Tsu

Tsu pays for part of its roads, parks and school works with speedboat gambling. Officially, it is Mie Prefecture's capital on Ise Bay, with 266,353 residents on the city's September 1, 2025 register, and the largest municipal area in Mie. The map tells the deeper story. On January 1, 2006, ten municipalities were fused into the new Tsu, creating a city of roughly 710 square kilometres. Modern Tsu is therefore not a natural urban core so much as an administrative container holding fishing coast, commuter suburbs, inland farms and mountain villages under one budget.

That is why Boat Race Tsu matters more than its postcard image suggests. The city's own boat-race division says profits from the course are used for roads, drainage channels, parks, school construction and other civic projects. That makes the racecourse a fiscal organ, not local colour. A 2020 municipal column made the dependence plain: after twelve years of zero transfers to the general account from 2004 through 2015, the recovered business was expected to send ¥2 billion ($18 million) back to city finances in fiscal 2020. Tsu is not just a prefectural office town. It is a merged municipality that uses a public-gambling cash engine to smooth the cost of governing a wide and uneven territory.

The mechanism is homeostasis with redundancy. The prefectural-capital functions, the racecourse and the old municipalities give Tsu several overlapping revenue and service nodes instead of one fragile centre. Path dependence matters because the 2006 merger created one legal, fiscal and bureaucratic shell; unwinding it would be costlier than continually redistributing revenue and administration inside it. Tsu behaves like a Portuguese man o' war: many specialised bodies tied into one colony, surviving because the whole shares circulation and function better than the parts could alone. If the racecourse subsidy weakened for long, the strain would show first in exactly the peripheral services the merger was supposed to protect.