#-himself when compared to the opportunity at west coast tech. but that has one less layer of conflict

[godsfavoritescientist]

Building off of what I wrote in my fic "Sparks," I'm really compelled by the idea of Ford genuinely no longer being interested in sailing around in a boat with Stan by the time they were seniors in high school.

I like the idea of it not being just a symptom of the resentment that had been building between them, nor it being a dream of Ford's that only paled in comparison to west coast tech, but it being a genuine loss of interest on Ford's end. I think it complicates things even further in some really juicy ways.

Like, imagine going through high school slowly losing more and more interest in the dream you've shared with your twin and only friend ever since you were little kids. How do you break it to him? How do you explain it to him without making it sound like a rejection of him? Without it making him hate you?

How do you explain it without it feeling like a spit in the face to all the hard work he's put into a plan that started out as a way of him comforting you by telling you "it doesn't matter what people say about you, you're going to be an adventurer who sails away into the sunset and never has to hear their mockery ever again, and there will be babes and treasure and heroism, and then they'll all see how cool you really are!"

And all through high school you think to yourself, "he's going to move on to more realistic dreams any day now, and then I won't have to say anything about it!" But no matter how many times you mention something else he could do with his life that he seems interested in, or bring up the challenging logistics of traveling around long-term in a boat, he sounds just as committed to the childhood dream as ever, and completely oblivious to how apprehensive you sound.

So resentment grows, little by little. Because that's easier than confronting the soul-crushing levels of guilt that are building up inside of you, every time you don't take an opportunity to tell him you don't want to do the plan anymore. You don't have a single person in your life who modeled how to have difficult conversations for you. As far as you know, having this conversation with Stan would crush him into tiny little pieces and then he would hate you forever, and you can't stand the idea of losing the only friend you've ever had.

So tensions grow. A lack of interest turns into a bitter resentment that, if you were really being honest with yourself, is directed more at yourself than it is at Stan.

And then the falling-out happens, and it seems like you were proven right. Stan hates you now, and he's never going to forgive you for giving up on his dream. But two can play that game, so you try to hate him too. Because if you hate him too, then maybe it won't hurt as much that he never came back. That he never even turned up at school, or by the boat, or in through your bedroom window in the middle of the night. He knows what dad's like, and how he says impulsive exaggerated things when he's angry, and haven't you both dealt with his harsh words countless times before and been able to dust yourselves off and joke about it later? So why isn't he back at home, joking with you about how absurd your dad acted that night, being impossible and belligerent about ruining your dream, but at least now you're even, because you've ruined his dream too.

-

And now imagine you find out he risked the lives of everyone in existence to bring you back, right after you had accepted your fate was to die killing Bill. It would be terrifying and confusing and infuriating. If he cared so much, why didn't he do something to reconnect with you sooner? Why did he ignore you in favor of trying to make it big without you? Why didn't he take the infinitely safer and simpler action of reaching out to you without you having to track down his address and send a desperate plea for help? You were convinced that he didn't care enough to bother with you unless you had an important enough reason for him to come. But even then, he thought your plans were stupid. He didn't want anything to do with you, not even with the world at stake.

Did he save your life out of guilt? Does he pity you that much? It doesn't add up with what he did in the decade leading up to shoving you into the portal. And the dissonance between the version of him in your head that hates you, and the man who held out his arms to welcome you back to your home dimension, is so strong that you feel like you're being lied to again, like you're back in the depths of gaslighting and manipulation that Bill put you through, even though there's no way that's what Stan is trying to do... right? You can't figure it out, so you run away from it. You don't want to know the answer to whether or not Stan hates you, because you don't know which answer would hurt more, so you try to make him hate you more than ever, because at least then you would know for sure how he feels.

And in the end, after he sacrifices his memories for you, and for the world, things seem clearer. The layers upon layers of confusion and anger and hurt seem to have washed away like drawings in the sand, leaving behind the simple truth: that you two had an argument, and didn't move past it for forty years, and despite everything you put each other through, you both still want to re-connect.

