Tag: Japan

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Japan’s Manufacturing and Its Responsibility in Cybersecurity

For decades, Japanese manufacturing has been synonymous with “quality.” Precision, durability, craftsmanship, and trust have defined the country’s industrial identity.
Yet in an era shaped by AI and IoT, quality can no longer be understood solely as physical robustness. Hardware itself has become a target, and Japan’s machines, components, and devices now operate within a fundamentally new risk environment where cyberspace and the physical world are directly connected.

Until recently, cyberattacks focused primarily on digital systems: servers, networks, authentication layers.
Today, however, attackers aim at physical devices—automotive ECUs, robot actuators, factory control systems, medical equipment, communication modules.
If the internal control of these systems is compromised, the consequences extend far beyond data breaches: accidents, shutdowns, and physical malfunctions become real possibilities.

This shift carries particular weight for Japan.
Japanese hardware underpins a vast range of global equipment—precision machinery, automotive systems, robotics, and embedded components.
A single vulnerability in a Japanese-made part could serve as an entry point for attackers into systems around the world.
Conversely, if Japan succeeds in securing these layers, it becomes a crucial pillar of global cyber resilience.

The core issue is that traditional concepts of manufacturing quality are no longer synchronized with modern cyber risk.
Manufacturing evaluates safety and reliability on long time horizons; cyber threats evolve on the scale of days or hours.
Physical and digital timelines were once independent, but AIoT has merged them—forcing hardware and cybersecurity to be designed within the same conceptual layer.

In other words, manufacturing and cybersecurity can no longer be separated.
The idea of “adding security later” no longer fits the reality of interconnected devices.
Security must be integrated across every stage: the component level, assembly level, device level, and network integration.
The definition of quality must expand from “does not break” to “cannot be broken, even under attack.”

Globally, a culture of testing and attacking hardware is emerging.
Vehicles, industrial machinery, and critical infrastructure control panels are publicly examined, and specialists search for vulnerabilities that lead to corrective improvements.
This trend mirrors the evolution from software bug bounties toward hardware-level security assessment.
Such environments—where offensive and defensive testing coexist—directly contribute to elevating industrial standards.

Yet awareness of hardware security remains uneven across nations.
In Japan, the reputation for robust and safe manufacturing often leads to complacency: devices are assumed secure because they are well-made.
Paradoxically, this confidence can obscure the need for systematic vulnerability testing, turning manufacturing strengths into latent cyber risks.

To maintain global trust in the years ahead, Japan must design manufacturing and security as a unified discipline.
The production process itself must function simultaneously as a security process.
A country known for its hardware must also be capable of guaranteeing the safety of that hardware—this dual responsibility will define Japan’s competitive position.

Japan today carries responsibility not only for manufacturing the world relies on, but also for ensuring the cybersecurity of that manufactured world.
Manufacturers, infrastructure operators, telecom providers, local governments, research institutions—each must coordinate to secure the nation’s industrial foundation.
Cultivating a perspective that connects manufacturing with cyber defense is essential.
It is this integration that will sustain global confidence in Japanese technology and define the next evolution of “Japan Quality.”

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Japan as an Information Market and the Computational Power of Local Cities

Financial markets once had clear centers of gravity—New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore. Each era had its “world’s number-one market,” a place where capital, people, and rules converged. But today’s financial world is fragmented. Regulation and geopolitics have dispersed activity, and the idea of a single location one must watch has nearly disappeared.
If the world seeks a new center, what will it be? I believe the answer is the “information market.”

By information market, I do not mean a marketplace for trading data. It is a composite system: computational power, data, algorithms, the infrastructure that runs them, the people who operate them, and the rules that guarantee trust. When the choice of where to train an AI model—and under which legal and cultural framework to operate it—becomes a source of significant economic value, the information market will rival or surpass the importance of financial markets.

From this perspective, Japan cannot be excluded.
It is a stable rule-of-law nation with minimal risk of arbitrary seizures or retroactive regulations. Its power grid is remarkably reliable, with extremely low outage rates. Natural disasters occur, yet recovery is fast—earning Japan a reputation as a place where “things return to normal.” Additionally, Japan still retains a manufacturing foundation capable of designing and producing hardware, including semiconductors.
Taken together, these characteristics make Japan uniquely qualified as a place to “entrust information.”

Viewed through the lens of an information market, Japan has the right to stand at the “center.” Its position—neither the United States nor China—can be a geopolitical weakness, but also a strength when acting as a neutral infrastructure provider. Japan also has the institutional calmness to redesign rules around data ownership and privacy. The challenge is that its potential remains constrained by a Tokyo-centric mindset.

