Tag: Government

Until now, the word “inbound” has mostly been used in the context of tourism. People come from overseas. Products are sold. Culture is shared. Inbound meant creating systems that welcomed people, goods, and money into the country.

But today, a new kind of inbound is beginning to take shape.
Not people—but data—is coming.
In other words, we’re entering an era in which “information processing” crosses borders and comes to Japan.

Startups and research institutions from around the world are beginning to choose Japan as the place to train and deploy their AI models—not despite the regulations, but because of them. Because the legal frameworks are stable. Because the power supply is consistent. Because the local infrastructure is safe. And above all, because Japan is seen as a place where things can run in peace. There’s also the institutional integrity—data won’t leak even if someone attempts to subvert the system.

What’s happening here isn’t outsourcing or delegation.
What’s coming is not people, but computation, processing, information itself, and the use of infrastructure.
This is not tourism. It is the use of Japan’s physical infrastructure.

I believe this is a phenomenon we should call digital inbound.

Within this structure, Japan’s greatest value is in being a trustworthy foundation.
It’s not just about computing power, power grid reliability, or legal frameworks.
It’s about confidence that data won’t be extracted without permission.
Stability, knowing that rules won’t suddenly change.
Trust, that when something goes wrong, someone will be there to respond.
A proven track record of resilience in the face of disasters.
These intangible layers are beginning to define the value of Japan as a digital territory.

In the financial world, places like Manhattan, Hong Kong, and later Singapore once played similar roles.
They became “locations” where information and capital gathered—not because people were already there, but because the systems in place made it safe for people and information to arrive.

Now, the world no longer revolves around cities with growing populations.
AI doesn’t need crowds.
IoT doesn’t require human presence.
In fact, the very absence of people may make certain environments ideal for IoT.
Where there is land, energy, and social calm, AI and IoT will come to live.

In places once dismissed as “worthless because no one lives there,” we may soon see a new logic emerge—“valuable precisely because no one is there.”

Land that’s comfortable for AI.
Legal systems that are gentle on data.
Energy infrastructure with minimal friction.
Taken together, these factors are already starting to shift how Japan is being reevaluated by the world.

Democracy, at its core, is built on the premise that sovereignty belongs to the people. But as we’ve passed through the information age and entered the age of AI, the very question of what sovereignty means is beginning to shift.

In today’s world—where computational resources, electricity, and data can influence the fate of nations and the direction of society—how can citizens, as sovereign actors, recognize and exercise their sovereignty?

In the information age, sovereignty meant choosing which sources to trust, which platforms to participate in, and which algorithms to entrust with our attention. But in the age of AI, that definition requires a deeper level of inquiry.

For example, we now have to ask: which computational resources processed the information that underpins our decisions?
Where were the models trained? Under what national legal frameworks and ethical principles were they built?
Where does the electricity come from, and who controls the compute processes?
All of these questions are directly linked to how and what we think.
It increasingly feels as if computational resources are becoming the new foundation of sovereignty.

In this era, having the right to vote may no longer be enough to be a true sovereign.
We also need to understand where our data is stored, under what nation’s rules our cloud operates, and which computational infrastructures are supporting our decision-making.
That ability to understand and choose is what I would call the literacy required of sovereign citizens in the era of computational resources.

If we entrust everything to Big Tech, we are, often without realizing it, relinquishing our sovereignty.
Which compute environments can we access?
To which computational infrastructures do we submit our data?
These may now be political rights in their own way.

So what kind of literacy do we need in this age?

Not just technical understanding, but literacy that spans systems, energy, ethics, and the meaning of decentralization.
Knowing which computational ecosystem we live upon may be one of the most important forms of awareness we can have.
That, I believe, will be a new prerequisite for democracy in the age of AI.

The cloud was once seen as belonging to no one—or at least, that’s how it felt.

Despite being built and operated by someone, we’ve long used it freely, entrusted our data to it, and become dependent on it, without treating it like “land” that can be owned. The cloud exists physically on some server somewhere, yet where it is has never seemed important.

In that sense, “cloud” was a triumph of branding.

But now that AI has become foundational to everything, and computational resources have emerged as the new currency of power, the cloud is once again under scrutiny.
Whose is it?
Who owns it?
Who has the right to use it?
Who controls access?

Just like land, water, or energy once did, the cloud now wavers between being public and private.

Today, decentralized data centers—what could be called distributed cloud infrastructures—are starting to appear in various regions. These are not provided by governments, nor should they be monopolized by any single corporation. Ideally, they should be owned by communities, used by schools and hospitals, and joined by citizens. These networks of computational resources could function as part of the societal infrastructure, much like waterworks or power grids once did.