So you sail away in a boat together.

And at first, it's wonderful. It's exactly what you want. It feels like an apology to Stan, and a thank-you for saving the world, and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to heal the rift between you two, and it's good to be back on earth, and you wonder why you ever doubted the dream you two once had.

But then, after the first long journey you spend on the sea together, when you get back home to dry land, Stan is already talking about planning your next adventure out on the open sea. He recaps every adventure you had on the first trip, over and over again, and he wants to chat with you all through the morning and long into the night, and you don't have the words to explain to yourself that you don't have enough social battery for this, and suddenly you're slipping back into the horrifyingly familiar feeling of Stan being overbearing and needing space from him and how could you think that? How could you think that about him after everything he's done for you and everything he's forgiven you for? But the longer this goes on, the more you realize that you still don't want to spend the rest of your life sailing around with Stan. It's great fun in moderation, but the idea of your whole life revolving around Stan and going on adventures with Stan and being in a boat with Stan with no time to be by yourself thinking about your own things and figuring out your own dreams makes your skin crawl with a claustrophobic kind of panic that you still don't know how to put into words forty years after the first time this feeling grabbed you by the throat and ruined your friendship with Stanley.

But the first time this happened, it nearly ruined his life forever. You can't let yourself feel this. You don't feel this. You're happy to spend the rest of your life fulfilling Stan's lifelong dream, and making up for the time you crushed his dream, and sure, maybe he crushed your dream once too, and maybe it would be nice for him to support your dreams like you're now doing for him, but you can't say that. He saved the universe, and it would be horrible and ungrateful and cruel for you to try to voice these feelings, especially when you don't know how to voice your feelings without it making other people feel like you twisted a knife into their gut. So you try to pretend the feeling isn't there.

You go out on a boat with Stan again. You planned out another incredible journey together, and this should be fun, and you should be happy about this, but the unspoken feeling you shoved as far down in yourself as it could possibly go is eating you alive. The worst part? Stan is starting to notice. You have never been good at hiding your emotions. The trick to it has always been to convince yourself you don't feel it at all, and not think about it, and that has always worked like a charm. But whenever the emotion claws its way back up to the forefront of your mind, you can tell Stan knows something is wrong. So you can't even give him the happy ending he deserves. You can't even convince him that you want to be here on the open seas forever with him, like he deserves. And you keep trying and trying to hide it, but Stan keeps asking in roundabout ways, like "You're being awfully quiet, sixer," and "whats that look on your face?" and eventually it comes exploding out of you like a shaken-up soda bottle dropped on its cap.

And then it's like you're back at home in New Jersey again, standing in the living room while dad grabs Stanley by the shirt. It all comes pouring out of you, in the worst possible way, with the worst possible phrasing, like a pandora's box of monstrousness, and Stan tries to fight back against the sting of your words, but you're made out of acid and you're burning through him and you can see it on his face, and there's never any coming back from this, not this time, you'll just have to either jump into the ocean or become a monster forever, so Stan can hate you more easily again, and-

-and at the end of the outburst, you're still on a boat in the middle of nowhere in the ocean with your brother, in dangerous waters, and you have things to do to keep the boat running smoothly.

You can't run away from him. He can't run away from you. You're stuck here for at least a couple more weeks, even if you turned around and sailed back towards shore right away.

-

And the thing that compels me so much here, despite how unbelievably angsty it all is, is that it sets up a situation wherein the Stans might end up forced to actually address the decades of resentment and confusion and wanting-to-reconnect-throughout-it-all that they thought they could gloss over and heal with enough time spent adventuring together on a boat. They might end up forced to actually address the crux of the issue that drove them apart in the first place: Ford wanting a little more space to feel like his own person, and to feel like he's able to have his own dreams, too.

