For eight years, I explored around the world for a seemingly phantom ‘perfect place’ to settle down. After trying various coliving setups from hippie communes to urban sharehouses with various levels of disorganization and sustainability I decided to stop looking and start building my “perfect place” at ZuCity Japan. In just a year, and only ~7 months actually in the country, I am well on my way to acquiring an entire neighborhood of properties and generating revenue at a profitable rate. Here is how I am doing it.

2025 Recap: ZuCity Japan Community Metrics

In our first year building a coliving neighborhood we have accomplished a lot.

• 4 houses bought all within a 5 minute walk of each other

• 1 car purchased

• 1 government property deal being negotiated

• 2 gatherings hosted

• 44 community members visited

Through many experiences across communities and countries, one of the main issues seems to be permanence and ownership. By treating community as an equity structure instead of as a ✨vibe✨, we are building a future where we don’t just occupy space—we steward it. If you think of owning 1m² of land as equal to 1 share in the community, then anyone can buy more shares off the open market via real estate deals. This is great because property is inherently networked so by being owners in an area we are automatically aligned to help improve the neighborhood and each other’s properties.

Compared to leasing, community-owned coliving benefits everyone :

1. Own our own housing, venues, transportation, food, and everything needed for a self-sustaining coliving community in a dense urban area or remote compound. ← This is our how we thrive autonomously.

2. Provide utilities/services that save ZuCity members money compared to 3rd parties (e.g. houses vs airbnb or hotels, owning cars vs renting or taxis) that are still profitable for the network to operate. ← This is our model’s crux.

3. Host more coliving events faster, cheaper, and profitably with our community owned infrastructure. ← This is how we scale our community..

4. Reinvest to maximize housing/utilities/services that make future ZuCity popups easier, cheaper, bigger, and better. ← This is how we scale our infra to city-size.

5. Continually compound and grow local wealth through increasing economic activity and land prices. ← This is how we get local alignment.

6. Free access to our amenities and events for locals. ← This is how we assimilate.

We are building an economically sustainable culture creation engine by using a vertically integrated business as the foundation for growing our community and property. A self-sustaining basecamp that owns all necessary infrastructure keeps costs and operational overhead low with profits reinvested into more public goods for the next community event. Our growing network of assets and businesses provides the best possible experience at the lowest cost to our members. ZuCity then offers our infra to other popup city and retreat organizers to host events 100x easier and a fraction of the cost of other destinations.

We leverage our networks of global coliving communities for amazing characters to power our unique coliving neighborhood combining traditional culture with futuristic society. ZuCity is a space where life is wonderful, social innovation thrives, and authentic local engagement fosters revitalization.

It has been one year since we started building ZuCity and the results speak for themselves. ZuCity has acquired 4 residential properties and are waiting to here back from the local government about acquiring a school as our 5th property, all within a 5 minute walk of each other.

• Neighborhood: We acquired two homes in 2025 and are moving into two more homes in Feb 2026 all within 5 minutes of each other. We also have our 🏴‍☠️ fleet’s first vehicle with more cars planned in Q1.

• Diplomacy: We’ve met city government twice and submitted a proposal to buy an abandoned school in our neighborhood. This would change ZuCity from a community experiment to a 5-year public-private partnership. If the school goes to one of the local Japanese companies, we have other properties lined up to propose next.

• Acceleration: We broke-even on our first ZuCity Japan popup city event purely through ticket sales, proving our model requires no grants, subsidies, or sponsors to survive. Event tickets generated ¥480,000 (~$3,200) in revenue with 26% immediately converted into hard assets (a car and furniture). This means we can perpetually acquire more assets, reducing costs and friction, from event revenues without external funding.

• Culture: We are embodying a new culture that practices and appreciates Japanese tradition while also innovating on it by importing best practices from around the world (this process itself is part of Japanese culture). I believe our success so far integrating into our local community is mainly due to this point.

• Aesthetics: We are ideating a visual and verbal language that makes this culture memetic and shows what our community is about. By combining traditional concepts like wabi-sabi, satoyama, mottainai, ma, and enso with futuristic visions we are working towards like transhumanism, space exploration, bioart, cypherpunk, neo-ruralism, and hyper-synthesization.

Why Try Community-Owned Coliving Model In Japan?

Its not the “wow ✨Japan✨” ignorant foreigner infatuation you might first assume. There are a lot of personal, political, and economic reasons backing the decision. We have started a whole blog to explain our investment thesis and prospects on the future of Japan where you can read essays on the economic/political side of things.

JPY2

Illuminating an optimistic future for Japan through research on culture and economics. Follow our coliving community building an innovation hub from Japan's abandoned houses.

