The Population Of The Human Village

the population of the human village

… is a topic I’ve been unnecessarily thinking about for a long time, and I’m half-asleep and bored, so let’s talk about it. Right now. Right now. Nobody is going to care about this and nobody should care about this, but sometimes I think about dumb stuff.

We don’t get many good looks at the human village. There are a few high-level views of it in the manga. The best one I can think of is in FS 31:

I mean, I don’t think an illustration in the manga is a strictly authoritative source, but I’d say it’s roughly accurate. More importantly, I guess, it’s bigger than I see a lot of fanworks suggest. That’s definitely bigger than anything we’d call a ‘village’ around where I grew up, really. (Note: I grew up in the middle of nowhere, so we had no standards.)

Here are some businesses/etc that we know are in the village:

One school (Keine’s school)

One specialty book store (Suzunaan)

A master diviner who has multiple students (from FS 25)

Multiple pubs (FS 22)

A guy who made his money off selling salt and got rich (well, there was. Dead now. FS 36)

Quite a few restaurants (WaHH 7)

A florist (Yuuka’s PMiSS article)

… which all make me place a pretty high minimum on the village’s size. Apart from Akyuu’s books, Suzunaan doesn’t seem particularly in demand, so it doesn’t seem like the kinda place that would pop up in a settlement of a few hundred people. Kinda the same for the diviners. There are actually statistics for number of bars per capita; it’s hard to find actually good ones with a quick search, but apparently modern Tokyo has about 1 bar per 900 residents, so let’s use that as a general order of magnitude kinda thing. (Ironically, I had far less luck finding stats on the number of schools per capita. Japan’s historic situation is kinda unique there, too, so let’s just give up on estimating it.)

On top of the above: It’s pretty obvious that the village is large enough that everybody doesn’t know each other. Pretty much any time stuff in the village becomes important, it’s always “that one shop downtown” or “a guy who runs an udon place.” There are a few chapters dealing with outsiders showing up, too, and nobody ever seems too surprised to see a new face around or, say, sees a new kid showing up to their classes and questions the fact that they don’t know their parents.

Comparing it with historic Japanese cities… well, Hakodate had about 10,000 people in 1850 (which is probably about the best historic point to use as reference,) and by that point it also had multiple temples and pretty active trade. Probably too high. Population data seems pretty hazy and unreliable that far back, so comparisons for anything smaller are hard to find, if they’re out there. But hey, let’s say 10,000 is significantly more than the village.

Combining all that, I guess I’d put the population somewhere in the low/mid thousands? Three to five thousand, maybe. Big enough that people definitely won’t know each other, small enough to have some reference for most other people, even if it’s only ‘yeah, he runs a shop over that way, married to the old tailor’s daughter.’ Also just big enough to support some weird specialty shops and probably have a few indistinct districts. (At least, specialty shops that aren’t frilly hat outlets, which is presumably one of the most reliable industries in Gensokyo.) Probably big enough to start approaching the viable threshold for industrial development and stuff, which I guess could make an interesting plot hook.

… actually, probably enough that they significantly outnumber the non-fairy youkai, with the numbers I’ve always felt like canon hints at. (if there are significantly more than, like, 100 kappa, I will be shocked.) Huh.

tmt

Momosuzu Nene🍑

Ookami mio because shes my favorite

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