Ehime Prefecture

The highest “physician count (per 100,000 population)” and the lowest “population change rate”—these two poles set Ehime’s contour. The indicators lined up between them are 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 outward feature.

What is structurally important, however, is that its overall advantage in effect depends on a single pillar, the “physician count (per 100,000 population)” (57% of the strength). The complete unemployment rate and the birth rate, too, slightly exceed the average, but once you remove the pillar of the physician count from your mind, the advantage all but disappears. On the other hand, the population change rate, per-capita prefectural income, and average life expectancy are in the lower national ranks, and the word “balanced profile” tends to conceal both the single-point dependence and the downward weaknesses at once.

The strength of Dogo Onsen and mikan in tourism and industry, too, does not directly fill in the real numbers of population and income. The more one summarizes it as a “well-balanced prefecture,” the more it is worth questioning the thinness of that pillar—I treat the statistical single pillar of the physician count and the local core of Imabari’s maritime city, which does not show up easily in statistics, as separate pillars. Cram two pillars into the single word “balanced profile,” and the thinness of one and the thickness of the other come to look equally thin.

I wrote in the previous section that it “stands on the single leg of the physician count,” but in reading the future, another core must be added. Imabari City is “Japan’s largest maritime city,” where shipping, shipbuilding, and marine machinery cluster within a single municipality; Imabari Shipbuilding is at the top tier of domestic shipbuilding in construction capacity, and the city alone accounts for about 20% of Japan’s newbuilding market. This does not readily appear in statistical indicators, but it is a structural economic core deeply rooted in the locality and can support the future as a pillar separate from the physician count.

The downward pressure, however, is heavy. By the prefecture’s own analysis, Ehime’s population is expected to fall by about 40% from 2020 to 2060, with the aging rate rising from 33.2% to 44.1%. The generational turnover concentrated in 2031–33 and the phase of a rising vacant-home ratio overlap in the same direction. Whereas the cluster of maritime industry works in the Imabari area, the population decline works across the entire prefecture—a force on a different layer.

A statistical present of a single physician count; a local structural core that is a maritime city; a prefecture-wide population decline of roughly 40%. Distinguishing both reach and certainty as separate things is Ehime’s practice—Imabari’s shipbuilding cluster, hard to see in statistics, supports the prefecture by a logic separate from the physician-count indicator. I want to write the statistical image and the local image on separate tables and view them without adding them up. What stage each factor is at now can be reconciled item by item in the development roadmap below.