Europe, the US and China dominate smart city developments, Singapore and South Korea are grabbing some headlines, while India floods news feeds with its own smart city ambitions. Quietly a giant sleeps, a tech giant with the capacity for great smartness is slowly but surely developing its cities in a bid to leap frog all other countries and become the world’s leading smart nation. Welcome to Smart Japan. Away from the noise around terms like the “Internet of Things”, the Asia-Pacific nation put together their ‘Smart Japan ICT Strategy’. The mission of this strategy is both clear and ambitious, “To be the most active country in the world – Realizing Japan’s economic growth and contribution to international society through innovation by ICT.” The strategy’s vision is for Japan to build “a knowledge and information-based nation by 2020”. If you think that sounds too ambitious, consider Japan’s birth as an industrialized nation. In the matter of […]