Of course, this may be inefficient. It might be costly. Integration with existing infrastructure won’t be easy.
But between a future where everything is entrusted to one massive compute environment somewhere far away, and a society where small, reliable pockets of compute capacity exist across regions—surely the latter deserves more attention and discussion.

Beyond technical concerns, the cloud also needs diversity—politically and culturally.
This diversity means freedom of computation, freedom of thought, and freedom of choice.

So who owns the cloud?
I believe that should be decided by its users.
Perhaps it’s time to shift from a model where we’re merely “allowed to use” the cloud, to one where we “own it together.”

There are resources in society that are no longer in use. They once had value, but over time, as structures changed, they were forgotten, left behind, and left untouched. Vast tracts of land abandoned due to natural disasters or depopulation. Decommissioned power infrastructure. Obsolete telecom stations. Remote plots of land and tunnels no one visits anymore. These are resources left behind by shifting industrial structures—forgotten, but not gone.

If the structure changes again, these resources may take on new meaning. Especially in an era driven by computational power, these physical infrastructures can function as “foundations for computation.” There’s electricity. Land that can dissipate heat. Environments with high tolerance for noise. Cheap land and municipalities open to collaboration. Water sources and climates ideal for cooling. From a different perspective, these may have always been “ideal infrastructures.” It’s not that they lacked value—they simply hadn’t been redefined yet.

When urban depopulation accelerates and rural populations decline, we tend to assume that the value of those regions is lost. But I believe that’s a human-centered—and deeply arrogant—assumption. For AI and IoT, the presence of people is not essential. What matters is whether data can be collected, electricity is available, and there’s access to the internet. For them, the optimal environment isn’t necessarily the city. In fact, rural areas—less interference, more available power and space, and infrastructure that can be redesigned from scratch—might be “natural” habitats for AI and IoT. Just as wildflowers grow where human hands do not reach, it is in these quiet places that the information infrastructure of the future may take root.

In finance, Manhattan once served as a hub, and later, Singapore did too—each backed by policy, tax regimes, and geopolitical positioning. If “geographic advantage” takes on new meaning, then Japan’s rural regions still have a chance. Japan is a rule-of-law country with stable power infrastructure and a high degree of safety. From the standpoint of human-centric life, it may appear resource-poor, but if we look across the country with localized renewable energy in mind, these “low-value” areas could become ideal foundations for the next generation of infrastructure.

Modern computational infrastructure no longer needs to be concentrated in urban centers. In fact, to avoid the shortages of electricity, space, and cooling found in cities, it will spread outward—to the periphery, to rural regions. As this trend continues, the logic that “unused means worthless” will flip. Places once dismissed may now be rediscovered as the foundational base for computational resources—valuable precisely because no one else is using them.

And it’s not just resources being redefined. Entire regions can reclaim purpose by changing the scale of evaluation. Turning forgotten resources into assets is not simply about buildings or machinery—it marks a quiet update to the structure of society itself.

Traditionally, a state has been defined by physical territory and the institutions attached to it. Tax systems, laws, currencies, education, communications, and infrastructure—all layered over geographic space to create the framework we call a nation.

But in recent years, a new layer has quietly begun to emerge. It is a realm structured not within physical space but within a computational dimension—an additional space layered atop existing infrastructure. One where the flow of time is not bound by human perception, and where even space-time itself may be transcended.

Just as the cloud now operates above physical data centers. Just as blockchain has been layered on top of the existing internet. If this trajectory continues, we may soon see a structure that resembles a “state overlaid upon the state.”

Currency no longer has to be issued by governments. Data no longer needs to cross borders. Identity no longer depends solely on passports. Communication flows across regulatory regimes.
In this context, functions like information, computation, authentication, currency, and governance—what we once considered the essential operations of a state—are absorbed into higher-order structures. They become meta-layers. And these new structures are not necessarily designed by states.

This trajectory points toward something I would describe as an “overlay state.”
It sits atop existing nations, supplements or overrides legacy institutions, and operates on a new logic. It is governed not by borders, but by protocols. Not by passports, but by keys. Not by laws, but by smart contracts. Not by armies, but by compute resources and cryptographic systems.

The distributed networks now rising around the world under the banner of decentralization may not merely be technical experiments. They may be the early signs of a new kind of sovereignty.
Whether this becomes a new form of state, a corporate construct, or something else entirely—we cannot yet say.
But what I do feel, more strongly each day, is that it is already layering itself over society.