The author's journey started with a simple piece of cardboard.
The author of this article is convinced that we will soon commute by VR. If so, it will change urban and rural life dramatically.
Creators in Tajimi deserve to be connected with like minded souls around the world. With VR it can happen.
This story is the second of two parts about a foreigner moving to a rural town in Japan. Part One lives here.
How not to park a car in the countryside
In a tiny community, people will notice when you park in a sloppy way.
In the first installment of this article I claimed that my quality of life has improved greatly since I moved to Tajimi from Tokyo. I now enjoy a great environment, lots of space, and the best job I ever had, working for my own company. Admittedly, I have a long way to go before I enjoy a lack of financial stress, but that isn't much different from my previous life in Tokyo.
Does this sound like a rosy picture of life on the countryside? Is it really that good? A friend on Facebook wasn't convinced when I posted the article there:
Does this sound like a rosy picture of life on the countryside? Is it really that good? A friend on Facebook wasn't convinced when I posted the article there:
"I don't buy your argument that life is so much better on the countryside," he wrote. "I lived many years in Tokyo but also traveled around a fair bit. In my experience people in the provinces are conservative and introvert. The only decent place to live in Japan is Tokyo."
I wish I could say he is completely off the mark, but I can't. Many share the view that life in Tokyo is a lot less restricted by social conventions than in the provinces. We have to be careful about our behavior here, unless we want the rumor mill start spinning.
This realization really hit me the other day when I met my friend Bob (I changed his name and nationality for privacy reasons). Bob is an American married to a Japanese woman, who lives in another part of the town. He told me how his wife had complained about the way he had parked the car in front of their house. I asked him what her problem was.
"She insisted I must straighten the car. Not by much. I had parked reasonably well, I think".
Bob explained that they have a little wall around the entrance to the house, and that they usually parked the car in a pocket between the wall and the wall of the next house. This time around, he had parked the car somewhat diagonally, so that it wasn't perfectly aligned with the wall.
"Well, that's ludicrous!", I said. "What does it matter if the car is perfectly straight or not? As long as it is not blocking anybody's driveway?"
That's what I thought," he said. "I took a close look, and yes, the car was indeed not perfectly aligned with the wall. But who cares?
"You're joking?", I said.
"No, my wife insisted that people would talk."
"About what?"
"That we don't bother parking the car properly."
"But, how will it bother anybody if—"
"People do mind. They really do. At the very least, my wife does."
This realization really hit me the other day when I met my friend Bob (I changed his name and nationality for privacy reasons). Bob is an American married to a Japanese woman, who lives in another part of the town. He told me how his wife had complained about the way he had parked the car in front of their house. I asked him what her problem was.
"She insisted I must straighten the car. Not by much. I had parked reasonably well, I think".
Bob explained that they have a little wall around the entrance to the house, and that they usually parked the car in a pocket between the wall and the wall of the next house. This time around, he had parked the car somewhat diagonally, so that it wasn't perfectly aligned with the wall.
"Well, that's ludicrous!", I said. "What does it matter if the car is perfectly straight or not? As long as it is not blocking anybody's driveway?"
That's what I thought," he said. "I took a close look, and yes, the car was indeed not perfectly aligned with the wall. But who cares?
"You're joking?", I said.
"No, my wife insisted that people would talk."
"About what?"
"That we don't bother parking the car properly."
"But, how will it bother anybody if—"
"People do mind. They really do. At the very least, my wife does."
Well, that's downside with life in the provinces. The Japanese can be quite particular about details. And they are hyper aware of the community around them. It can get on your nerves.
Don't get me wrong. Everyone in our village are truly kind to us. The place is quite an oasis. There is a small lot of farmland behind our house. Now and then an old, retired man comes around to look after his crops. Nextdoors there is a small pub. Other old men come there, to get their breakfast in the morning. If they are lucky, they get to chat with the charming lady that runs the place. There are no accidents, really, except for the occasional crow dropping hitting the roof of our car. That's a summary of typical events around our place. Very insignificant in a global perspective, indeed. So people are curious about everything that breaks the routine.
About the most exciting thing that happens in our neighborhood is when the police stops some motorist. There is a busy road running through the village, right in front of our house. There is a very good place to ambush motorists there. Sometimes the police hide there so they can catch people who haven't fastened their seat belts. If you are lucky, the motorist will argue, trying to escape a fine. Not like some Italian, of course. A very civilized argument. But that's about it for excitement around our place. I am fine with that. A calm space in this frantic, sometimes bewildering world is a luxury. It's good to see the old hobby farmer working on his land on the other side of the creek behind our house. Good to think of the ancient kilns resting in the grounds around us, where potters once labored for days and weeks to produce the small wonders we now call Mino ware. Pleasant to know that a ten minute drive will take me to town, where pubs and bars and eateries are waiting for me. And another half hour ride will take me to Nagoya, with two and a half million people and all the excitement you would ever want.