It wouldn't happen easily, nor right away, but if they were stuck together on a little boat in the middle of nowhere surrounded by magical creatures they have to protect each other from in order to make it back home alive, then after they had one fight where they brought up all the things they silently agreed to never bring up again, it would probably happen many more times, and each time it would leave them both angrier at each other than ever, until eventually something honest slipped through amidst all the saying-anything-except-what-they-mean bickering. And once enough of these honest moments slipped through, then they would have a thread to tug on to start to unravel the gargantuan knot of their decades of unresolved conflicts.

And then, eventually, maybe Stan could learn that he can have a good friendship with his brother without needing to be glued to him at the hip, and Ford needing a certain amount of alone time doesn't mean he dislikes him or wants to abandon him, and Ford could learn that he can be honest and have a meaningful connection with someone without it driving them away and making them hate him.

[fapangel]

What are your thoughts regarding Elon Musk?

A great question. Long story short, I alternate between wanting to love Elon Musk as one of the few venture capitalists on Earth with a fucking brain, and wanting to drown him in a scummy pond for being such a fucking West-coast weenie retard. 

Elon’s Genius

Waitbutwhy.com got a series of exclusive interviews with Elon, and while the star-struck explorations of the author might be of questionable objectivity, he did a great job of summarizing how Elon thinks. And the single most important thing about Elon was expressed in a verbatim quote from the man himself:  

Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope—that’s what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering.

Yeah. You’re sitting there saying “no shit, Sherlock, who doesn’t understand that?” But the shit some journalists say will just blow your fucking mind. Yes, this is an actual journalist, in one of the few semi-respectable, mostly-sane publications left on earth (by dint of catering to people who have to make sums add up at the end of the day,) saying that Trump should make space-based solar power satellites a priority. Not talking it up as a nice theoretical tech, not wondering about it, but pushing this as a serious short-term policy priority. 

Incidentally, this is how Elon Musk feels about that bullshit. Yes. Being a sane, intelligent human fucking being, he’s capable of understanding basic opportunity costs, and since he’s aware that hair-brained pie-in-the-literal-sky schemes must be constrained by the actual ability to fucking build this shit (i.e. engineering,) he’s capable of stopping long enough to realize that building and orbiting a vast fleet of satellites designed to blast the Earth with microwave lasers is fucking retarded compared to just building more solar panels right here on Earth. 

This ties into the second massive, massive thing that makes Elon Musk unique - he’s a venture capitalist that knows what the fuck a BUSINESS CASE is. Despite being a save-the-world-I-want-to-build-unicorns idealist, he actually understands the basic principles of economics and markets. To wit, nobody’s going to give him eleventy trillion dollars for free to do decades of R&D to realize his Big Dream, so it has to fund itself, and furthermore, major advances in technology and the human condition don’t spring from individual genius companies, but from entire industries. This nice diagram produced by Waitbutwhy’s eloquently fawning author expresses the same with more colored boxes and less exasperated fucking invective, if that’s your thing. 

What you’re looking at - especially the box at the very bottom that says SUSTAINABLE FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL - is the concept that any gormless asshole on the street can grasp (business gotta make money) but the multi-millionaire masters of the universe that gave Juicero ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MOTHERFUCKING MILLION DOLLARS TO BUILD A WI-FI ENABLED JUICER COULDN’T FIGURE OUT. 

Yeah. Some of his businesses don’t make money, like Tesla. They release glowing reports that retards eat up, while anyone who worked in the actual 100+ year old auto industry look at these sillicon valley nerds who think they know fucking everything after a few years of research and just wait for the inevitable explosion. (Despite their cheery PR, people who know what they’re looking at see nothing but trouble in their business. To say nothing of how the Ultimate Dream of Everyone Driving Electric is flawed by the basic resource limitations of PLANET FUCKING EARTH. And then there’s shady shit. When they discovered that the established automakers have hundreds of acres and tens of millions of dollars worth of suspension torture-testing facilities for a goddamn reason, instead of repairing their janky suspensions under warranty, they offered to pay half the repair cost if the customer would sign a fucking nondisclosure agreement. Tucker Torpedo this motherfucker ain’t, is all I’m saying.)

