Can a 'quiet' town in Japan become Asia's Silicon Valley?

Can a 'quiet' town in Japan become Asia's Silicon Valley?

Tokushima, a town seen as a relatively underdeveloped area of ​​Japan, is not the kind of place one would expect to see a new school for young entrepreneurs interested in technology.

There was not much development going on here, which is probably why so few people know about this quiet town on the southern island of Shikoku.

But the area, which is mostly elderly and the population is dwindling, will soon welcome a group of young people.

In April next year, a school of tech entrepreneurship (the first of its kind in Japan) will open in the town of Tokushima, Kamiyama.

Students aged 15 to 20 will be taught engineering, programming and designing as well as marketing. They will also learn how to pitch their business plans to investors to raise money.

Behind it is Chikahiro Terada, boss of Tokyo-based startup Sansan, which specializes in digitizing business cards.

Terada does not belong to Tokushima, so why did he choose this area? This story starts from the year 2010.

"Twelve years ago, I set up an office here because I heard that Kamiyama is an interesting town where old houses have high-speed internet," he says.

When Terada visited, he met a local businessman, Shinya Ominami, who was responsible for installing the best internet in the city.

"I thought that if I said I wanted to open an office here without helping the area, I might not be allowed," Terada explains. So he offered to teach computing to the local, elderly population.

But Ominami only wanted Terada to prove that a Tokyo-based IT company could have an office here. After the success of Sansan, other companies followed suit setting up offices in Kamiyama, which has a population of less than five thousand.

"It was exciting to see the city come back to life," Terada says. Then I started thinking about what else I could do to contribute to society and that's when I thought: education.'

"I became an entrepreneur after graduating from university but I don't remember school teaching me any important skills for starting a business."

To build the school, Terada received two billion yen in donations through a government system. Under the scheme, middle- to upper-income city dwellers can donate money to a rural area of ​​their choice in exchange for a reduction in their income and property taxes.

More than 30 companies are also now financial supporters of this new school. These are mostly Japanese but some are international, such as the accountancy giant Deloitte.

Traditionally, young people in Japan want a secure career and choose to join a large firm.

But Terada says many people are now entrepreneurial and his projects have seen a lot of interest from potential students, with the school initially having 40 seats but receiving more than 200 applications from all over Japan.

The school is also committed to a 50:50 ratio of girls to boys, a step in the right direction in a country where start-ups and businesses are dominated by men.

The announcement to set up the school comes at a time when Japan's government pension investment fund is set to start investing in the country's best new startups.

The country's former digital minister, Karen Makishima, told me that startups in Japan had not been successful for many years, but now it is expected to improve.

"We will do away with regulations or rules for analog systems and focus on these digital start-up companies." We are encouraging them to start not only in cities but also in rural areas.

But while the government expects these new startups to be super high-tech, the country also has one of the world's poorest aging populations. Over the past two decades, Japan has digitized many things. But the poor, who constitute about one-third of the country's population, are left behind.

"I don't know how to use a smartphone," Sasaki, 83, told me.

I met her and three of her friends a short distance from the new business school where she was waiting for a 'supermarket on wheels' (a market truck that drives up to you) called Tokushimaru.

As the name suggests, this startup, which is a lifeline for thousands of senior citizens in the country, also originated from this region.

When the company started 10 years ago, they only had two trucks locally, but today they have more than 1,000 vans on the roads across Japan and annual sales of 20 billion yen.

More than 90 percent of its users are over 80 years of age.

Once a week, Tokushimaru delivery driver Junichi Kishimoto travels to Kamiyama with everyone's orders.

"She remembers what I want to buy every week," says Sasaki. He comes every week, so if my grandkids are coming on Sunday, I request to bring something special.'

For many customers, some of whom are single after the death of their partners, it's also an opportunity to catch up with friends as they all wait outside as a group for the van to arrive.

For 38-year-old Kishimoto, the purpose of joining the company was not for the salary but to help the elderly It wasn't.

"I used to work in a nursing home and I realized that some residents came to stay there because they were worried about their daily meals," he says. I believed it would be better for them to stay at home, so I thought about what I could do to help them and then I found out about Tokushimaru.'

The idea for the business came to the company's founder, Tatsuya Sumitomo, because his own parents, in their 80s, were struggling to afford everyday groceries.

"When I started Tokushimaru, I knew the market would grow for the next 20 to 30 years because the demand was certain and society wasn't providing a solution," he says.

But the company is also moving with the times. They are also testing an app that will be available over the next two years. Many other personalities have started the same business and Sumitomo is also aware that the next generation of consumers is more tech-savvy.

"Those born in the 70s will become our customers sooner and have a better understanding of the internet, so we are integrating our supermarket trucks with online shopping."

Sumitomo is an entrepreneur who has also started many other businesses over the past 30 years.

He never tires of praising local businessman Shinya Omenami and has high hopes for Kamiyama's new boarding school. "One person is making such a big difference in this rural area," he says.

Omenami didn't have time for an interview while we were in Tokushima, but he and Chikahiro Terada of 'Sansan' plan to turn Kamiyama into Asia's Silicon Valley.

It may take a long time for that dream to become a reality, but one man's vision to reinvent his hometown with high-speed internet may have brought the area a brighter future than he ever imagined. Didn't even think.