The first part of my travels as part of my sabbatical started in Japan, an amazing inspiring place where one can find weird subcultures, beautiful temples, big conglomerate technology companies, and even a few small companies sprouting up and really innovating in areas important to the country.
Some tidbits on Japan
Japan has been in a state of economic semi-recession for the last 20 years, now consistently hovering in the pre-recession “danger zone” (causes are described more here). The result of this is tons of economic stimulus issued by the Japanese government, including very low interest rates for businesses and real estate loans (sometimes even negative interest rates!).
One big factor that worries the Japanese government and investors is the shrinking working population and the increasing number of retired elderly Japanese (due to the very high life expectancy, currently at 83 years) which will put a burden on the economy and decreasing labor force when it comes to elderly care.
The Japanese have traditionally had a very strict immigration policy (you can see the effects of this on the street — nearly everyone who is not Japanese is visibly a tourist). Many of my friends who came from outside of Japan and want to live there permanently either stay with a large company to maintain residency or have to jump through many visa hurdles to continue to live there.
Robots to the rescue?
Japan’s decreasing labor force, unwillingness to allow mass immigration of labor from other countries, and the increasing elderly population has made the government turn to robotics as part of the solution. Enter Cyberdyne — a company I had the chance to visit (just a 30 min train ride northwest of Tokyo).
Cyberdyne is one of several robotics companies around world building exoskeletons — giant wearable robots that support your limbs usually using motors placed where major joints (elbows, knees, hips) usually are.
Here’s a picture of the HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) exoskeleton that is the flagship product of Cyberdyne:
HAL works as follows: the user puts on the shoes, adjusts the exoskeleton to their limbs, and straps into the arms and legs. The exoskeleton detects bioelectrical signals (using Electromyography) and uses proprietary hardware and software to remove noise from the user’s actual body movements to get a clear idea of where the user wants their limbs to move. Then, it simply turns the motors at each joint (here, knees and hips) to assist the user in their natural motion.
HAL is pretty neat in that it doesn’t seek to augment a wearer’s functionality (that is, increase their strength many-fold) but rather assist movement, which means target use cases like walking or climbing stairs rather than lifting 500 lb weights effortlessly. The result of this is an exoskeleton that has smaller motors, weighs less, requires much less battery power and is much safer for wearers.
Unlike in the United States, where robotics is funded primarily by military research grants or contracts (and in the case of exoskeletons, this usually is for creating super soldiers). Here, funding for research usually is directed towards elderly care and rehabilitation (which is no coincidence given Japan’s economic situation). That’s exactly the market that Cyberdyne is targeting, and they hope to be a big part in enabling elderly or injured people in getting back to regular daily activities.
Will all disabled elderly people be wearing an exoskeleton in Japan (and perhaps elsewhere) in 10 years? Only time will tell!
Plant Factories: The new hotness in agriculture
The day after I visited Cyberdyne, I got a chance to see one of the most impressive agriculture companies out there — a small 20 person startup called Mirai that is potentially revolutionizing farming as we know it today.
Mirai, technically speaking, is a food company: they farm leafy greens and sell them to you fresh in packages like this:
But there’s something amazing about this head of lettuce — it wasn’t grown on a field, and it never saw a real sun.
Japan has been importing leafy greens because its limited agricultural land (only 19,000 square miles total) was being put to use on staple crops such as rice, wheat, and potatoes. This created natural economic pressure for the Japanese to innovate new ways to farm leafy greens using only a fraction of the land rather than flying them in at a much higher cost.
And that’s exactly what Mirai is doing: they are creating massive hydroponic farms using LED lighting as the sun, nutrients in a water solution instead of soil, and controlled temperature, humidity, and CO2 instead of an open farm.
Here’s what the inside of their farm in Chiba, Japan looks like:
The end result is simply amazing. This facility puts out 10,000 heads of lettuce per day using 1/100th the amount of water used by an outdoor farm and in 1/100th the square footage. Plus, since the entire factory is a sealed clean room environment, they can grow their greens without any pesticides, and since they seal the plants in packaging inside the clean environment, they have minimal losses after harvest (vs traditional farms that lose a signifiant amount of their plants during the harvesting process and in transit).
But the fun is just starting — I believe the real advantage of hydroponic farming is the opportunity to optimize the growing environment for each specific plant no matter where you are growing it. For the first time ever, you can create completely identical farms in completely different parts of the world and still aggregate data on the proper temperature, humidity, CO2 air mix, nutrient mix, and growing time to get an optimal harvest. For example, they are already finding that they can increase yield by turning the LED lights on and off once every 2/3rd of a day instead of every day. Try doing that with the sun!
I liken this to the moment when Ford pioneered the assembly line and cars started getting manufactured using a consistent process rather than being assembled by hand, one by one. The result was, of course, a massive increase in the volume of cars that could be made. Perhaps we can do the same with food, especially given our growing global population.
I was lucky enough to have a conversation with two Mirai employees in the Sales department about how the farm works and what their company’s aspirations are. They have already deployed a plant factory in icy cold Mongolia, enabling the Mongolians to create leafy greens at home rather than flying them in from other countries. They are already looking into doing the same in the deserts of the middle east, and that’s just the beginning.
And their technology is not only limited to leafy greens — it can even be used on staple crops such as rice, but due to the longer growing cycle of rice, the benefits don’t yet outweigh the costs.
This will surely change over time as they optimize the growing process and decrease costs. Today, planting, re-seeding, harvesting, and packaging are done manually by a team of 25 local employees, but as more of this gets automated and they start finding ways to reduce costs like using solar panel arrays and batteries to go off-grid for electricity, I am optimistic that they will be able to make even more crops accessible anywhere in the world where there is access to water.
Meta notes on traveling so far
I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into a couple of the places I saw when visiting Japan. These were some of the most inspiring moments for me, and they were only made possible because I stretched my network in Japan and even randomly emailed some folks at Mirai. So lesson learned: people are more open than you may think, and you probably have more to offer than you originally realized, so just reach out! You never know where your adventures will go, and being curious never hurts.
To the amazing friends, friends of friends, and hostel mates who made me truly feel like I am never alone — thank you!
I’ll leave you with this image of the beautiful Sakura, or cherry blossoms, that I saw in a small park near Daikanyama, Tokyo:
