Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging now available!
MIT AgeLab compilation examines global aging and regional innovation hubs
Friends - this is a bit of a restack, with some added bits of gratitude. Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging is now available (Amazon | MIT Press ). It was a delight to receive my contributor copy yesterday. I provided a chapter on Japan.
It’s been a delight to dig into some of the chapters, such as those from
and Keren Etkin. Joe Coughlin, author of the Longevity Economy and editor of the compilation has been publishing a series of articles on the Longevity Economy on LinkedIn during the buildup to publication. Luke Yoquinto, researcher at MIT AgeLab, announced the book on November 19.With that, I’d like to share a few words of thanks to those who shared their time and insights during research and writing.
Okinawa: Peter Gruss, former president, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology; also, Jack Moorman, Japan Society of Northern California and US MedTech Frontiers
Karuizawa: Prof. Tamai Katsuya, University of Tokyo RCAST; Prof. Suzuki Kan’ichi, Shinshu University; Tanaka Katsunori, specially appointed professor, Keio SFC;
Awaji: Furushiro Kenji, Nambu Makiya, Fukuda Shou and Kobayashi Keiko of Pasona Inc, and Prof. Kanazawa Hiroshi of the Awaji Institute for a Healthy and Happy Life
Kamakura: my long-time friend and collaborator Michi Kaifu!
Sharing economy insights: Airbnb Japan for graciously hosting power host interviews and the Sharing Economy Association of Japan for time and materials; also JETRO San Francisco (then Tojo Yoshiaki)
A lot of photos didn’t make the final edition for spatial reasons. In Chartbook-y style, I’m sharing a few highlights here.
Team Pasona at their Awaji HQ, January 2024
Rollator and cane on the streets of Kamakura Imaizumidai; March 2023
AgeTech startup pitch event, October 2023 (Tokyo; hat-tip
)
Pudu Robotics delivery robot; senior care housing operator pitch event, May 2023
And why look at the sharing economy in a country with an aging and centralizing population? Some class materials from a previous business in Japan class help frame this.
Above: Airbnb power hosts, 2018
On with that, on to the rest of our post. Congratulations again to the team at the MIT AgeLab!
Friends, back in August 2022 I published a two-part sequence on travel to Japan. It was my first trip in 2.5 years (after decades of flying multiple times per year) and it was a delight to get back. Through the heat and cicadas and some serious rain, I had a blast, and it inspired two newsletters: Tokyo, Again, and Clusters: Locations, Ecosystems and Opportunity, embedded below.
About a week later I awoke to an email from the team at MIT AgeLab: Prof Joe Coughlin and Luke Yoquinto. They’d read the post. They were looking for someone familiar with clustering who could contribute a chapter on longevity hubs in Japan for a forthcoming book on Global Longevity Hubs. Specifically, they were applying the same concept of Regional Advantage (from AnnaLee Saxenian) that I had talked about in my post. Would I be interested?
Short answer: yes!
Two-odd years later, the book is now available for pre-order (Amazon | MIT Press). Here’s what it looks like.
Having read only part of it so far, I can’t wait to read the rest!
Longer answer - in approaching putting a chapter together, I gave thought to how best to take advantage of being neither Japanese nor in Japan, and not being affiliated with one institution in-country. Rephrased, how could having an informed, arm’s length perspective be advantageous? And the conclusion I reached was that my own Clusters class framework would lend itself to this topic.
Industry clusters are characterized by a centripetal force - opportunity draws in talent, begetting further opportunity. In countries with a super-city at the center (e.g. Japan, South Korea, France, the United Kingdom) a lot of this activity happens there, meaning regional hubs need to somehow offset the gravitational pull of the mega-city at the center. (In the US, by contrast, we are rather more federated - our innovation hubs aren’t necessarily collocated with our federal government or financial center.)
In countries with low birth rates, the effect is heightened - the pull of the super-city means the one child born to a typical household will move to the big city for university or for work….and most likely stay. Which leaves the big cities relatively more youthful, and and regional and rural areas are where the effects of aging can be most clearly seen.
In Japan’s case, birth rate has been below replacement since 1974. So while South Korea’s birth rate may be lower, Japan has a bit of a headstart, and thus provides a leading indicator for other countries or regions to looking to adapt.
Share of population 65 and above: G7 plus South Korea and China1
~30% of the population over 65 is an average, and it’s not evenly distributed. As author, that meant there were no shortage of potential case studies. Ultimately, I chose four:
Okinawa: home to the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and Japan’s one remaining growing prefecture (in organic population terms)2
Kamakura: only one hour from Tokyo; one of Japan’s historic capitals and also home to the postwar “new town” of Imaizumidai, which has aged in place since its formation; also home to a Living Lab in which seniors can give feedback on product ideas
Karuizawa: famously described as a “hospital without a roof”; connected by bullet train to Tokyo (and thus commute or second-home friendly); frequent host city to global events (e.g. G7 and G20; the town grew in 2021 while the surrounding prefecture of Nagano shrank (as 46 of Japan’s prefectures did)
Awaji: I profiled Awaji in an earlier post, embedded below. Pasona moved its much of its headquarter functions here in 2020, in addition to launching the Awaji Island Institute for Healthy and Happy Life.
In addition to a chapter on “Japan’s urban satellites” (hat-tip Luke Yoquinto), Longevity Hubs also contains (and I quote): the full complement of articles originally published in the Boston Globe’s 2021-2022 "Longevity Hub” special series, as well as NINE new essays diving into burgeoning longevity hubs around the world.
The nine longevity hub contributions: Dubai; Louisville (KY); Japan; Milan; Newcastle; São Paulo; Tel Aviv (by Keren Etkin, curator of the Gerontechnologist newsletter); Thailand EEC; and Aging 2.0 by
.Stephen and I collaborated on a cross-post last year.
A population that is shrinking and consolidating presages some hard choices about where to invest, and where to disinvest. Japan’s Cabinet Office put out the projection below in 2019. It predicts (even) greater concentration of population in larger cities going forward.
Japan, population by city size3
Which informed both the selection of hubs and the naming of the chapter - to survive and thrive as a regional (longevity) hub, one likely needs to be in range of specialist resources that can be best found in the big city, and all four hubs are relatively well-connected to Tokyo or Osaka/Kobe (in the Awaji case).
Limitations of space meant not all material made it into the final chapter. Honorable mention goes to:
Toyama: the city that put a light rail in the center, and famously shrank itself (and discussed in Clusters class in 2023) by using “carrots not sticks” to move residents to the civic center over a span of decades
Gojome: the oldest town in Japan’s oldest prefecture (Economist coverage), Akita, with 50% of population over age 65
It’s been a delight working with the MIT AgeLab team on this, and I am very excited for the book!
Onward and upward
Jon
Statistics Bureau of Japan data, 2021, for Japan; World Population Prospects data, 2019, for ex-Japan countries; via stat.go.jp
Per 2021 population data, by prefecture
Cabinet Office of Japan projections, 2019