By Taiko Aki

Japanese culture and real estate market provides an interesting dynamic here too. Many deals are not even listed and require hearing through the grapevine (in Japanese of course). Trust and cultural homogeneity are more important than money so you will be denied sales because you dont fit in no matter how much money you offer. This all means that actually living in the area, speaking the language, knowing the culture, and helping the locals is super important just to be allowed in and get off the ground. Luckily I’ve spent a couple years in Japan, mostly in rural areas working on farms and living with families. 3 out of 4 properties we bought so far didn’t even get listed online and were bought over text message 😏.

In short the reasons are for choosing Japan are:

1. Founder-Market-Fit: I’ve spent years traveling and living across Japan, speak Japanese, have deep connections to global digital nomad community, access to foreign capital, experience in finance and startups, and a deep dedication to making Japan the best country in the world again.

2. Primed Market: Massive national market of distressed properties (~15% of all houses are abandoned) which allows us to buy large amounts of houses and land in established cities with world class infrastructure.

3. Natural Protection: Xenophobia means it is hard for unwanted people to just move in to our neighborhood without our permission yet it is easy for our friends to move in if we vouch for them.

4. Fractal Wonders: Japan is actually a huge country and there’s always something deeper to explore. People just go out into the middle of nowhere and decide to build a house/cafe/gallery that you stumble across.

5. Government Support: There’s an abundance of incentives and programs at the local and national level for creating startups, moving to rural areas (including free land), having kids, R&D research, and other activities core to the ZuCity community.

6. Modern Meiji Restoration: Betting on an imminent revival of the Japanese economy that makes yen-denominated assets outperform the global markets in the coming decades and drives economic growth. We dont take this as a given outcome, we are driving this vision forward with ZuCity.

7. Cultural Superiority: Hight trust societies will always beat low trust societies long term. The west no longer has any high-trust regions left. Respect for other people, society, and nature are huge leverage points when trying to start a community and innovate on social systems like ZuCity is.

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Introduction

I wrote an initial braindump on my experiences at Network States in fall 2023 about that year in popup cities just to reflect on my experiences and how I was evaluating which projects I liked or not. Its crazy that a year has flown by and I’ve mostly lived in popup cities and Network States since April 2024.

Read my 2023 Network State Experiences

I decided to write an update after many people in the space asked me to speak about my experiences across the different projects and I realized it has been an entire year since i published my last one (which took a month or two to write actually)

Writing this as part of my own reflections and understanding of the different projects but also as a general resource for the ecosystem. I think its useful for both potential coordination members figuring out which ones fit them best that they want to join and also the organizers of each to understand how members might be analyzing them and perceiving them in the wild as well as how they can better differentiate from each other.

I’m excited for this Network State / New Nation movement since i’ve been a digital nomad since 2017 and been traveling solo around the world looking for a new home. I’ve yet to find one but I’ve built a great network of amazing people in the process. Many people in my friend groups have been talking about a “global network of community homes” for years now and it is finally starting to become a reality with the help of some billionaire papis contributing financial and social capital. The past 18 months I’ve been living 50% in popup cities (zuzalu + FtC + zuconnect + vitalia + zuvillage), 25% hub cities (Berlin + Tokyo), and 25% adventuring in nature.

A quick meme explaining the archetypes of people involved across the ecosystem

There is no war with East Asia

“Network States” as a meme has continued to take off. Many people I know in the “Network State” space dislike the term for ideological and moral reasons for various reasons. Ironically many people don't like the Statist aspect as anti-state anarchists or libertarians while also many not liking the unnecessarily antagonistic rhetoric towards existing governments (mainly that they offer more benefits and operate better than any Network State). “Startup Societies”, “Network Societies”, “New Nations”, “CoordiNations” etc. other terms get used and tossed around but don't have the same mind share, mimetics, or funding magnetism. I prefer “New Nations” at the moment but I still use “Network States” for the more techno-libertarian projects that I don't like so much.

As a US citizen, I tried creating a corporate entity in Prospera and Catawba. After many days just trying to pass KYC on both and being continually denied, I gave up. Both were also charging hundreds of dollars for company registration. I went ahead and created a company on Stripe Atlas which was a faster process (minutes), lower price, and no KYC bullshit.  Even if I had created a “Network State” entity, it would be isolated from the traditional banking world making it difficult to raise capital or even sell products. I haven’t tried making an entity in Liberland but I also don’t feel like paying the $5-10,000 to be a citizen.

So while these Network States are promoting themselves as libertarian economic engines for innovation, they have more hurdles and struggles for founders who already have access to traditional markets with more capital (a.k.a where the majority of innovation currently happens). Convincing existing/potential founders to defect their country is the growth strategy of Network States, yet these founders are better to stay where they are for now. 

