Gunma Prefecture

Yet when you line up the living indicators, that sharpness is almost invisible. The contour is drawn only by the two poles—the highest home-ownership rate and the lowest public safety (number of crimes)—while the indicators between them cluster near the national average. Economic strength (rate of population change, prefectural income per capita) sits slightly above, medical care (life expectancy, number of physicians) slightly below. A prefecture sharpened so far to a single point in industry looks, in its living numbers, like an average, balanced type. This gap itself is the point worth reading in Gunma.

And beneath the surface that looks flat lies one non-obvious twist. In many prefectures the home-ownership rate (high here) and public safety / number of crimes (low here) tend to move together, but in Gunma they point in opposite directions (the national correlation is 0.40, yet here the direction is reversed). The overall balance and the average neatly conceal this inner discrepancy.

The industrial extremity of about 95% of konjac potatoes, and the living numbers smoothed down to near the average. As long as you view Gunma through a single deviation score or an overall ranking, neither of these two layers can be seen correctly. Judge by the calm surface alone and you drop both the sharpness and the twist together—because the force by which closed terrain sharpened industry to a single point is written on a different set of numbers from the averaging of daily life.

The “closed terrain” seen in the past section returns, in the future section, with a different face. The weight of demographics is its trigger. The generational turnover concentrated in 2031–33 and the rising vacant-home ratio push downward, and the IPSS projection too has the prefecture entering a phase of decline. The problem is that in a prefecture surrounded by mountains, the thinner the population becomes, the more the per-person cost of movement leaps. The terrain that worked to sharpen the prefecture flips here into a weakness.

Against that weakness, Gunma is trying to get ahead through technology. Two cities in the prefecture (Maebashi and Shibukawa) were selected for the national “Autonomous-Driving Social Implementation Promotion Project,” and the prefecture too is joining the consortium to advance the social implementation and area-wide rollout of Level 4 autonomous-driving services. On Lake Yanba (the Yanba Dam reservoir), a world-first demonstration of autonomous driving for an amphibious bus was carried out. But the certainty must not be softened—this is at the demonstration and social-implementation-promotion stage, and prefecture-wide adoption is still a concept. It is not something to count as a settled future, yet it can be read as a sprout of trying to fill the weakness of the enclosing terrain with driverless vehicles. Alongside this, the Joshin Expressway (Shibukawa–Higashi-Agatsuma, 80 km) is progressing through staged construction such as the Yanba Bypass (a regional high-standard road strengthening tourism and logistics access), so the renewal of physical infrastructure also continues in parallel with the social implementation of autonomous driving.

What must not be mistaken is that autonomous driving is a force that eases the burden of movement, not a force that offsets the prefecture-wide population decline. Industry sharpened to a single point, daily life smoothed to the average, autonomous driving at the demonstration stage, and the demographic weight pulling on the whole prefecture. I write these on my table in two tiers—“forces that are arriving” and “forces that may arrive”—and view them placed on the same screen without adding them up. The individual schedules, plans, and certainties can be tracked one by one in the development roadmap at the bottom of the page.