Generally seen as Japan’s backwater, Tokushima is not where you would expect to view the opening of a particular new school for tech-savvy young entrepreneurs.
Situated on the southern island associated with Shikoku, the tired, rural region noesn’t need a reputation to be a thriving place.
But the area, which has been suffering from both a good ageing and diminishing population for decades, will soon welcome lots of vibrant, young brand new residents.
In April next year the school of technology entrepreneurship – the first of its kind in Japan – will open in the Tokushima town of Kamiyama.
The students, elderly from 15 in order to 20, will be taught engineering, programming plus designing, as well as business skills such as advertising. They will also discover ways to pitch their company plans to traders in order to raise cash.
The man behind it is Chikahiro Terada, the boss associated with Tokyo-based start-up Sansan, which specialises within the digitalisation of business cards. These nevertheless play a huge function in Japan’s business world.
Mr Terada is not from Tokushima, so why did he pick the area? The story starts in 2010.
“Twelve years back, I set up a web-based office here mainly because I heard that will Kamiyama is an interesting town with high-speed internet in [empty] previous houses, ” he admits that.
Mr Terada had paid a visit and met a local businessman called Shinya Ominami, who had been responsible for the installation of the town’s excellent internet.
“I thought I might get told off basically said I wanted to open an office here with no helping out the city, ” Mr Terada recalls. So he offered to teach processing to the local, aged population.
But Mister Ominami just wanted Mr Terada in order to prove that a Tokyo-based IT company might have an office here. After Sansan’s success, others followed in creating remote offices in Kamiyama, which has a human population of less than 5, 000.
“It was exciting to find the town being revitalized, ” says Mister Terada. “I then started wondering what else I could do to contribute returning to society and that’s while i thought: education.
“I became an entrepreneur right after graduating from university, but I don’t remember learning any essential skills that I needed to start a business from school. ”
To build the school Mr Terada has secured 2bn yen ($15m; £12m) in donations with a government system called furusato nozei or even “hometown tax”. Under this scheme, middle to high-earning huge city dwellers may donate money to a rural region of the choosing in return for a reduction in their income plus residency taxes.
Greater than 30 companies are also now financial followers of the forthcoming school. These are mostly Japan but there are also some international ones, like accountancy giant Deloitte.
Traditionally, teenagers in Japan choose to join a big founded firm as a safe career path.
But Mr Terada states many are now far more entrepreneurial, and his programs have seen some huge interest from potential students, with more than two hundred applications from all over Japan for the 1st 40 slots.
The college is also committed to a 50: 50 percentage of girls and boys, a step in the right path in a country exactly where men still control the start-up picture and the wider workforce.
“For many years, start-ups have experienced some disadvantages in Japan, but from now it will be transformed, ” the country’s former digital ressortchef (umgangssprachlich) Karen Makishima told me.
“We will remove the regulations or maybe the rules of analogue systems, and the emphasis will be given to these types of [digital] start-up companies. We have been encouraging them to begin not only from the cityside, but also the non-urban areas. ”
New Tech Economy is a series exploring how technological innovation is set to shape the new emerging economic landscape.
But while the government expects these new start-ups to be super great, the country is also home to the world’s earliest population.
As many things within Japan have been digitalised over the past two decades, seniors – almost another of the country — have been left behind.
“Oh no, no, I got no idea how to use the smartphone, ” 83-year-old Mrs Sasaki tells me.
I met her and her three friends the stone’s throw away from your new entrepreneur college as they waited for a supermarket-on-wheels called Tokushimaru.
As the title suggests, this start up, which offers a lifeline to thousands of the particular country’s elderly, was also born in this area.
When it started 10 years ago, it only had 2 trucks locally. Yet today, with more than one, 000 vans on the highway across Japan, they have annual sales of 20bn yen ($150m; £123m).
Over 90% of its clients are aged over 80.
Once a week, Tokushimaru delivery driver Junichi Kishimoto travels in order to Kamiyama with everybody’s orders in his mind.
“He remembers what I want to buy every week, inch says Mrs Sasaki. “He comes each Saturday, so if the grandchildren are coming on Sunday, I actually request something special. ”
For many from the customers, some of who live alone after their partners passed away, it is a chance to hang out with their friends because they all gather outside in a group waiting for the van to arrive.
For the 38-year-old Mister Kishimoto, joining the company was more about assisting the elderly rather than getting a wage.
“I used to work at the nursing home and am realised some inhabitants came to live generally there because they were concerned about everyday food, inch he says. “I believe it is better for them to reside at their own house, so I wondered the things i could do to help and that’s when I found out about Tokushimaru. ”
The business idea came to the company’s founder, Tatsuya Sumitomo, because of their own parents in their 1980s, who were struggling with their own daily groceries.
“When I started Tokushimaru, I knew the market would grow for the next twenty to 30 years simply because there was definite requirement, and the society wasn’t providing any options, ” he says.
However the company is also moving with the times. It really is testing an app that it hopes will become available within the next two years. Its rivals are usually catching up, and Mr Sumitomo can also be aware that the next generation of customers are more technology savvy.
“The baby boomers in their 70s will soon become our main customers and they have better internet literacy, so we’re merging our supermarket vehicles with online shopping, inch he says.
Mr Sumitomo is a serial entrepreneur who has started many other businesses over the past 3 decades.
He has high desires for the new boarding school in Kamiyama as he sings the praises of local business person Shinya Ominami. “For a rural city, one person can make this kind of big difference, ” he says.
Mr Ominami wasn’t available to be evaluated when we were within Tokushima, but he and Chikahiro Terada of Sansan have a vision of turning Kamiyama into Asia’s Silicon Valley.
That might be a little far-fetched, but one male’s vision to reinvent his hometown simply by bringing in high-speed internet may have brought a far brighter future compared to it could have ever hoped for.
Watch New Tech Economy Japan on BBC World TV at 10: 30 BST and 22: 30 BST on Saturday, 27 August, with 03: 30 BST and 16: 30 BST on Sunday, 28 August.