So far as an entrepreneur and a digital nomad, none of the Network States has seemed particularly appealing. To say nothing of the business environment, the general local environment is not a great value proposition with most having been on resorts in developing nations which have nice scenery but overpriced, at-best mediocre products and services available on site. I'm not a needy glamping bitch - I’ve hitchhiked, slept on streets, and lived in the jungle before - but why overpay for low quality in a competitive global market? Compared to my new life in Japan, I can’t see any Network State competing on cost of living, quality of life, and access to capital and culture in the foreseeable future. But sure you are “free” to not pay taxes there.

I would say so far Network States are losing the fight in terms of financial, natural, and cultural capital. While still losing in absolute terms, on a per capita basis they have much higher human, knowledge, social, political capital which are of course more valuable. They should start to turn the existing capital into the livable business centers that they say they are so the experiments can continue.

Popup Cities as tactical meta for New Nations

“A healthy lifestyle is also a technology—one which works best as a social technology—and this too improved quickly at Zuzalu...Technologies that have a heavy cultural component, where new software tools and new human habits are being developed at the same time, are likely a great fit for this approach…given that many now desire personal spiritual progress” - Vitalik Buterin, Why I Built Zuzalu

While not a New Nation / Network State, Zuzalu started the concept/genre of popup city with a 2-month event targeted at longer-term coliving without full-time commitment. the  experiment was to see if we can better iterate on modes of living, daily habits, and new collaborative formats for exchanging/creating/building information and ideas. I wrote how my art project Jinni is gamifying life with cute tomogatchis to drive these lifestyle changes in startup societies.

I feel pretty confident saying popups are the new meta of New Nations. There have been ~5 popups in the past 18 months since Zuzalu. The format is spreading from the Zuzalu ecosystem to other communities like ShanHaiWu and now Balaiji’s own Balaji’s Network School at 90 days long (and at the exact same time as multiple communities takes over Chiang Mai for a massive collaborative popup city).

Popups have excelled as short-term coliving to build community momentum while prototyping culture, tooling, and startups. Build momentum and community, generate revenue, acquire social and financial capital, while figuring out location and strategy to acquire natural capital. The most successful New Nation / Network State projects in the past year in terms of IRL participants and VC dollars have followed the same model. With the 6+ popup cities happening simultaneously in Chiang Mai in October, some from new communities some from existing ones, I think next year in 2025 we will have more data and developments from how this model performs over time.

The “Decentralization” of Zuzalu

Its more like a fragmentation or pollination than “decentralization” in my opinion. Zuzalu was intentionally disrupted abruptly by the founder Vitalik Buterin to prevent political capture and centralization from the community that was trying to latch on to the social and political capital that was accrued during the event. I would say “Zuzalu is dead” and was just a moment in time and space. Today it feels more like a concept than a community to me, especially after Vitalik said there would be “no official Zuzalu event in 2024”. Infighting and squabbling for grant funding, lack of quality control in events, lack of clarity on community autonomy or governance, competing socio-political cultures, etc. etc. have further ensured that “Zuzalu” as a singular entity no longer persists.

It has turned into a bustling ecosystem of interconnected communities around the world with dozens of events in the year since it happened though. “Zuzalians” and the fresh blood into the ecosystem are voting with their feet by choosing which popups they go to, who they live with, what they do there, and who they refer their friends to. Instead of arguing “should Zuzalu do this event or that event” as was seen with 2024 in Thailand vs other locations like most community/DAO “governance” turns into, all events are operating independently happening whenever they want. An ideal outcome imo but one that didn't necessarily require the community fracturing and fighting in the way it did

While Zuzalu itself hopefully fades into irrelevance, I can also see it becoming the biggest and most successful New Nation if it can find a way to be more collaborative across the popups its spawned. The main thing really missing from Zuzalu ecosystem is a feedback mechanism for popups to learn from past mistakes and successes. They need a way to learn what operational process worked, what types of venues/accommodations are most conducive, which residents provide vs extract value, rating organizers by residents for future attendees can understand quality before deciding, etc.

New Nations I’m (still) Exploring

The list has only grown, despite my bearish intro I haven’t counted anyone out yet! As last time I would still say all the subject CoordiNations have pretty well defined cultures, even if that culture is an intentional mixture of cultures through mandated diversity or agnostic ideology. Zuzalu has the most mindshare but exists as a standalone event that has now branched off into many popups and projects. I like AKIYA the most because while they are open to technology they definitely are not “tech first” an absolutely not the standard “tech bro” vibe at other New Nation projects and also more intimate, creative, get shit done together while the others are larger and I inevitably slip into socializing instead of working after a few weeks (my own fault for not having self-control I know).

The people I met at Zuzalu and other New Nations over the past 18 months have become some of my closest friends, helped me advance myself in ways i didnt know I needed, and generally made my life way more amazing and exciting than I thought possible after 7 years globe trotting and making millions.

