Toyama Prefecture

Toyama’s advantage does not sharpen to a single point; rather, it stands in the form of a level slightly above the national benchmark spread across a wide range of indicators. Neither a strength standing on one leg nor a fatally broken weakness floats to the surface. The two ends are carried by the highest, the unemployment rate (economic strength), and the lowest, the rate of population change (economic strength). This very lack of flash can be called Toyama’s characteristic.

On the strength side, beyond the unemployment rate, the home-ownership rate (housing) and life expectancy (medical care) rank high—the foundations of daily life, employment, housing, and health, are uniformly high. On the weakness side, meanwhile, beyond the rate of population change, the number of physicians (per 100,000 people) and public safety (number of crimes) sink relatively low. Even with a high total volume of affluence, structural points of contention—population and the medical-care system—remain on the inside. The average and the overall ranking tend to conceal this unevenness.

The foundation of daily life is solid. But whether people will increase is a separate number—and Toyama’s difficulty lies precisely there. Sum up as the single word “stable type” a prefecture where employment, housing, and health are all at a high level yet only the population points downward, and its lowest indicator quietly disappears from view. I write the solidity of the foundation and the thinning of the population on my table as two separate numbers.

How does the future side shake the solid foundation seen in the previous section? At its center is demographics. The generational turnover concentrated in 2031–33 and the rising vacant-home ratio push downward, pointing the opposite way from the present national advantage—a phase that can be read as a possible turning point.

In step with this population decline, Toyama carries a plain but structural future burden. The parallel conventional line, spun off from management with the extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen, is operated by the third-sector “Ainokaze Toyama Railway,” but with population decline along the line and the spread of remote work, ridership is projected to fall about 13.5% by 2030 compared with 2019. Moreover, much of the facilities were completed in the late 1960s and early 1970s—more than 50 years since construction—and the large-scale repairs and renewals that come with aging are estimated to require about ¥12.1 billion over ten years. Behind the benefit of the bullet train, the maintenance cost of the conventional line coexists as a weight pointing the same way as population decline—an unglamorous but substantial forward-looking factor.

The orderly present, the demographic weight that points the same way, and the maintenance burden of the parallel conventional line. I do not round the three into one; I lean neither toward optimism nor toward pessimism, and read each on its own clock. The very picture in which, behind the glamour of the bullet train, the aging of conventional-line facilities over 50 years old quietly coexists is, as I take it, the contour of the prefecture of Toyama. The individual schedules, plans, and certainties can be tracked one by one in the development roadmap at the bottom of the page.