Being mobile is necessary to get anywhere in the world. But the future holds opportunity also for the immobile countryside dweller. It's called Virtual Reality commuting.
Don't get me wrong. Everyone in our village are truly kind to us. The place is quite an oasis. There is a small lot of farmland behind our house. Now and then an old, retired man comes around to look after his crops. Nextdoors there is a small pub. Other old men come there, to get their breakfast in the morning. If they are lucky, they get to chat with the charming lady that runs the place. There are no accidents, really, except for the occasional crow dropping hitting the roof of our car. That's a summary of typical events around our place. Very insignificant in a global perspective, indeed. So people are curious about everything that breaks the routine.
About the most exciting thing that happens in our neighborhood is when the police stops some motorist. There is a busy road running through the village, right in front of our house. There is a very good place to ambush motorists there. Sometimes the police hide there so they can catch people who haven't fastened their seat belts. If you are lucky, the motorist will argue, trying to escape a fine. Not like some Italian, of course. A very civilized argument. But that's about it for excitement around our place. I am fine with that. A calm space in this frantic, sometimes bewildering world is a luxury. It's good to see the old hobby farmer working on his land on the other side of the creek behind our house. Good to think of the ancient kilns resting in the grounds around us, where potters once labored for days and weeks to produce the small wonders we now call Mino ware. Pleasant to know that a ten minute drive will take me to town, where pubs and bars and eateries are waiting for me. And another half hour ride will take me to Nagoya, with two and a half million people and all the excitement you would ever want.
Being mobile is necessary to get anywhere in the world. But the future holds opportunity also for the immobile countryside dweller. It's called Virtual Reality commuting.
How VR will change everything
About a year ago I decided I had to do something if I didn't want to work in a warehouse into old age (I tried for a few months. It is really not my thing). How could I find decent work in a town where nobody is looking for someone with my background? I worked in big media most of my career. There is no big media here. There is nothing big at all really. I had to think out of the box. Perhaps it was this sense of urgency, perhaps the hard labour in the warehouse, or maybe my general nerdiness that draw my attention to the news headlines about Virtual Reality (VR) and the promise of instant travel to anywhere. VR, people said, fools the brain to believe you are somewhere that you are really not. You put on a pair of goggles that shut out the world around you, and let your computer transport you to another reality - real or constructed. That reality can be Mars, or a tropical jungle full of dinosaurs, or even some place where you can park your car slightly diagonally. Or, it can be your workplace.
You can go to work without going anywhere.
Realizing this, I just had to try it for myself, and now I am a believer. Be warned, from here I am going to take you far, far away from the city of Tajimi, which is supposed to be the theme of this site. Am I not straying away from the subject? Be patient.
My first journey out of the Tajimi reality and into the virtual realm began with a cheap pair of cardboard goggles, which I soon swapped for a plastic headset. It was the latter that really blew me away. I inserted my handset in the thing one day, and when I came out half an hour later my cheeks wet from tears. I had just experienced the plight of the aborigines in Australia after an atomic bomb test. I cried because I had been there, felt their pain and sorrow. In Australia. It was awe inspiring.
Today I am running a VR company, with the mission to connect great, curious, interesting and creative people around the world by VR. In spite of its seeming ordinariness, Tajimi has an unusually large population of creative and curious people. Its millennium long history of pottery has spawned a culture of creativity. Those creators deserve to connect to like minded people around the world. Connecting the human dots in a border-less, virtual world will spawn epiphanies all over the place. Let me give you an example.
The other day I visited a wonderful little exhibition by Ms. Yoshimi Tokuda, who creates tableware using a largely forgotten ancient technique. Her plates and cups were on display in a gorgeous private villa sitting on the edge of a steep cliff with a view of Nagoya. The place is really hard to find, but when you do, it's a treasure in itself. The artist herself was there, and guided us around the exhibition space. After her presentation, I pulled out my VR goggles and gave her a tour of my own, of the Gustavsberg Porcelain factory in Stockholm, Sweden. I shot the facilities with a 360 VR camera recently. I showed the Japanese ceramist how she could move from room to room simply by gazing at little special markers, portals that connect the scenes.
You can go to work without going anywhere.
Realizing this, I just had to try it for myself, and now I am a believer. Be warned, from here I am going to take you far, far away from the city of Tajimi, which is supposed to be the theme of this site. Am I not straying away from the subject? Be patient.
My first journey out of the Tajimi reality and into the virtual realm began with a cheap pair of cardboard goggles, which I soon swapped for a plastic headset. It was the latter that really blew me away. I inserted my handset in the thing one day, and when I came out half an hour later my cheeks wet from tears. I had just experienced the plight of the aborigines in Australia after an atomic bomb test. I cried because I had been there, felt their pain and sorrow. In Australia. It was awe inspiring.
