Kagawa Prefecture

The highest birth rate (total fertility rate), around 10th nationally, is followed by the complete unemployment rate and the physician count (per 100,000 population) as relative strengths, and the three of childrearing, employment, and medicine quietly support Kagawa’s underlying capacity. The indicators other than these line up broadly near the national average, and the unevenness among indicators is small. It is a “balanced profile” where neither a standout strength nor a single collapse is easy to see.

Lowest, on the other hand, is public safety (crime incidents per 1,000 population), around 37th nationally, followed by per-capita prefectural income and the population change rate as weaknesses. That public safety, which has been moving in the direction of improvement, nonetheless forms the prefecture’s weakest contour is non-obvious. The very lack of flash is this prefecture’s feature, and average values and overall rankings tend to conceal this inner gradation.

The strength of udon tourism, too, does not directly fill in the real numbers of public safety or income. Neither a standout nor a collapse—in Kagawa, that very flatness is the prefecture’s character itself. Across the smallest area in Japan, it has spread childrearing, employment, and medicine out flat, and continued for half a century without a standout or a collapse. To read the flatness not as a flaw but as a character—it is not a flashy discovery, but I take it as the minimum practice for looking at the smallest prefecture squarely as the smallest prefecture.

Kagawa’s future holds a distinctive upside that connects the smallest prefecture by area to the world. The Setouchi Triennale is held once every three years on the islands of the Seto Inland Sea centered on Kagawa—a festival of contemporary art that gathers about one million people from Japan and abroad during its sessions, to be held again in 2025. Furthermore, in the Sunport Takamatsu district, the Kagawa Prefectural Arena—one of the largest in the Chugoku-Shikoku region with a capacity of 10,000—was completed in 2025, with a university campus the same year and the opening of a Mandarin Oriental hotel planned for 2027. For a prefecture where “the flatness itself is the character,” as seen in the previous section, these are clear upsides that work by being placed in the Takamatsu area. The certainty differs by stage—the art festival is held regularly, the arena is already complete, the hotel is planned for 2027—and I read them with those stages distinguished.

However, “flatness” also means there is little room to absorb the coming weight. Kagawa’s population has continued to decline since its 1999 peak, falling to about 389,000 by 2040 in the projections of the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. The generational turnover concentrated in 2031–33 and the phase of a rising vacant-home ratio push this flat present in the direction opposite to its current advantage. Whereas the benefit of the art festival and Sunport works locally in the Takamatsu area, the population dynamics work across the entire prefecture—a force on a different layer.

A flat present; the local upside of the artistic culture of the islands and Takamatsu; the prefecture-wide weight of population dynamics, with little room to spare. Do not add the benefit and the weight together—flatness, while not a weakness, also means there is little room to absorb either an upside or a downside. As someone who has made numbers a profession, I want to resist, every time, the temptation to count a local benefit into the benefit of the whole prefecture. What stage the regular holding of the art festival and the various Sunport facilities are at now can be checked one by one in the development roadmap below.