But ya know what? I can forgive that, because SpaceX. SpaceX forgives a lot. And there is a business case there - there’s enough rich virtue signalling fuckheads to support a small car company, at the very least - so the premise itself isn’t just pissing up a suspension bridge cable on a bridge to nowhere, like most venture capital bullshit. Even the Hyperloop isn’t that bad, because even though it’s fucking retarded, Elon’s probably only looking at it because of his “Boring Company” project. He looked at the ongoing clusterfucked abortion of a high-speed rail line that California’s doggedly carrying to term, and correctly surmised that digging fucking tunnels the length of a huge earthquake zone would be cheaper, in the long run, than trying to navigate the political clusterfuck of buying contiguous right-of-way for the whole damn length. A tunnel is a tube, and as long as it’s a tube, you may as well use the damn Hyperloop thingy, right? There is thinking, there. A brain, is working. And hey, at one point SpaceX was an idea just like this - the Great Ones of industry often leave a trail of dead and dying projects behind them while the One Great Success just climbs higher and higher. It’s worth it, and it’s why Trump’s “six bankruptcies” don’t mean jack shit compared to his dozens and dozens of successful businesses.

And yet - despite that amazing presence of a god damned brain in his skull - he still manages to go full fucking retard sometimes to a degree that makes me want to catch his tongue with a vise-grip to make the stupid noises stop. 

Elon’s dumb-fuck bullshit

This slashdot article neatly sums up the problem. The short version is that lots of very rich people in Sillicon Valley were going around acting very serious about the possibility that our entire world and universe is just a huge computer simulation and we gotta try to break out of it somehow. 

Billionaires. These people are fucking billionaires. And this is how they spend their time. This quote from Business Insider sums up the reason why: 

The piece doesn’t give any clue as to who those two billionaires are – although it’s easy to hazard a few guesses at who they might be, like Musk himself or Altman’s friend Peter Thiel – but it’s fascinating to see how seriously people are taking this theory. According to Musk, it’s the most popular topic of conversation right now.

“The most popular topic of conversation right now.” If ever you doubted that there’s a vast wealth discrepency in the United States, look no further - not only is the West Coast rolling in economic opportunity for the right people - especially with the right connections - but there’s so many multi-zillionares out there that their entire social circle can consist of nothing but. This is some zany philosophical fad that caught on and percolated around, like memes and fads do, via usual social interaction - except for these people, their friends consist mainly or only of multimillionare tech CEOs. 

And that, in a nutshell, is why obviously intelligent people who’s words can make stock prices in multiple huge companies employing many thousands of people do a damn jig feel no reservations at all about saying things in public that make them sound like fucking idiots. When you contemplate the sheer distance between the world of us ordinary humans and these privileged Coastal Gods, it’s enough to fill you with an almost instinctive rage. As a good seal-clubbing communist-hating rabid frothing conservative bigot bastard from Soviet Mordor, I wouldn’t give a shit if these Masters of Industry at least bore passing resemblance to the Randian ideal. I’d be down with that. Even if their huge underwater cities did spring a leak and a massacre or two, that’s life, you know? 

But this shit? This!? No. I draw the fucking line here, pal. There’s some floof-ass hair-brained bullshit I’m not going to stomach. 

But entirely aside from my impassioned-downtrodden-country-boy-rage-at-the-coasties-grapes-of-ree, there is the simple fact that people idolize, hero-worship and generally LISTEN to this man, and that imparts some level of responsibility on him to not say fucking stupid shit. The reason I’ve resisted making a Paetron for so long (aside from my crippling depression, self-doubt and general talent for self-sabotage) is that it’d impinge, ever so slightly, on my total freedom to say any stupid shit I want, because I’m not beholden to anyone, at all, to sound sane or coherent. (My fiction writing is a testament to this.) So I’m keenly aware of the decorum and care a public speaker ought to have - it relates directly to how big an impact his words are liable to have on people, and for Musk, that’s a lot.

Elon’s latest shtick - which is also popular with all his millionaire friends - is screaming and crying about how AI is going to replace all of us. Well, no, that’s just the luddite screeching of Sillicon Valley in general now, Musk is actually claiming that AI will rise up and fucking kill us or some bullshit. His newest company, OpenAI, has a great business model and all - developing mind-machine interfaces, which is a thing and will be a much bigger thing in short order - but he’s still going around telling everyone that AI is some evil terrible scary thing, and that’s causing actual goddamn harm. It’s all fine and good to loathe “science deniers” if they’re arguing against climate change, food pasteurization, the Health Dangers of GMO Crops and childhood vaccinations, but when it’s bullshit like the health effects of radio waves and the coming AI apocalypse, suddenly these fucking geeks are all ears. And here they have a successful CEO who’s Made Science Things Fly and has half the world sucking him off repeating this chicken-little fear-mongering bullshit. In ten to twenty years the anti-vaccers are gonna be screaming NO AI NO DRIVERLESS WHATEVERS REEEEE AND IT’S GOING TO BE THE FAULT OF PEOPLE LIKE ELON FUCKING MUSK. 

[j-kaiwa]

Discussion Article November 18

Why Fukuoka is Japan’s most innovative city

Sandwiched between the mountains and the sea in Japan’s far-west corner, Fukuoka is a city trying to reinvent itself. In a land long dominated by mega-conglomerates and the inexorable pull of Tokyo, the country’s fastest growing urban centre wants to become Japan’s answer to Silicon Valley.

Despite the country’s reputation for hi-tech wizardry, Japan’s start-up scene remains surprisingly stunted. The world’s third largest economy has only one “unicorn” – a private company valued at over $1bn – compared to the United States’ 127 and China’s 78.

Fukuoka’s charismatic young mayor is determined to change that, and he’s convinced the city has the ingredients to replicate the success of the US’s west coast innovation hubs. In 2011 he declared Fukuoka would become Japan’s start-up city, and since then it’s risen to the top of the country’s business creation league tables.

Whether it can truly rival the capital remains to be seen as funding and talent continues to concentrate in Tokyo, but the city’s leaders have a convincing pitch. A tight-knit start-up community, a young workforce and an affordable city that promises that elusive goal of a work-life balance – something they hope will appeal to a new generation of entrepreneurs keen to avoid the Tokyo rat race.

Fukuoka's local government has established a city-wide low-power communication network that helps local companies to test their hi-tech products 

Shortly after being elected as the city’s youngest ever mayor in 2010, former TV presenter Sōichirō Takashima, 44, visited Seattle and was struck by the similarities to his hometown. Both are compact coastal cities surrounded by nature, with well-developed transport infrastructure and plentiful human resources, he says. In Seattle those ingredients support titans like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as a thriving start-up ecosystem. Takashima believes Fukuoka can replicate that success and help drag the Japanese economy out of a rut it’s been in since the early 1990s.

“The presence of start-ups which create new innovation and value is necessary to break economic stagnation,” he says. “With that in mind, I positioned start-up support as our city’s growth strategy.”

Since then he’s been busy. In 2014 the central government granted his request to designate the city as a “national strategic special zone” for start-ups, which has allowed them to cut corporate taxes for new businesses and create a special visa for foreign entrepreneurs. It’s also allowed them to relax planning rules so they can redevelop the city centre and wireless regulations to create a faster and simpler licensing process for experiments and technology demonstrations aimed at the Internet of Things (IoT), which embeds sensors, communication and computing hardware into everyday objects.

Takashima has also been aggressively promoting the city at home and abroad, leading business delegations and signing cooperation deals with start-up hubs like San Francisco, Taipei and Helsinki which provide support and introductions for Fukuoka start-ups looking to expand abroad or foreign start-ups looking to enter Japan.

Back in Fukuoka, the government has renovated an old school in the central Tenjin business district to create Fukuoka Growth Next (FGN), a one-stop shop for budding entrepreneurs which opened in 2017. “Simply put, our mission is to raise future unicorns,” says Yasunari Tanaka, director-general of the FGN secretariat.

Facilities include discounted office space, a prototyping lab, a start-up cafe where consultants provide free business, legal and accounting advice, and the Global Startup Centre to help foreign founders set up in Fukuoka or local entrepreneurs expand abroad. There’s also a bar to lubricate the networking process and a regular schedule of talks, seminars and matching events to link start-ups with customers and investors.

Locals in Fukuoka attend a festival at the Toka Ebisu shrine and pray for good luck and success in business in the year to come (Credit: Edd Gent)

While the city’s first unicorn is probably still some way off, there’s been encouraging progress. The initial goal for FGN was for tenants to raise 500m yen (£3.37m) by September 2018, but they smashed that target, raising 7.1bn yen (around £50m). Fukuoka also has the highest new business creation rate (the percentage of companies newly registered in a year) in the country at 7%, well above Tokyo’s 4%.

The city has some strong fundamentals in its favour. Japan’s ageing population and shrinking workforce are causing politicians and economists sleepless nights, but Fukuoka is the fastest growing city in the country, and has the highest proportion of young people. Rent is about 60% of that in Tokyo and the city is closer to Seoul and Shanghai than the capital, leading it to be seen as Japan’s "gateway to Asia".

That combination is what prompted Fukuoka native Yasuhiro Ide to transfer the headquarters of his e-commerce business New World back to his hometown. He’d moved to Tokyo in 2015 in search of business opportunities, but last year he decided his goal of expanding into China would be easier from Fukuoka. “In Fukuoka it's easy to recruit engineers and designers who are low cost and office costs are less,” he says. “And if I want to go to China it’s two hours by plane. From Tokyo it’s four.”

The compactness of the city also means the entrepreneurial community is both tight-knit and diverse, says Hashimoto Masanori, CEO of software company Nulab and a veteran of Fukuoka’s start-up scene. That makes team building and networking much easier. “If I go drinking I will bump into someone at a related IT company,” he says. “In Tokyo I go to community events and it’s only programmers, but in Fukuoka I go to these events and I meet programmers, designers, marketers.”

Another key plank in the government’s pitch is the city’s “liveability”. The international airport is a 15 minute metro ride from the centre and commutes are short, with walking or cycling to work common. You’re never far from nature with mountains looming at the city limits and picturesque beaches a short drive away. “Fukuoka is more laid back,” says Tanaka. “If you want to seek a good work-life balance Fukuoka is a very attractive city.”

That was what drew French entrepreneurs Yasmine Djoudi and Thomas Pouplin to settle in the city.

They first came as part of a student exchange program and when they decided to launch their start-up Ikkai, an online platform for students to find short-term work, they chose to stay in Fukuoka rather than move to Tokyo

“The lifestyle here is really nice,” says Djoudi, adding that the lower costs were also a major boon when starting out. “We didn't regret it, because we realised that the burn rate is way lower. We couldn't have done half of the things we did in Fukuoka if we went to Tokyo.”

The pair were the first recipients of the city’s start-up visa and helped shape the application process. Pouplin admits that language barriers and inflexible regulations still make Japan a tricky place for outsiders but he says Fukuoka is ahead of the curve in making things easier for foreign founders.

Fukuoka may be attractive for start-ups, but as the businesses mature, many decide to set up new offices in Tokyo (Credit: Getty Images)

The city’s re-branding has generated significant buzz in both the domestic and foreign press, but despite the positive coverage two key ingredients remain in short supply – talent and funding. There’s limited venture capital available in Fukuoka, says Pouplin, so when start-ups grow they generally have to head to the capital for investment and customers. “Fukuoka is a great starting place, but it's not a great growing place,” he says.