The spreadsheet has gotten too big to really share here so go to the link for an indepth review.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MvR23yGSRuBAwEqaZjOvKaxARNnmz4_sXrBYYSFfIb0/

While I havent gotten official financial statements from the organizers yet, this is an average cost for the major popups based on anecdotal polling of ~20 residents that have been to multiple events.

My New Home Nation - Japan

I’ve been a fulltime digital nomad with no homebase for about 7 years now. I’m really starting to feel how much effort it takes and how disruptive my life is having the inability to stay in one spot and have a routine. So last year I decided to buy a house in Japan and move there again which is when I came across AKIYA COLLECTIVE. Why Japan? I’m hella bullish (with low certainty) on Japan’s economy after visiting and living there over the course of 10 years.

AKIYA and I were both in a vibecheck stage for the past year but after helping them get a grant from Zuzalu, living there a couple weeks helping clean and restore the house, it seems we’re both down for me to buy a house near them and join the community fulltime. I mainly want to live with them to work on my art project Jinni which is related to Network State/New Nations/Startup Societies. I also made a post in Zuzalu’s private members forum that Akiya and other permanent villages are an experimental form we should be exploring more and enable us to try more things faster, at lower costs, and retain knowledge between experiments better.

I’ve had so many friends say they want to buy a house near me that I am starting my own permanent popup village separate from AKIYA to preserve their lowkey art vibe and I have more freedom to develop my own community. This dual-node approach should allow for us to do comparative analysis of IRL operations, community health metrics, governance models, etc. providing data for New Nation theory and praxis.

Conclusion

Looking back at last year's New Nations thoughts and analysis I’m surprised how accurate they have turned out to be. I'm even more surprised that all the projects still exist today in some form. I’m also super surprised how much of my life has been consumed by this New Nation movement and how revolutionary the people I’ve met have been to my way of living and thinking.

Now that multiple popups are happening year-round, sometimes at the same time and even in the same city,  we need more cross-event ticketing between popup cities.If I pay up to $5k to stay one month at a popup city, why would i not be able to go to another one in the same city for a day or two for meetings? The obvious next step is a subscription-model pay $X and go to anyone you want. We can do even better than that.

We need POPOUTs. Moments of collaboration, not another popup city/village. Popouts could be a party, camping trip, hackathon, or any cross popup moment. At the very least popup cities should be co-funding parties in the same city as an interstitial space and cultural and information exchanges like World Fairs. We don't need “congress” that try to unify and come to agreements, just connect the social fabric and let this amazing community of builders do the rest.

I’m super excited for what 2025 will bring to this space and even more excited for what I can contribute. And I can't wait until we can all live in the village we buy together in Japan ;)

Self-Actualization Progress

Now that the full game prototype is *almost* complete I’m going to start tracking core life metrics that cant be tracked in-game and posting before/afters of my avatar in every post. I’ve gone to the sauna at least an hour a day for the past month (end of July + early August) and its really becoming a habit and my skin is fucking radiant like the 🌞.

On my hiatus

I quit my job that i had started in March beginning of last week because it was not fullfiling its original purpose of giving me stability and a salary to build Jinni without pressure to monetize. I had started really hating working with them (esp because they didnt want to pay me), i didnt feel like i could even do work there, and was wasting so much time trying to push before their launch but then they kept delaying (to their own detriment the onchain evidence would seem to tell). I could really feel how much life energy they were stealing from me because omg they were so annoying and useless. Even though I quit last week it took them almost 2 weeks and me coming back just to curse them out before they got it through their heads I as done with them.

As soon as i quit last week i felt way happier, less irritated, more inflow, etc. Felt v similar to when I fired everyone and shutdown my last startup Debt DAO early last year. After just a couple days of going back to building Jinni fulltime and i felt fucking great. Two weeks later and I feel light, airy, and in flow again. Taking a couple months break turned out to be great either way because some of my technical issues magically resolved themselves like Android Health library getting fixed, Expo updating to the latest React Native with major upgrades, and bumping into a real (non-crypto) dev that fixed my AI pipeline blocker by simply….adding a library I refused to use before lol.

So I’m back to full time art making and game development. I’ve made a ton of progress in two weeks even when just getting back into the codebase and game dev mindset. Im headed to Japan again in a couple weeks to chill with the two art collectives i’ve found there (so far 😈) and blast through features before going back to popup cities in Thailand in October and hopefully do a soft launch for the game with communal jinn.

Next dev update post I’ll try to go back to my original format where the main section is a thought piece instead of this boring life update / excuse for no progress. I’m thinking I’ll go with pro-social psyops but might describe my strategy Japan, brand IP, and monetization strategy to make it clear to players while onboarding that I’m not going to sell their data (which would mean selling my data! and I have the most data on the platform). Could also explain my popup city GTM strategy but i thinks it better to write that while im in Thailand rather than before.

Game Updates

• Got AI image editing for your tamagotchi evolution to work. Full AI pipeline and MVP technically working. Concept and architecture is built, now its technical + prompt engineering, code cleaning, product development, and distribution at pop-up cities.

• Deployed my React Native app as a website so I can side-load it onto iPhones as a PWA (so convoluted lol). Havent gotten PWA working but thats one of the small product dev things to figure out. PWA is very important for retention and continuous gameplay but people can still play on mobile without it.

  But cool I still have one codebase for a native Android app and a my webapp. I had already designed codebase for this so actually didnt take much except some project-level config.

• My hosted Neo4j database got deleted bc i hadnt used it in almost 6 months. Data structures have changed a lot since Neo4j is unstructured and doesnt have migrations like SQL so actually a good reset / cleaning. Great reason to keep backups and also good to test that my backdated importing will work for new players when i re-onboard again.

• Updated content on the marketing site. Still not great but a lot happier with the copy and vibes

• My cute pixelated tamagotchi base model that all players evolve from is either too cute or too pixelated and does not actually get edited. Although it was selected by popular vote in the private players chat (DM me if you want to get added) I will unfortunately be forced to find a new base model that is higher resolution to be edited by DALLE. Might be an issue w ith my AI pipeline which i havent fully tested since getting the DALLE API call to work and is still very hacky

• Going to be posting more ongoing product/dev/UI stuff on Farcaster. I think its good to start being a bit more public. People like the game, apparently people like this blog, people like me, no reason to share them all more

• Participated in the Zuzalu Q2 Gitcoin round. I didnt do any marketing/sales around it like i did last time because i didnt care and i havent been working on the game. Also forgot to update copy on my profile my before I submitted so not even best presentation possible. Still ended up in top 10 projects again (out of 30) with 1.6 ETH (~$4,000 today) in total donations and matching. Pretty good for a solo dev that hasnt touched the project in 4 months and only messaged like 5 people to donate lol.

• Had my first contributor to Jinni codebase from another resident at ZuVillage Georgia!

• Finally got AI pipeline fully working. Was actually fixed by the contributor, he made the fabulous insight that I could just ….import a library! I was really trying to avoid that and have complete manual control over my AI interactions because they are so core to the game. But at the same time its not so core that im building my own AI models and it being blocked on the final and most critical game logic was

• Got re-confirmation from Apple that I’m banned from creating a developer account so i cant even submit my app to the app store so they can reject me there like a normal app does lol

• Asked one of my favorite crypto artists Elco to do some avatar concept designs and artsy stuff. Video of moodboard I sent him. He’s still cooking on the artwork. Not feeling like doing user testing on branding. Just going to go with own aesthetic and intuition and if people dont fux they can not play.

I think thats it but thats pretty good for 2 weeks back including this post.

Next Steps

• Get PWA working now that webapp is live. Spent a couple days trying to get it ready but having issues with JS bundling/package imports on web with service worker files and stuffs. Basic annoying stuff as always.

• Test and improve prompt engineering to refine avatar evolution now that pipeline is working

• Get webapp onto a custom domain app.jinni.health. For some reason netlify isnt working, might be because i already have a netlify site deployed at jinni.health. AI gave me what seems like an overly complicated work around but ill try it. I could just roll my marketing site into my app and resolve the issue once and for all while also improving UX and SEO but also takes more effort so lets see.

• Get jubjub NFC cards working on mobile web so i can do onboarding for iPhones. Should be small logic change and I know its possible because of jubmoji.quest and already have some tips from them so not super worried about it.

• Push updated app to Android App Store so they dont delist my app after 5 months of inactivity (again perfect timing coming back to game development)

• Get server and database spun up again for user testing the new working version of the app!

• Run through game and make sure data structure’s are still valid/consistent for communal Jinn before I start developing the UI

• Make UI/UX wireframes for communal jinn to user test with in Japan and Thailand before building

• Find some more grants to apply to. Ideally not on Gitcoin to expand reach and get buy in from specific communities that will use my game.

• Going to integrate Farcaster sign-on and have sharing ur jinni image / evolution summary as a frame. Hopefully can make frame so that other people that have signed-in with Farcaster can just recast and it will auto populate with their jinn. Would be dope to make channels have communal jinn but that seems kinda weird so not going to prioritize that.

Disclaimer: While I've been thinking about this for over a year, I just threw this whole essay together today, research and all. I would love feedback, comments, and questions for my follow up posts.