A Japanese information market cannot be built by focusing on Tokyo alone.
What is required is a shift: assuming that local cities must hold computational power. Until now, the role of local regions was to attract people and companies. From this point forward, they must be reframed as entities that attract computation and data. This is not a competition for population but a competition for information and processing.

Japan has many regions with renewable energy, surplus electricity, and land. Many of them enjoy cooler climates and access to water, which are favorable for cooling infrastructure. With proper planning for disaster risk, these regions can host mid-scale data centers and edge nodes—allowing each locality to own computational power.
This would create a distributed domestic information market that exists alongside, not beneath, Tokyo-centric cloud structures.

For local cities, possessing computational power is not merely about installing servers.
Services such as autonomous driving, drone logistics, and remote medicine depend on ultra-low latency and local trust. Japan’s regions—low population density, stable infrastructure, and defined geography—are ideal as real-world testbeds. If the computational layer behind these services resides locally, then each region becomes a site of the information market.

A similar structure appears at the level of individual homes. As I wrote in the 3LDDK article, the idea of embedding small-scale generation and computing into houses transforms residential units into local nodes. When aggregated at the town level, these nodes form clusters; when interconnected across municipalities, they become regional clouds.
Rather than relying entirely on centralized hyperscale clouds, local cities gain autonomy through computational power.

Financial history offers a useful analogy. Financial centers were places where capital, talent, and rules concentrated. Future information markets will concentrate computational power, data, and governance. But unlike finance, information markets will be physically distributed.
Networks of data centers in local cities—linked through invisible wiring—will collectively form a single “Japan Market.” From abroad, this appears not as a dispersed system but as a coherent, trustworthy platform.

The critical question is not “Where should we place data centers?” but “How should we design the system?”
Merely placing servers in local regions is insufficient. Market design must weave together electricity, land, and data flows while clarifying revenue distribution, risk ownership, and governance. Only then can Japan move from being a location for data centers to being the rules-maker of the information market itself.

Japan as an information market, and local cities as holders of computational power—these two visions are, in truth, one picture.
A system in which regions contribute their own compute and their own data, forming a market through federation rather than centralization. Whether Japan can articulate and implement this structure will determine the country’s position over the next decade.
That, I believe, is the question now placed before us.

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Digital Deficit

I just finished reading the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s (METI) PIVOT Project report.

For years I have argued that electricity and computational capacity resources are becoming the new basis of value for nations and companies alike. The METI report, Digital Economy Report 2025, visualises the same issue through the statistical fact of “digital deficit.” The critical takeaway is clear: we haven’t been earning in the very domains where value is generated.

The report, grounded in SDX – Software Defined Everything, also warns that the export competitiveness of automobiles and industrial machinery will depend increasingly on software. Confronting the “hidden digital deficit” of the SDX era and acting early with a long-term strategy is indispensable.

One concrete idea is to recapture industry standards through innovation at the lower layers of the tech stack. We must avoid a future in which entire platforms—and therefore choices—are controlled by others. The fact that an official policy document now shares this sense of urgency is significant.

The report calls for action. Our own initiatives—edge data centres × renewable energy × overseas joint ventures—represent one possible answer. We hold computational capacity resources, sharpen our strengths, and take them to market, not as a purely domestic play but as an exportable Japanese model. The business roadmap we have spent the past few years drawing up aligns closely with the report’s prescription.

Our path remains unchanged; the report simply reaffirms its necessity.

“The future has already begun to move—quietly, yet inexorably.”

Those were the very words that opened ENJIN. Today, we continue to build step by step, but with unshakable conviction.

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Watt–Bit Integration

Cloud computing, AI—none of it exists without electricity.
Computation may appear abstract, but at its core, it is wattage.
Running GPUs, accessing storage, maintaining networks—everything runs on power.
In that sense, control over the digital world is, ultimately, control over electricity.

“Data sovereignty” is inseparable from energy sovereignty.
Whether it’s a nation or a company, anyone who wants to build and maintain the infrastructure of the next era shouldn’t start with servers or software.
They should start with land and electricity.

Where there is land, sustainable energy, and resilience against disaster,
that is where the foundations for next-generation data and AI will be built.
As a result, the structure of the internet is already shifting from “centralized” to “polycentric and distributed.”
In this emerging paradigm, the number of physical sites and the reliability of power flowing into them will become the new measure of competitiveness.

Until now, selling electricity has been the primary business model for renewable energy.
But even as the demand for total power increases, the nature of that demand is shifting away from heavy industry.
From here on, the question will be not how much electricity we can sell, but how efficiently we can convert electricity into computation.

Local energy consumption is no longer a lifestyle choice—it is becoming a strategic tool for regional infrastructure independence.
The real question is this: how much stable electricity can we provide to each square meter of land?