Today I am running a VR company, with the mission to connect great, curious, interesting and creative people around the world by VR. In spite of its seeming ordinariness, Tajimi has an unusually large population of creative and curious people. Its millennium long history of pottery has spawned a culture of creativity. Those creators deserve to connect to like minded people around the world. Connecting the human dots in a border-less, virtual world will spawn epiphanies all over the place. Let me give you an example.
The other day I visited a wonderful little exhibition by Ms. Yoshimi Tokuda, who creates tableware using a largely forgotten ancient technique. Her plates and cups were on display in a gorgeous private villa sitting on the edge of a steep cliff with a view of Nagoya. The place is really hard to find, but when you do, it's a treasure in itself. The artist herself was there, and guided us around the exhibition space. After her presentation, I pulled out my VR goggles and gave her a tour of my own, of the Gustavsberg Porcelain factory in Stockholm, Sweden. I shot the facilities with a 360 VR camera recently. I showed the Japanese ceramist how she could move from room to room simply by gazing at little special markers, portals that connect the scenes.
While she enjoyed the experience tremendously, it was even more wonderful to see her reactions. These days it is extremely hard to catch a person's attention for more than a minute. Tokoda simply disappeared into the distant factory. She "oohhed!" and "aahed!" all the way through the experience, pointing at things and making comments: "See? That's a kiln!" "Oh, those Lisa Larsson creations over there, aren't they wonderful?" "Ah, so that is their painting studio. How wonderful! And those people are customers, aren't they?" "What an interesting way to show their products! They are really putting it to good use!"
Tokuda spent well over ten, maybe 15 minutes walking virtually around the factory, pointing at things only she could see. Her brain believed so strongly in the illusion that it thought I must be able to see it too, when all I saw was her waving her pointing at empty air.
Tokuda spent well over ten, maybe 15 minutes walking virtually around the factory, pointing at things only she could see. Her brain believed so strongly in the illusion that it thought I must be able to see it too, when all I saw was her waving her pointing at empty air.
I wanted to bring up this example as an illustration of how VR transcends time and space, allowing people to share the experience of their own world. To really feel what it is like to be in some other place. But it goes much further. In a so called "social VR experience" the artists in Gustavsberg would have been able to actually meet Tokuda in real time, walking around the factory in Sweden together, and Tokuda could have toured the Swedes around her own Nagoya exhibition. Both parties' brains would have been fooled into believing it really happened.
In a digital construct, using computer imagery rather than photography and video, you can go even further again. Here, in our little sleepy village outside Tajimi, I traveled as an avatar one day to a fantasy shooting range where I encountered a kid, maybe twelve years old. We used scifi style, whimsical guns to fire strange objects into the sky - airships and whales among other things. We ran around in a vast space together, laughing. He was faster than me, and his laughter faded away as he put more distance between us. In another VR world, I shared 360 degree pictures of Tajimi with a man from Florida, who got excited by the Zen temple here and looked up the city in his virtual Wikipedia. Now he showed me pictures of our town using his own, virtual computer display. We spent over an hour talking in the construct, a post modern studio overlooking some vast cityscape.
One day, maybe five years from now, VR will be used by companies to let workers check into a Tokyo office from places like Tajimi. They will arrive to work after shape shifting into an avatar in a suite, while their real self is still in a pajama.
As Darshan Shankar, founder and chief executive of the social VR app Bigscreen put it:
"Over several decades, the VR office could trigger a "shift to a world where people live wherever they want – in rural areas, in smaller cities."
How will this transform a city like Tajimi, or a city like Tokyo? The bubbles in this world - communities large and small - will start to connect. The connected bubbles can be physically located anywhere in the world. Medium blogger Fernando Tarnogol put it well:
"We are on a good track. The foundations to migrate our workplaces to immersive environments are laid out. The technologies required to achieve this future are rapidly maturing, big money is being poured onto them and all of the tech giants agree that VR/MR [Mixed Reality] (and AI) is a top priority.
Consumer adoption will be a consequence of the above."
When this happens, ordinary people in Tajimi will start to discover more exciting things than oddly parked cars. And people around the world will start discover the treasures in this town, and other little towns like ours, that they would never have found in a lifetime. Like the old rustic pub The Broken Umbrella. Or the wonderful festival in the tiny community Suwa, far up in the mountains. Or the noisy, sake brewery festival in Kasahara where people go out of their way to invite you to a cup or two. Or the secrets of Mino ware pottery, with its thousand year old tradition. The story that rests in the grounds around our village.
In fact, you can start connect your own life bubble to Tajimi now on this site. Maybe you will decide one day to settle down here, or in a place like this somewhere, and connect to a work bubble far away in the world.
And if you arrive in your virtual car, you can park it upside down if you like. :-)