One of FGN’s most successful graduates is Skydisc, which uses artificial intelligence to help customers boost factory productivity and has been pegged as a “future unicorn” by financial newspaper The Nikkei. Overseas strategy officer Yoshihiko Suenaga is full of praise for the city government’s approach and says their time at FGN opened a lot of doors. “They gave us cheap rent and a lot of opportunities,” he says. “We actually met one of our partners as well as one of our big clients at a matching event there.”

But he admits they are only staying in Fukuoka because it’s the founder’s hometown. Their operation is now split between Fukuoka and a Tokyo office that opened three years ago because most of their clients’ headquarters are located there. Talent was also a big driver – while it’s possible to find competent developers in Fukuoka, more advanced technical skills are concentrated in the capital. “AI-focused engineers are relatively difficult to find in places other than Tokyo,” he says.

In an attempt to coax this kind of talent to the city the government recently declared itself an “engineer-friendly city” and followed up with recruiting events in Tokyo. But even Fukuoka’s brightest find it hard to resist the pull of the capital, says Suenaga, who spent 15 years in Tokyo himself. He hails from neighbouring city Kitakyushu and only returned due to family reasons. “After graduating you’ve got no choice but to go to Tokyo,” he says. “That’s the regular mindset.”

That’s not to say perceptions of Fukuoka aren’t changing in the capital. Shun Nagao, who runs the Tokyo office of global venture capital firm White Star Capital, says in the last two years there’s been a lot more buzz around the city thanks largely to the mayor’s efforts. It’s still seen as a relatively immature ecosystem though, he adds.

“I don't think there's an understanding about what Fukuoka excels in,” he says. He thinks the city needs to do a better job of branding, pointing to Kyoto, which has developed a reputation as a hotbed for hardware start-ups by building an ecosystem around the world-class Kyoto University and the city’s big electronics companies like Kyocera, Omron and Rohm.

One major opportunity for the city, says Nagao, is its proximity to Asia, which could allow it to attract talent from abroad rather than going toe-to-toe with Tokyo. But in terms of attracting more funding, he thinks there needs to be some clear success stories or big valuations before investors commit serious resources to the city.

Fukuoka is considered one of the most "liveable" cities in Japan (Credit: Alamy)

That’s something officials in Fukuoka recognise, but they’re also aware that laying the groundwork for that kind of success takes time. Their current target is to create one hundred start-ups worth 1 billion yen (£6.8m) in the next five years, says Naokatsu Matono, director of the city’s start-up department. “To make a unicorn we believe first we need many start-ups,” he adds. “In the future, our goal is to help one of those one hundred companies become a unicorn.”

And the city isn’t resting on its laurels. FGN closed down for a revamp at the end of March and when it relaunches under new management in May it will team up with a well-known international start-up accelerator to mentor and help fund a new batch of start-ups.

The government is also in the process of creating an ambitious new “smart city” – an urban area that uses technology like IoT and data analytics to enable smarter service in areas like transport, utilities and government – on a 124-acre former university campus within Fukuoka, just 2.5 miles (4km) from the centre.

Typically these kinds of projects end up on greenfield sites far from urban centres or layer technology on top of existing infrastructure, says Kouichi Matono, who is leading the project. This smart city will be unique because it will be built from scratch in the heart of the city with the infrastructure and technology developed in unison.

Demolition work has already started, and the government plans to partner with a consortium of companies to create an open source test-bed for advanced technologies like 5G, driverless vehicles and telemedicine. The aim is to spur the creation of many new start-ups, says Matono, and act as a proving ground to show the rest of the country how to use technology to solve Japan’s most pressing problems.

“We are trying to create a new lifestyle not just buildings,” he says. “Japan has a lot of issues. The number of old people is growing and we have a small birth rate so we’re going to have problems with labour and healthcare. That’s why we want to use new technology like AI and IoT to solve these issues.”

Developing the ecosystem of talent, expertise and funding required to support the kind of “living lab” the mayor has previously said he want to turn Fukuoka into will take time. But the city’s unique combination of entrepreneurial energy, quality of life and a supportive government makes it as good a place as any for those trying to build a more liveable future.