Yamaguchi Prefecture

Highest is public safety (crime incidents); lowest is the population change rate—Yamaguchi’s contour is shaped by these two ends. The indicators caught between them fall broadly near the national average, and the unevenness among indicators is small. It is a balanced profile where neither a standout strength nor a fatal single collapse is easy to see, and the very lack of flash can be called this prefecture’s feature.

Looking at the strength side, in addition to public safety, the birth rate (total fertility rate) and the complete unemployment rate are relatively in the upper ranks, and the stability of daily life and employment is firm at its base. On the weakness side, meanwhile, led by the population change rate, average life expectancy and per-capita prefectural income run low. Within a stable balance, the structural weaknesses of population and income coexist. Average values and overall rankings tend to conceal this coexistence.

The thickness of history and nature radiated by Hagi and Akiyoshidai, too, does not directly fill in the real numbers of population and income. Daily life and employment are stable, and yet only the numbers for population and income face downward—the present of a prefecture that sent out the patriots of the Restoration, sinking to the lower ranks in both population and income. I do not want to cover that shape with the single word “balanced” but to line it up on the same screen as a weakness lurking inside the stability.

What most strongly defines Yamaguchi’s future is the fate of the industrial complexes along the Seto Inland coast. The oil refining and petrochemicals of Shunan, Iwakuni, and elsewhere are pillars of the prefecture’s industry, and the prefecture is promoting corporate collaboration toward their decarbonization and making requests to the government as well. Idemitsu’s Tokuyama works and others, too, are advancing a transformation toward carbon neutrality by 2050. This is a two-sided issue where benefit and risk coexist in the same place—if the decarbonization transition succeeds it becomes an upside for maintaining competitiveness, but at the same time it carries the risks of transition cost and changes in the employment structure. The certainty is at the stage of promoting corporate collaboration and requests, and the outcome is not yet fixed.

Beneath that lies the weight of population dynamics. Shunan City fell from about 167,000 in 1985 to about 132,000 in 2026—about 35,000 fewer over forty years—and on the remote islands the decline and aging are expected to accelerate further. The generational turnover concentrated in 2031–33 and the phase of a rising vacant-home ratio overlap with this, pointing the same way as the structure seen in the previous section—“daily life and employment are stable, but population and income are weak.”

A present of stable daily life; a decarbonization transition of the industrial complexes where benefit and risk coexist; the prefecture-wide weight of population dynamics. In the same composition by which the weaknesses of population and income coexisted inside the stability, the decarbonization transition, too, has upside and downside back to back in the same place. Sum it into a single word and the two sides—the opportunity to maintain competitiveness and the change in the employment structure—come to look equally thin. I want to swing the uncertainty of the transition neither too high nor too low, and keep the benefit and the risk lined up on separate clocks. What stage the corporate collaboration and decarbonization requests are at now can be checked item by item in the development roadmap below.