Can Japan become Asia's Silicon Valley?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We look at Japan’s bid to compete with Silicon Valley. Japan is well known for innovations such as the walkman, bullet trains and Nintendo games, but the country hasn’t produced a killer product to really wow the world for decades. The government wants to change that by increasing the number of start-ups by ten-fold over the next five years. In this episode Mariko Oi travels across her home country to meet with the next generation of entrepreneurs hoping to make Japan Asia’s Silicon Valley. She hears from Chikahiro Terada, the boss of Tokyo-based start-up Sansan, which specialises in the digitalisation of business cards. Chikahiro is opening a special new school for tech-savvy young entrepreneurs in Tokushima on the southern island of Shikoku. Mariko also meets the founder of a mobile supermarket business and speaks to the country's former digital minister, Karen Makishima, who says there will be fewer rules for digital start up companies and that the government will be encouraging more diverse entrepreneurs to set up businesses in rural as well as urban areas.
Presenter: Mariko Oi Producer: Jagdip Cheema Image: Mariko Oi in Tokushima; Credit: BBC
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Food Chain is the podcast that explores the world's relationship with food and what it takes to put food on our plates. |
| 0:09.1 | The Food Chain from the BBC World Service, available now. |
| 0:16.4 | Hi, I'm Marie Kaui. Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC. Today we're looking at Japan's |
| 0:23.0 | startups as it tries to reboot its economy. Known for its 1980s Walkman and Nintendo games, |
| 0:30.1 | but Japan hasn't produced a killer product that wows the world for decades. For many years, some |
| 0:36.7 | startups have kind of disadvantages in Japan, but from now it will be changed. |
| 0:44.1 | That's Japan's former digital minister, Karen Makishima. |
| 0:47.8 | The government wants to increase the number of startups by tenfold over the next five years. |
| 0:53.1 | The initiative is expected to be dominated by |
| 0:55.5 | Texav adventures in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka. Or will it? |
| 1:01.4 | Dear passengers, we are now making our final approach. |
| 1:06.3 | I've come to Tokushima. It's a bit of a backwater and hasn't got a reputation of being a thriving area. |
| 1:13.5 | But it's been trying to reinvent itself as a place for startups. |
| 1:17.3 | And in recent years, a local company has hit the jackpot by taking itsest areas of the country, |
| 1:33.3 | comes this music. |
| 1:37.3 | Tokushima, named after this area, is a supermarket on wheels. |
| 1:41.3 | Almost all of its customers are aged over 80. |
| 1:47.0 | Located on the southern island of Shikoku, Tokushima is known for lots of greenery and rural farming. |
| 1:53.0 | But as young people leave for big cities, it's been suffering from both an aging and shrinking |
| 1:58.0 | population for over half a century. And they've been left behind as everything got digitalized. |
| 2:04.9 | That's Mrs. Sasaki telling me how she has no clue how to use a smart thing. |
| 2:18.6 | She's 83, but she then jokes she's actually 38. |
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