Page 475 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Japanese Smart Communities as Industrial Policy Chapter j 21 445

comprehensive list of Japan’s smart communities. Rather, it summarizes the
core infrastructures of the Japanese smart community and shows potential
customers how to arrange consulting, financing, and other assistance.
Another important influence on export possibilities is that the main pro-
ponent of national resilience, Nikai Toshihiro, was appointed LDP Secretary
General on August 3, 2016. Nikai is influential and an internationalist. He has
long emphasized cooperating with regional countries, particularly China and
Korea. Nikai has made it clear that he is committed to leveraging Japan’s
expertise on disaster resilience and renewable energy. He has called for using
it to expand external engagement and exports, combining domestic security
and economic goals (in Kashiwagi, 2016, pp. 177e178). At Hawaii University
on May 4, 2017, Nikai argued for the deployment of renewable energy in
Pacific Island states as one measure to bolster their resilience against climate
change (Kyoto Shimbun, May 4, 2017). The evidence thus suggests that smart
community and associated exports are increasingly prioritized in Japan’s
infrastructure export strategy.

POST 3-11 STAKEHOLDER SUPPORT FOR SMART
COMMUNITIES

A further consequence of the 3-11 disaster is greater subnational government
and popular support for energy alternatives and smart communities. Before
3-11 Japan did have distributed energy initiatives aimed at increasing local
energy autonomy through biomass, geothermal, and other projects. Yet these
“local production and consumption” programs gained minimal traction due to
the ambivalence of local communities, the disinterest (or outright opposition)
of the regional power monopolies, the lack of incentives for local leaders,
byzantine regulatory regimes, and other hurdles. However, after 3-11 virtually
all public and private sector stakeholders, together with most of civil society,
were able to agree on the need to bolster resilience against hazards.
For example, a March 2014 Japanese METI survey of smart communities
showed that 82.2% of surveyed local governments listed resilience against
disasters as their top priority for undertaking a smart community project, with
energy autonomy second, at 73.3% and the creation of new local services and
businesses third at 71.1% (Oguro, 2014). Moreover, Japan’s annual and
authoritative “Environmental Consciousness Survey,” released in September of
2016 by the National Institute for Environmental Studies, showed that the
country’s strongest level of consensus for any initiative related to energy and
the environment was the 77.8% support for using public funds to build
resilience in the face of climate change. And 68.1% supported using ODA to
build resilience in developing countries (NIES, 2016, p. 20). In short, Japanese
local governments and the public were quite amenable to changing the built
environment as an adaptation response. They were also willing to foster
resilience in developed countries.