tokyo’s Marunouchi business district on April 26, 2021 (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

More people left Tokyo’s 23 wards than moved in during 2021, a trend reversal likely caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic, the internal affairs ministry said.

The population report, released by the ministry on Jan. 28, showed a net loss of 14,828 people in the wards located in the central part of the capital in 2021.

It was the first population drop since 1996. It was also the first time leavers outnumbered arrivals since the current form of measurement for the report started in 2014 to cover non-Japanese residents.

Fewer people have moved to the capital while more people are relocating from the 23 wards since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020.

For all of Tokyo, people who moved in still outnumbered those who left by 5,433 in 2021. But the figure was down by 25,692 from the previous year and the smallest since 2014.

An increasing number of residents who moved out of the 23 wards in 2021 went to more distant regions, such as Chigasaki and Fujisawa in Kanagawa Prefecture, Saitama Prefecture’s Ageo, and Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, according to the report.

In 2019 before the pandemic, popular destinations for relocators were other municipalities in the capital and neighboring prefectures’ areas close to Tokyo’s 23 wards.

Yutaka Okada, a chief researcher at Mizuho Research & Technologies Ltd., who is well-versed in issues involving populations and local revitalization, noted that many people left central Tokyo in 2020 for regions around the capital and locations in the northern part of the Kanto region.

Okada said a prominent feature in 2021 is that more Tokyoites relocated farther away to Tokushima Prefecture, Oita Prefecture and elsewhere in the Shikoku and Kyushu regions.

Okada said this tendency is being fueled by the increase in teleworking, which gives employees, particularly those at information technology companies, greater freedom on where they can live.

“The trend will not change easily,” he said. “This may be a watershed moment.”

In 2021, the number of people who moved in was bigger than that of those who moved out in a total of 10 prefectures. The 10 included not only Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba but also Ibaraki, Yamanashi and Gunma.

The three, all situated around the Tokyo metropolitan area, saw population increases, following declines a year earlier.

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