This is why watt–bit integration is so vital.
Electricity and compute must be designed together and deployed together.

To embed AI into society, we must first place the bit upon the watt.

What sustains the distributed future won’t be invisible models or code.
It will be wiring, voltage, terrain, and physical distance.

And in Japan’s rural regions, the possibility to build that foundation still exists.

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Japan’s High-Context Expressions, Exported to the World

We now live in a time when meaning is often carried not by words, but by structure and movement itself.

Japanese culture has always been rooted in high-context expression. It doesn’t over-explain. It leaves meaning in the space between lines. It embeds implication in the background.
And now, those forms of expression have transcended national borders. They are being exported to the world not as dialogue, but as symbols—visual conventions that are directly understood. And as they mix with the styles of other cultures, they give rise to new visual grammars.

Among these, certain “idiomatic visual expressions” have become so culturally embedded that I hope we can begin to name and codify them explicitly.

Akira Slide
In the anime AKIRA, there’s a now-iconic scene where Kaneda skids to a stop on his red motorcycle. The friction, the sudden compression of motion—it’s become a visual shorthand.
“Cool motorcycle stop in animation = Akira Slide.”
This has now become a kind of global visual language. Not translated, but exported in form.

Major’s Drop
In Ghost in the Shell, there’s a moment where Major Motoko Kusanagi dives from the top of a skyscraper.
A silent fall. Gravity rendered quietly. The slow pan of the camera.
This visual—half-gravity, half-zero-gravity—has become a staple of cyberpunk film grammar.
The lack of spectacle creates tension.
Even now, decades later, it defines the atmosphere of a certain kind of cinematic world.

Itano Circus
In Macross and other works, Ichirō Itano created an unmistakable animation style involving missile trails.
Missiles move with complex, intertwined trajectories—leaving behind smoke, residual motion, and a kind of three-dimensional choreography.
It has become the visual standard for aerial missile combat.
“Itano Circus” is no longer just a name; it’s become a metaphor for a whole form of kinetic expression.

What these examples have in common is this: the meaning isn’t in words. It’s in movement. In structure. In visual grammar.
It’s not translated—it’s understood, because the memory of the motion itself functions like vocabulary.

This is Japanese high-context culture, not explained, but exported.

I want to keep observing this process—how such expressions become part of the world’s shared visual language.
Because it is both a record of cultural expansion and the birth of a new kind of vocabulary.

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Waymo in Tokyo

Finally.

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What I Truly Wanted to Say

In Japanese culture, there is a tradition called the jisei, or death poem.
But for us living today, it’s difficult to understand its meaning without explanation.

Haiku is inherently high-context. And when it comes to jisei, you need to understand the poet’s historical background and life context as well. That’s why explanation becomes necessary.

But did the poet really think explanation was needed? Perhaps they believed that, with enough cultural literacy, their words would be understood without saying more.

Not long ago, I had an experience where I realized something I’d been trying to say hadn’t actually gotten through.
It was a concept I thought I’d explained many times, over many years. Then one day, someone said, “I finally understand. Is this what you meant?”
Their understanding was accurate.
But at the same time, I realized that the core premise I thought I had conveyed had never been shared to begin with.

I’d assumed it had already been communicated. That I’d laid the foundation and was building on it. But in fact, the foundation wasn’t even there.

That moment made me pause.
Maybe this wasn’t the only time. Maybe many other things I’ve said over the years haven’t truly been heard.
Maybe I’ve just been assuming I was being understood, when in reality, nothing had reached the listener.

The way I communicated was likely at fault.
If the result wasn’t there, the responsibility lies with the one speaking.

But I also wondered—was there really a need to say it in the first place?
Maybe I’d been trying to communicate things no one had asked for. Driven by the assumption that they needed to be said.

I don’t think it’s necessary to explain everything or be perfectly understood. That’s impossible.
I’m not trying to pass down some legacy.

When action and outcome are what matter, communication is just a means to an end. The act of telling shouldn’t become the purpose itself.

No matter how beautiful the image rendered by the GPU, it’s meaningless if the monitor lacks resolution.
The limits of output are defined by the monitor—by me.
That means I needed to improve the resolution of my own expression.

In this case, the shift happened because of timing.
The cultural moment had changed. A real, painful experience gave the listener additional context.
So when I said the exact same thing again, it finally came through—smoothly, effortlessly.

The listener’s eyes were open. Their focus was aligned.
All the timing was right.
And in that moment, all I had to do was present the same image again—at the correct resolution, with the right context.
Without reading the situation well, that never would’ve worked.

