Aichi Prefecture

Aichi’s economic strength is not an apparent height supported by a single breadwinner. The indicators are near the national average and the scatter is standard, but the two ends reveal the character—the highest is “per-capita prefectural income,” the lowest public safety (number of crimes). What catches the eye is the structure of the strengths: income, the rate of population change, and the unemployment rate all occupy the upper national ranks together. It is a prefecture of thick underlying strength, with a structural strength that does not rely on a particular indicator and is not transient.

What is non-obvious against that underlying strength is the point where the unemployment rate and the home-ownership rate, which in many prefectures nationwide tend to move together (correlation 0.52), face the opposite way in Aichi alone. The employment environment is in the upper national ranks, yet the home-ownership rate sinks to the lower ranks, and the number of physicians also runs low. Even when the total volume of the economy is high, it is not necessarily proportional to the ease of acquiring a home or to part of the living infrastructure—that the size of affluence and its distribution and livability are separate stories is a calm fact the data shows.

Even in a prefecture where the economy is structurally strong, that strength does not reach into every corner of daily life. That is the point worth reading in this prefecture. The thickness of underlying strength, and the non-linkage by which that thickness does not extend to housing and medical care—I leave both lined up on separate layers. If I speak of a rich prefecture only by the total volume of its affluence, the meaning of the numbers that leak becomes invisible.

Aichi’s future is at a phase where a new layer is riding atop the thickness of manufacturing. The symbol is “STATION Ai,” which opened in Tsurumai, Nagoya City, in October 2024. Based on the Aichi-Startup Strategy, it is one of Japan’s largest open-innovation bases, where startups and leading companies from home and abroad gather across a floor area of about 23,000 m². This is not a concept but already opened, becoming an upside that adds a core of new industry to a thick underlying economy. Along with it, the redevelopment of the Nagoya Station front, linked to the Chuo Shinkansen maglev (Shinagawa–Nagoya), is also advancing. However, JR Central abandoned its 2027 opening target in March 2024, and while the station-front redevelopment proceeds in stages, the timing of the whole-line opening is uncertain—I read these two at differing degrees of certainty.

On the same scale as that upside is placed the Nankai Trough megaquake, which in the long-term evaluation of the government’s Earthquake Research Committee is placed in the top-rank probability band of occurrence. Aichi, including its coast, is liable to strong shaking and tsunami impact. The timing of occurrence is uncertain, but the certainty is an official government figure and the scale of impact is extremely large. Onto this overlaps a phase of generational turnover concentrated in 2031–33 and a rising vacant-home ratio.

A structurally strong economy, an already-opened core of new industry, a maglev whose timing moves, an earthquake risk of the top rank, and a certain demographic weight. The more a prefecture is one of the few structurally strong ones whose economy is not one-legged, the greater what it could lose in a single blow—strength and fragility are written on the front and back of the same prefecture. I do not smooth this into one; I want to keep observing it lined up on separate scales. The individual schedules, plans, and degrees of certainty are lined up by stage in the development roadmap at the bottom of the page.