My personal history with Japan

I've been going to Japan for 10 years. The yen, after the last volatile 6 months, is still ~50% cheaper than it was when I first went in 2015. My decisions aren't based on short term news hype cycle that popped up recently (akiyas on instagram, stock crash last week, ). I’ve spent nearly 3% of my entire life living in Japan and plan on spending a majority of my next 10 years there.

April 2015 - June 2015: Broke ass 19 year old. Spent 3 months WWOOFing in Shimane and Hokkaido. Hitch hiked across half of Japan from Hiroshima to Fukushima sleeping on the highway/streets and surviving on 7-Eleven.

March 2019 - November 2019: Lived in Osaka because they were the nicest, funniest people I met my first trip and they have the best food. Osaka >>> Tokyo. Decided Japan wasnt for me because my environment felt very static / no growth which was no bueno for an ambitious 22 year old

March 2023: Was in a bad mental state so went to Japan for vacation. Healed me beyond belief. Remembered why i wanted to live there in the first place and decided to live there again.

April 2024: Scouting trip for property across the country. Visited Tokyo, Izu, Fukuouka, Goto, and Osaka. Stayed at Akiya Collective and really got to know the founder. Decided to buy property near them.

September 2024: Scouting and starting the process of closing on two properties in Nagano and Hokkaido with two different art collectives I'm interested in working with. Meeting with a VC fund and Shibuya reps to negotiate a visa.

December 2024: Hopefully starting my permanent move there if i can close on properties and visas. Otherwise hopefully finishing those processes.

TLDR My Japanese Supremacy Theses

1. Japan will enact more innovative policies than other countries, especially developed western ones

2. Explosive adoption of accelerationist technologies like nuclear, AI, robotics, crypto, and longevity

3. Japan's strong-culture + isolationist nature will make them a bastion of creativity and innovation while the rest of the world continues to homogenize as "The West"

1. Innovative Policies & Policy Innovation

In the past 200 years Japan has already gone through two major economic restructurings - the Meiji period from feudal to industrialized and post-WWII from industrialized to modern. Both times the transitions were fast and put them at the forefront of global technological where just a few years before they had been dominated by The West. These were driven by strong government, clear visions, and cut throat implementation to achieve their goals. I'm taking the bet that they are on the brink of another quantum leap and their economy will have a massive turn around in the next 10 years

Starting with the most relevant point that inspired this post - interest rate hikes

The BoJ rate change tanking the entire market shows how influential Japan is to the world economy even just from a financial sense. If Japanese monetary policy can add $1.4 TRILLION to the US stock market then they can add $1.4 TRILLION to the JP stock market. Its obviously easier said than done and not a direct correlation e.g. no startup ecosystem with IPOs over past decades but instead of funding foreign hedge funds with cheap rates they can change monetary/financial/tax/tech policy in favor of funding domestic startups. And now they have data to prove how valuable these polcies can be to their economy

“But the stock market crash” ok so? US stock market crashed in 2020, 2008, 1987, etc. With a long enough time horizon and a reasonably decent plan a market crash doesnt matter.

They were willing to challenge status quo in monetary policy by persisting with negative interest rates for nearly a decade, even after COVID when even the ECB buckled, and raising rates for the first time in nearly 2 decades stark contrast to ECB who and US who have had positive rates for most of that time period. Long running unconventional strategy AND a rapid, decisive shift to "normal" monetary policy show the government is capable and willing to take extreme steps to fundamentally change the construct of the Japanese economy. While major changes, interest rates are a small and relatively simple change, what will they do next to overhaul their economy? I believe this is only the start. Notably they increased rates because they see positive development in the economy. To be fair this could also be insignificant detail as it was largely out of control since 1. they were no longer competitive on the global market and 2. they were incapable of fully controlling yield curve in the first place.

Increase rates signals confidence in the economy and may attract foreign investment (not me, i was already investing). Some might argue that higher rates might slow growth further but "normalizing" monetary policy may bring long-term financial stability and could encourage more efficient capital allocation to the Japanese market. Yen price increasing, decreases exports which is sending stock prices down because they are an export economy - for now. Not a huge problem if you belive they're moving to an even more isolationist and not dependent on imports for energy (still need manufacturing inputs).

Japan has focused on strengthening domestic industries and supply chains. While their economic growth has always been lower than US and China and they took a bigger hit during covid due to much stricter lockdowns, their economy has stronger growth in the years since covid than before, in contrast to US and China whose economic growth is lower than before. It may not look like much but outpacing the two biggest economies in the world is opposite to most peoples perception of Japan's economy including most of the investment community.

In addition to making dramatic changes in policies Japan is also starting to experiment with new governance models and ways of creating new policies.

Anno Takahiro ran for governor of Tokyo and used git to crowd source policy changes from voters. Version controlled policy has been a dream of technologist since like forever. He also plugged an AI chat bot into the updated policies so people could ask questions about his platform in the upcoming election. He placed 5th with ~150k votes. This style of campaign is unheard of in the West but based on his success in a major election I think it will catch on fast in the Japanese political sphere.

