Abstract
The 2020 National Census was a survey that delved into the actual situation of those
who have not completed compulsory education. A new category, “persons who graduated
from elementary school as their last school education” was newly established. To determine
the need for evening classes at public junior high schools, prefectural and city boards of
education have conducted their own needs assessments. Problems have been pointed out in
the past regarding how municipalities measure “enrollment needs.” These points highlight
the essential issue of “who” and “how” to identify latent needs（Usui 2020a, p. 108）. How do
we accurately identify the latent learning needs and enrollment needs of evening schools?
The answer is already clear. Use the census. The census is a full-count survey, carefully
prepared by the government at great expense. It is designed to increase response rates so
that various biases are minimized. The method of tabulation can be selected according to the
purpose of the analysis. Sub-regional tabulation refers to the results of the national census,
which are tabulated by town and district, and it is not only possible to display the results
of more than 100,000 areas nationwide by census survey item but also to link the results to
geographic information（GIS: Geographic Information System）. By linking the GIS, it is
possible to visualize on a map the shading of the ratio of the population who didn’ t complete
elementary or junior high school. This paper presents several examples of analyses using the
census and discloses the procedures from obtaining census data to processing them. To some
extent, we have made a process manual so that interested readers can develop policies in
their regions.
