Is it really possible to digitize rural areas?
The Kishida administration's ``Digital Garden City Nation Plan'' is one of the ``new capitalism'' economic policies, with a budget of 5.7 trillion yen including promotional grants.
Through the use of digital technology, the aim is to accelerate local revitalization by leveraging the uniqueness of each region, achieving breakthroughs in solving local social issues and improving their attractiveness. This is a policy that aims to solve Japan's problems of a declining birthrate and aging population, as well as the hollowing out of rural areas due to excessive concentration in cities, through digitalization.
One of the projects promoted under the Digital Garden City Nation Initiative is the development of satellite offices. This is intended to allow people working in IT and other fields to work while living in local cities.
Other initiatives being promoted include smart agriculture that utilizes robots and AI, and smart health businesses that use video and other tools to provide remote medical treatment.
If realized, this could be called the ``future of work,'' but the question is whether each local government will be able to secure the technical capabilities and human resources to make it a reality.
``Regional development through digitalization'' sounds good, but it is not clear which fields should be digitized to lead to regional development. Even if the human resources issue can be resolved, there is no doubt that the issue of how to use the budget will still remain.
This is where a metaverse created by local governments could emerge.
In recent years, there have been an increasing number of cases in which local governments and other organizations are attempting to construct metaverses that recreate specific regions in VR space. When we hear about the Metaverse, it sounds like something like ``digitalization'', but we can't help but wonder what it will be used for and who will visit it.
If things continue as they are, the ``Digital Garden City-State Initiative'' is likely to end up handing out huge grants that no one knows how to use and building a metaverse that no one will use.
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