Page 451 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Chapter 21

Japanese Smart Communities

as Industrial Policy

Andrew DeWit
Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan

Chapter Outline
Japanese Smart Communities: Plenty, Japan’s National Spatial Strategy 438
but Poorly Promoted 421 Policy Integration in the Compact City 439
Opening the Window on Japan’s Smart Fiscal Support for Smart Communities 441
Communities 423 Post 3-11 Stakeholder Support for
Higashi Matsushima City Smart Smart Communities 445
Disaster Prevention Eco Town 427 Hirosaki Smart City 446
The Power Business 430 Conclusion 449
Japan’s Incentives 431 References 449
Japan’s New Institutions 433 Further Reading 452
Smart Community Policy
Entrepreneurs 436

JAPANESE SMART COMMUNITIES: PLENTY, BUT
POORLY PROMOTED
The scale of Japan’s smart community policies and projects remains little
known or understood, even among experts in smart cities. Only recently has
this lack of awareness begun to change: on April 27, 2017, the smart city
market analysts at ABI Research declared that Japan, China, and South Korea
were leaders in Asian smart city initiatives. ABI Research Industry Analyst
Raquel Artes highlighted the countries’ robust wireless communication net-
works as the principal factor in their ability to quickly and efficiently diffuse
smart cities. She also argued that the region’s projects are likely to accelerate
over the coming 5 years and pointed to the role of “catastrophe management”
in Japan’s projects (ABI Research, 2017).
The main reason for the dearth of information on Japan is that the Japanese
themselves are notoriously poor at communicating. This problem was evident,

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