There’s something else.
Maybe the reason my words hadn’t landed before was because they didn’t contain any specific action or outcome.
Strictly speaking, there was only one thing I’d been trying to achieve all along.

In the manga Chi: About the Movement of the Earth, there’s a scene where someone asks Yorenta, “What are you even talking about?”
And she replies:

“You don’t understand? I’m desperately trying to share my wonder.”

That’s it.
All this time, I’d only wanted to share a sense of wonder.
I thought that was what I was meant to do. That it was everything.

If that wonder doesn’t come across, people won’t move. Society won’t listen.
So I don’t think what I’ve done has been meaningless.
But I’ve also realized that wonder alone isn’t enough.

That’s why I’ve decided to change how I communicate.

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Japan as a Choice

As information infrastructure becomes tied to national strategy, and both cloud and AI are increasingly framed within the context of geopolitics, nations are now faced with a decision: which information network to connect to, and on which compute infrastructure to build their society.

Many countries have effectively left that decision to Big Tech. The American cloud, or the Chinese cloud—not so much a matter of choosing, but of being absorbed into one or the other. In parts of Europe, there are now efforts to build “sovereign” systems, but even those often amount to little more than a reshuffling of dependencies.
This is something I felt directly, through discussions I had at CERN.

Beyond the startup

In this context, I’ve been thinking about the potential of a third option: Japan.

Not because Japan is technologically superior. In terms of compute resources, latent energy reserves, software competitiveness—Japan may in fact be at a relative disadvantage.

Even so, Japan holds a unique kind of value: neutrality, transparency, and trust—layers that aren’t easily quantified.

It’s a rule-of-law nation, with high disaster resilience, cautious about global-scale data usage, and with a strong social security layer. These form the foundation of what might be called national-level “assurance.”

In training AI models, it’s no longer just about how much you can compute. Where the data is processed, and under what ethical standards, now directly impacts long-term value. Ethics itself has become part of the infrastructure.

That’s why I believe that choosing Japan—specifically, the combination of its compute infrastructure and its legal framework—may increasingly hold structural significance. As companies, organizations, and even individual developers begin to consider “where to run” their projects, Japan may come to be seen as a politically and culturally “acceptable” nation.

Just as, in the world of finance, Switzerland, New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore once played such roles—Japan, or more precisely, Japan’s regional cities, could become a new center.
Perhaps the world is already beginning to seek out this option called Japan.

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How Nvidia’s Mirror World Is Changing Manufacturing

Watching Nvidia’s latest announcements, I couldn’t help but feel that the world of manufacturing is entering an entirely new phase.

Until now, PDCA cycles in manufacturing could only happen in the physical world.
But that’s no longer the case. We’re entering a time when product development can be simulated in virtual environments—worlds that mirror our own—and those cycles are now run autonomously by AI.

It’s clear that Nvidia intends to make this mirror world its main battlefield.
With concepts like Omniverse and digital twins, the idea is simple: bring physical reality into a digital copy, migrate the entire industrial foundation into that alternative world, and build a new economy on top of Nvidia’s infrastructure.

In that world, prototypes and designs can be tested and iterated in real time, at extreme levels of precision.
Self-driving simulations, factory line optimization, structural analysis of buildings, drug discovery, medical research, education—it’s all happening virtually, without ever leaving the simulation.

The meaning of “making things” is starting to shift.
Before anything reaches the physical world, it will have gone through tens of thousands of iterations in the virtual one—refined, evaluated, and optimized by AI.
We’ve entered a phase where PDCA loops run at hyperspeed in the digital realm, and near-finished products are sent out into reality.

This isn’t just about CG or visualization.
It’s about structures that exist only in data, yet directly affect actions in the physical world.
The mirror world has reached the level of fidelity where it can now be deployed socially.

In this era, I believe Japan’s role becomes even more essential.

No matter how detailed the design, we still need somewhere that can realize it physically, with precision.
In a world where even the slightest error could be fatal, manufacturing accuracy and quality control become the decisive factors.

And that’s exactly where Japan excels.

Things born in simulation will descend into reality.
And the interface between the two—“manufacturing”—is only going to grow in significance.

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Sayonara, Japan's Cryptocurrency Market

Binance

A number of negative incidents have occurred in succession within the cryptocurrency market of Japan.
The first is that the cryptocurrency exchange Binance has ceased its developments in Japan. They withdrew from the Japanese market after a warning from the Financial Services Agency that made it sound like they were committing a crime.
They had already achieved remarkable results in the industry. It is true that by skirting certain regulations and taxes, they weren’t competing on a level playing field with other businesses. However, they were a genuine fin-tech company that was an industry leader in innovation. It is regrettable that their expansion into Japan has come to an end.

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