The Japanese government is also experimenting with collective decision making with cryptoeconomic tooling such as Quadratic Voting/Funding and DAOs. Plurality Institute, a multinational economic and governance policy research group is helping Japan implement changes with their learnings from Taiwan and other markets. Shibuya City, a subset of Tokyo, is proactively experimenting with how to redesign themselves for more public social spaces, industry, mixed use architecture, and other things to make it a futurist city and attract top talent.

Better policies, faster, with public input means faster implementation of novel solutions and accelerated economic development.

2. e/acc Adoption

I think Japan has a really level headed approach to new technologies even if too conservative for me personally. They balance practicality, economic viability, scientific progress, environmental stewardship, and social issues.

Nuclear

Before a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011 which was the biggest since Chernobly, 30% of all energy consumed in Japan was produced via nuclear! Then it went to 0 and they are looking to go back to 20% by 2030. They are an island nation with little natural resources. Energy dependency is a major economic expense and geopolitical threat. E.g. China wouldn't even have to invade Japan, just blockade them long enough until their power grid shuts down. They are ramping nuclear back up to ~20% by 2030 and investing in novel nuclear technology like modular reactors. This would put it back in the top 10-15 countries by nuclear production in the next 5 years

0 people died from Fukushima and estimated a couple thousand were indirect deaths from evacuations and health complications. If "loss of life years" is the risk we are seeking to be mitigated, Japan is losing many more life years from lack of economic development and population degrowth than even 10 nuclear meltdowns so I'm hoping they push nuclear even harder in the coming years.

Biotech

Japan has some of the best scientific insititutions and biotech manufacturing . Biotechnology Transformation (BX) for synthetic biology, biomedicine, gene and cell therapies. They excel at research, manufacturing, AND, translating to clinical treatments. Power combo.

They are already leading cutting edge biotech like longevity with Yamanaka winning the 2012 Nobel Prize and Ohsumi in 2016 for medicine I'm currently looking at starting a stem-cell injection on my next trip.

(graphic included solely for the power rangers but the paper is good too. Japan Supremacy!)

AI

Japan has been at the forefront of AI since its inception in the 80s, including the first real-world application of expert systems. The Japanese government released the "Social Principles of Human-Centric AI" in 2019, 3 years before ChatGPT and most of the world woke up to AI ( 80s FYI) paraphrased below:

1. Dignity - AI should be used as a tool to enhance human abilities and creativity, not to control or overly depend on it.

2. Diversity & Inclusion - AI should be developed and deployed in a way that flexibly includes diverse perspectives to create new values.

3. Sustainability - Utilizing AI to generate new businesses and solutions to solve social disparities and build sustainable societies including global challenges like climate change

I think these principles and their wording exemplify the well-rounded nature of Japanese e/acc policy. Highly recommend reading AI policy 2023 whitepaper and the 2024 retrospective from the Liberal Democratic Party. They focus on individuals acquiring AI literacy, business use cases, cultural digitization, reduce risks associated with generative AI, such as disinformation and privacy violations, while promoting the beneficial use of AI technologies in various sectors, including healthcare and climate change.

Crypto

Pretty good, and at the very least clear and underestandable, crypto regulation in terms of personal/corporate finance and taxes. Unlike the US where every government agency unilaterally dictates most cryptoassets are under their purview, Japan says that cryptoassets should be treated based on their function. They have lagged behind in the industry because of bad policies related to equity investing and overregulation but they are starting to turn around on both these fronts.

The infamous Mt Gox hack and bankruptcy set global precedent as the first time a companies assets weren't liquidated when a Japanese court allowed Bitcoin to be distributed directly back to depositors on the exchange. Bullish on Japan.

3. Cultural Evolution

I cant be fucked to finish this part but Peter Thiel and some other dude have a thesis on memetic warfare. People hate being the same. Eventually to distinguish yourself you must consume the other. This is happening in The West with "left vs right" politics, in-fighting on irrelevant just for the sake of schizmogenesis. As soon as one side says they like something, the other side HAS to label it as bad or stupid or whatever even if they never cared before just to feel different. Japan is "strong culture", insists on tradition, and has high agency as a society even if individuals dont really. Japan will win the memetic wars of the 21st century by continuing to refine, adapt, and export their unique culture and heritage. Mother fuckers are crazy and will do ANYTHING. They are repressing their kamikaze world domination desires with squid hentai and hello kitty until they're ready to unload.

