Shimane Prefecture

The reading of Shimane lies in the point that both strength and weakness coexist within the same category of “economic strength.” The indicators run broadly above the national average and the dispersion is standard—look only at the surface of the numbers and it is not a bad profile. But trace the two poles drawing the contour and they split at the two ends of the same economic strength: the highest is the unemployment rate (= the strength of little unemployment), the lowest is the population change rate. Per-capita prefectural income and the home-ownership rate, too, stay only at a level no lower than that weakness side.

There is one more structurally important thing. The medical category is not reliant on a particular indicator but uniformly high in level. Average life expectancy too lines up as a strength in the upper ranks within the prefecture. Employment is relatively stable and people can live long and in good health—this thickness of medicine is not transient but can be read as structural. And yet, in that same prefecture, the population declines. Firm employment, long lifespans, and a falling population. The coexistence of these three is Shimane’s present position.

The weakness on the economic-strength side (the population change rate), and the structural thickness on the medical side. To place these two on the same screen is the starting point for not speaking of Shimane by the average value or the overall ranking alone. The composition in which strength and weakness coexist at the two ends of the same “economic strength” category absolutely cannot be seen in an averaged overall verdict—summarize a silver-mine prefecture as a plain prefecture, and the thickness of employment and lifespan and the weight of population decline are leveled to the same thinness. I leave those two poles on the line as separate places.

The image of what lies ahead firms up first from the demographic side. In projections based on the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Shimane is to fall to about 500,000 by 2050—about 25.9% below 2020—with the average age rising from 50.2 to 54.8. The prefecture itself places measures against population decline as the top priority in its “Second-Phase Shimane Creation Plan.” The center of social decrease is outflow by those aged 15–24 for schooling and employment. What cannot be overlooked is that this downward pressure points the same way as the “already lowest population change rate” seen in the previous section—the weak point alone is dug deeper, in a place separate from the advantage. The generational turnover concentrated in 2031–33 and the rising vacant-home ratio overlap with this too.

And yet, one point of backlight falls on that current. Izumo Murata Manufacturing is investing about ¥47 billion in Izumo City to build a new production building (construction begun March 2024, completion planned March 2026), preparing for medium- to long-term demand for multilayer ceramic capacitors. The prefecture has officially certified it as a new siting, and the certainty is at the execution stage, not a concept. While people decline in the west of the prefecture and on the remote islands, the manufacturing of the Izumo area becomes one of the few clear upsides. However, on remote islands such as Oki and in hilly and mountainous areas, the maldistribution of physicians and the aging of practicing doctors are advancing, and whether the present “uniformly high medical level” can be maintained from here on remains, in itself, a separate topic.

What remains for the reader is not to round these three—a downward population pressure facing the same way, Izumo’s local upside, and a third uncertainty that is remote-island medicine—into a single overall evaluation. The ¥47 billion investment in Izumo does not flip the image of the whole of Shimane, nor does the maldistribution of physicians in Oki carry the same meaning as the prefecture-average medical level. What I can say as someone who has made numbers a profession is only this: do not add up three things that differ in certainty and in reach. The individual schedules, plans, and degrees of certainty are lined up one by one in the development roadmap at the bottom of the page.