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Japanese Smart Communities as Industrial Policy Chapter j 21 423

of public infrastructure including heat supply, water and sewerage, trans-
portation and communications.”
The above examples reflect shoddy governance in coordinating Japan’s
domestic and international communication of what its smart communities are
and how 3-11 has changed them. The JSCA and its member firms, along with
the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization and
Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), which serve as secretariat
and support organizations for the JSCA, have clearly allowed the crucial role
of PR to fall through the cracks. One great irony here is that Japan excels at
good governance of the smart community itself, both at the project level and
when it comes to integrating policy supports.

OPENING THE WINDOW ON JAPAN’S SMART
COMMUNITIES
In fact, smart communities are written in Japan’s 2016 “Energy Innovation
Strategy” (hereafter, EIS) and its “Society 5.0” industrial policy (Kashiwagi,
2016; METI, 2016). They are also deeply embedded in its disaster resilience
and spatial planning (EcoNet Tokyo 62, 2016, p. 13). Japan’s smart commu-
nity industrial policy aims to reshape the energy economy rather than merely
swap solar and other green energy for coal, nuclear, and other brown energies.
The policy includes a shift away from reliance on the conventional power grid
and other sprawling and vulnerable critical infrastructure.
Some of this ambition is evident in Fig. 21.1, adapted from a METI
publication. The figure offers a stylized portrayal of a typical Japanese city,
fronted by the sea and with moderately high mountains at the back. The
residential, commercial, and industrial districts are marked by rings, outlining
their respective deployments of distributed energy and related network in-
frastructures. The figure not only shows that the locus of Japan’s distributed
energy transition is the smart community but also clearly states that this
transition is the primary purpose of the smart community.
Hence, in Japanese usage, the smart community can be a residential dis-
trict, public facilities, a factory cluster, a commercial sector, or any other zone
where there is sufficient density of demand for smart energy and disaster
resilience. The Japanese smart community is where disaster resilience, energy
efficiency, and the uptake of renewable energy endowments are maximized by
smart energy systems, including virtual power plants; power microgrids; dis-
trict heating and cooling (DHC) networks; home energy management system
(HEMS) as well as building/factory/community/mansion energy management
systems; advanced energy storage; light-emitting diode (LED) lighting; waste
heat recovery; and other infrastructure. All these components represent the
ongoing convergence of energy, new materials, and ICT/robotics.
In addition, Japanese policy makers are quite explicit that their smart en-
ergy approach aims to maximize the diffusion of renewable energy and