JAPAN and the WORLD Magazine JULY ISSUE 2015 #Issue 12 | Page 71

REGIONAL BRANDING
JAPAN
to change the future of this community, so that
more people will want to visit and live here?”
So what do the scientists say?
“To offer a proper response,” says Masatoshi
Funabashi, “I’d really need to spend months
or even years living in the community.” But
he is also able to offer a valuable insight from
his study of agriculture: the cultivation of
exotic edible species holds a key to survival for
people everywhere. “Maybe this community
has a specific climate, a specific natural
feature, a specific type of soil; and maybe
that characteristic is an extremely good fit
for a certain species that has not previously
been introduced to Japan. That could create a
market niche.”
The market is very much on Natalia
Polouliakh’s mind, too. An expert on ageing
mechanisms, she believes that Japan’s regional
diversity will help her to identify valuable
ingredients for use in the anti-ageing cosmetics
that her new company will be selling. “In the
Ogasawara Islands, Hachijojima, Okinawa
and other parts of Japan we can find lots of
unique products, and the quality of Japanese
ingredients is very good. I want to establish
connections with these areas. First of all, I’d
want to know what is being overlooked: what is
not present in people’s minds, but nevertheless
present in the natural environment.”
Polouliakh’s comment draws attention to the
problem of being so accustomed to something
that aspects of it become almost invisible.
When you’re searching for new value, an
outsider’s perspective can be essential, and
increasing the number of visitors to an isolated
community will boost the number of potential
new viewpoints.
Using his own outsider’s eyes, Funabashi sees
an “intact environment” as potentially a great
tourism resource. “One thing would be to make
Annette Werth.
a trail to enable people to find edible plants in
the mountains. You could provide education on
the way, and this could of course be supported
by information technology.”
The mountains may offer calories as well as
beauty, but not everything in the Japanese
countryside is quite so appealing. As Annette
Werth says, “If there was a way to avoid having
the landscape polluted by power lines, maybe
more people from the city would visit.”
Werth is working on small-scale alternatives
to the kind of energy that is generated in
large power plants and distributed over great
distances. She notes that, “Generally, people
are attached to what is locally produced. If you
produce your own tomato, it tastes different
from a tomato you buy in a supermarket.
Maybe for energy it’s the same thing. If you
produce your own energy, maybe you’ll try
not to waste it. That could be a valuable idea
for a local area. When people from cities visit,
you could say the food is produced here, and
the energy is produced here. Visitors would be
more aware of the nature around them, and
the energy around them: from the sun, from
electricity, and their internal energy.”
“We could make a sustainable beauty salon!”
exclaims Natalia Polouliakh, in a way that
makes you think she might actually be serious
about this proposal. “I’ll provide the cosmetics,
and you make the salon, up in the mountains,
with no power lines!”
NEW WAYS OF THINKING
I was speaking with Natalia Polouliakh,
Annette Werth and Masatoshi Funabashi at the
offices of Sony Computer Science Laboratories,
Inc., which is where they all work together
with a number of other researchers including
Kazuhiro Sakurada, who was featured in my
last article.
Sony CSL brings together a diverse assortment
of researchers who share a commitment to
pursuing science that can change the world for
the better.
Long before Japanese companies were making
headlines with the introduction of policies
about “English in the workplace”, Sony CSL
was using English as a medium of everyday
communication. CSL’s foreign researchers, for
their part, work hard at communicating with
their Japanese colleagues in Japanese.
Natalia Polouliakh.
The many creative and collaborative minds at
Sony CSL make for a dynamic environment
in terms both of intellectual discovery and of
entrepreneurial initiative.
JULY 2015 // 71