A school for tech entrepreneurs will open its doors in April 2023 in the Tokushima town of Kamiyama.
Always seen as Japan’s backwater, Tokushima is not where you would expect to see the opening of a special new school for tech-savvy young entrepreneurs.
Located on the southern island of Shikoku, the sleepy, rural region doesn’t have a reputation for being a thriving place.
But the area, which has been suffering from both an ageing and shrinking population for decades, will soon welcome a bunch of vibrant, young new residents.
In April next year a school of tech entrepreneurship — the first of its kind in Japan — will open in the Tokushima town of Kamiyama.
The students, aged from 15 to 20, will be taught engineering, programming and designing, as well as business skills such as marketing. They will also learn how to pitch their business plans to investors in order to raise money.
The man behind it is Chikahiro Terada, the boss of Tokyo-based start-up Sansan, which specialises in the digitalisation of business cards. These still play a huge role in Japan’s corporate world.
Mr Terada is not from Tokushima, so why did he pick the area? The story starts back in 2010.
«Twelve years ago, I set up a remote office here because I heard that Kamiyama is an interesting town with high-speed internet in [empty] old houses,» he says.
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 if I said I wanted to open an office here without helping out the town,» Mr Terada recalls. So he offered to teach computing to the local, elderly population.
But Mr Ominami just wanted Mr Terada to prove that a Tokyo-based IT company could have an office here. After Sansan’s success, others followed in setting up remote offices in Kamiyama, which has a population of less than 5,000.
«It was exciting to see the town being rejuvenated,» says Mr Terada. «I then started wondering what else I could do to contribute back to society and that’s when I thought: education.
«I became an entrepreneur after graduating from university, but I don’t recall learning any crucial skills that I needed to start a business at school.»
To build the school Mr Terada has secured 2bn yen ($15m; £12m) in donations via a government system called furusato nozei or «hometown tax».
