Tottori Prefecture

A prefecture whose income is the lowest in the nation is the thickest in the number of physicians—Tottori’s character fits within this seemingly mismatched combination. The indicators as a whole gather near the national average with small undulations, and neither a standout single-point collapse nor a flashy strength is easy to see. What actually sets the contour of that flat look are the two poles: the highest is the “number of physicians (per 100,000 people),” the lowest is “per-capita prefectural income.”

Within that, what is structurally important is that the strength of “medicine” is not reliant on a single particular indicator but uniformly high in level. The birth rate (total fertility rate) too is in the upper ranks, and medicine and child-rearing together support the upper side of the contour. On the other hand, the lower side concentrates on economic strength, where the lowness of prefectural income and the weakness of the population change rate overlap in the same category. It is the calm composition the data shows—that the total volume of affluence and the stability of daily life are separate stories.

The strength of the dunes as a tourism resource also does not directly fill in the real number that is income. Tottori’s character lies precisely in this gap—level the mismatched combination of lowest income and thickest medicine with an average, and the two ends look the same thinness. I leave the two poles on the line as they are.

Tottori’s future first takes shape through “scale.” As the prefecture with the smallest population (about 537,000), Tottori is projected by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research to fall to about 406,000 by 2050. The prefecture itself sets “building a sustainable region, small though it may be” as the banner of its comprehensive strategy and its SDGs Future City Plan. The generational turnover concentrated in 2031–33 and the rising vacant-home ratio overlap with this, and on top of the “lowest income, thick medicine” structure seen in the previous section, the scale constraint of the smallest population continues from here on.

Against that constraint, Tottori is making a homegrown move that flips the very conception of its resources. It offers the Tottori Sand Dunes as a proving field called “Lunar Terrace,” assuming a lunar-surface environment, and works on developing human resources for the space industry and improving productivity in the construction industry (the Tottori Sand Dunes Lunar-Surface Project). It is the idea of repurposing a tourism signboard into a place of research and demonstration. As for certainty, it is being advanced as a prefectural project but is small in scale and not the kind of thing that moves land prices as a whole—read it as a bud by which the smallest-population prefecture tries to make up for the disadvantage of scale through ideas.

A present of lowest income and thick medicine, the weight of scale that is the smallest population, and a small bud turning the dunes into a proving ground. Read the bud still as a bud—the idea of repurposing a tourism signboard into a lunar-surface proving ground is very like Tottori, but count it as a fixed upside while still small in scale and you will surely misread it. I draw the line “the bud stays a bud, the scale stays the scale,” and observe, as it is, the attempt by the smallest-population prefecture to make up for the disadvantage of scale through ideas. At what stage the Lunar-Surface Project and the population projections now stand can be checked one by one in the development roadmap below.