Mie Prefecture

Mie’s headline is “flatness,” but what best supports that flatness is a single point that cannot be explained by underlying strength. The indicators gather near the national average with small ups and downs, and neither a showy break-out nor a fatal single-point collapse is easy to see—up to here it is the typical balanced type. Drawing the contour are the two poles: the highest is the “unemployment rate,” the lowest the “number of physicians (per 100,000 people).” What deserves attention is that the unemployment rate runs about 1.8σ above the level expected from the overall capability. Beneath the flat overall verdict, a hidden strength above the underlying level is buried.

What is structurally important is that the overall advantage in effect depends on a single line, the “unemployment rate” (57% of the strength). Pull that pillar from your mind once, and the advantage nearly disappears. What is further non-obvious is that the home-ownership rate and public safety (number of crimes), which in many prefectures nationwide tend to move together (correlation 0.40), face the opposite way in Mie alone—a twist inside the balanced type where the home-ownership rate is in the upper national ranks yet public safety is in the lower. The average value and the overall ranking easily conceal such single-point dependence and inverse correlation.

The high standing of Ise Jingu, too, does not directly fill in the real numbers of the count of physicians or public safety. The standing of tourism and the statistics of daily life must be read as separate axes of evaluation. Once you realize that the numbers of a prefecture with over a thousand years of standing ride on a single line—the unemployment rate—the thinness of that pillar suddenly starts to bother you. I open up the contents of the summary “an average prefecture” and check it every time.

Mie has, until now, had no high-speed railway station. To that prefecture, a station of the Chuo Shinkansen maglev is now set to come, with a site within Kameyama City as a leading candidate. In March 2024 the prefecture drew up the “Mie Prefecture Maglev Basic Strategy,” taking the stance of spreading the opening’s effect across the whole prefecture. For the flat prefecture of “a single leg of the unemployment rate” seen in the previous section, this becomes an upside that could change its character. But I write the certainty precisely—the station is at the stage of a candidate within Kameyama City and its location is not finally fixed, and moreover JR Central has abandoned the 2027 opening of the Shinagawa–Nagoya section, so the time axis of the whole-line opening is fluid. The “direction in which a first station comes” and the “uncertainty of when its timing settles” must be read separately. From here, it is the reader’s domain of decision-making.

On the same scale as that direction 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. Mie, including its coast, is liable to strong shaking and tsunami impact; in the 1944 Tonankai earthquake most of the prefecture recorded a seismic intensity of 5–6. 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 present on a single leg, a timing-undetermined upside that is the first high-speed railway, an earthquake risk of the top rank, and a certain demographic weight. I do not round these into one; I want to read them on my own time axis without mistaking their respective degrees of certainty and directions. Prefectures where a certain disaster, an undetermined benefit, and certain demographics line up on the same screen are few—smooth them to the same thinness, and the most important difference in certainty disappears. The individual schedules, plans, and degrees of certainty can be traced one by one in the development roadmap at the bottom of the page.