Returns are based no asymmetric bets. Ideally you have asymmetric information informing your bets. I dont have much asymmetric information on Japanese market itself, just on the culture e.g. I can speak Japanese conversationally, have friends across the country, understand how they think and act, etc. I can "move among them" even if im not one of them. If Japan does pop off a lot of people are going to try and rush in with their foreigner attitudes, behaviours, and get completely blocked by the natives. And I'll already be fully integrated doing whatever I please.

Soft power and cultural domination can win over a lot. Even now who doesnt love Japan? Just no one wants to move there because its too "weird", too far, too unknown, too risky, etc. But everyone still wants to go there. With some minor changes, and proper integration programs to get the. foreigners assimilated they can transmute their cultural capital into economic capital without diluting one of their biggest advantages.

Conclusion

While people might think the market doesnt have great prospects now, that means I can convince Japan to give me more perks for coming there at this dire time. And i know i can convince my friends to join me there. Not saying we can change the entire Japanese market but I think we could make a significant influence with just a handful of super talented, well capitalized rogue agents. I’m also willing to bet with my background in startups/finance/entrepreneurship/art/fashion that Japan wants me to be there to help improve their economy. And I want to. So cheap house buy.

Apparently the akiya phenomenon is now known via the tiktok/instagram algorithms to the public. To me akiyas are a massive empty container to be filled with creative energy for the new Japanese economy. The government says akiyas are one of the biggest problems facing the country (they are wrong, its a symptom of other problems) and have provided incentive programs to buy these homes in the hope new residents will rejuvinate the desert countryside.

Approximately 12-15% of all houses (9 million!) are abandoned.c

Nagano has one of the highest rates of akiya in the country at nearly 20% abandoned rate! I only went to Nagano for the first time to visit Akiya Collective, a project I've been following/helping for the past year. The crazy part is Nagano is known as a great vacation spot - amazing snow and ski resorts, much cooler in summer than the muggy sauna the rest of japan turns into, beautiful mountains and clean air, and home to one of the most famous Japanese rich towns in the country Karuizawa.

I'm also looking at a place in Hokkaido with another art collective. And of course I'm going to buy a place in my favorite spot Osaka but I'm prioritizing the community hubs first (in general in my life and also as part of my Japanese investment thesis)

P.S. This maybe only 75% of my economic thesis on Japan. I’ve at least got a “Longevity State” thesis which I’ll do another post about.

Jinni is impossible without genAI

As I mentioned in the intro to Jinni dev blog, I started building the app 6 years ago. I didnt continue it at the time for 2 reasons - the first being it was one of the first things I ever coded when I was 22 and knew I needed to be a much better programmer and entrepreneur if I wanted to unlock the idea’s full potential. The second is that it was infeasible to execute on the game’s core idea of programmatic image editing based on dynamic data at the time. 

To have your tomogatchi dynamically evolve everyday requires an army of data scientists and artists working in close collaboration analyzing and redrawing each players’ avatar by hand every day. Obviously time consuming, expensive, inconsistent, privacy issues, etc. I needed a way to programmatically evaluate data based on players’ different goals and intentions in life and then take those generated personalized analyses to programmatically create daily dynamic graphical evolutions of your tamagotchi.

The solution? While I was interested in genetic programming at the time, a form of generative AI, and I knew there must be some way to programmatically generate tamagotchi evolution images, I decided to wait to build the app. Lo-and-behold, Stable Diffusion, DALLE, Midjourney and others came into play with exactly the thing I needed to make this game a reality.

I'm really proud of what I’ve built over the past month (only a week or two of actual work though) and i'm excited to be sharing it with you all. While it doesn’t exceed my exceptional expectations it's a phenomenal start to a very complex problem that i didnt even know how to solve when i first started building the game a few months ago.

High level concepts I wont go into this blog but you can ask an LLM about if you need to:

• LLMs vs image generation

• Prompt generation pipeline

• Agentic systems

• Vector embeddings

• Prompt Engineering

Problems to solve building generative AI for a tamagotchi based self-actualization game

Before diving into what I actually did, it’s important to know all the problems and constraints that went into it. I mentioned some at a high level in the intro but there are many different components that led to the design solution I came up with.

• Need to accommodate the vast diversity in peoples’ goals, lifestyles, apps/services, and preferred tomogatchi aesthetics.

• Do not want to be prescriptive about “good” and “bad” actions. No global algorithm for experience / points / social score / etc. 

• Re #1 + #2: Must interpret players actions based on how they perceive them, not how I dictate them to be.

• Re #3: I've never heard of anyone programmatically generating personalized algorithms for people to run customiz data analysis with subjective view points.

• Accommodate arbitrary data in personal analysis algorithms. We already standardize data from all data sources so they are interoperable to facilitate this and other data analysis. However we must also consider the fact that people with the same intentions might have different habits and data to influence their jinni. 

• Ensure that all this programmatically generated code and artifacts are logically consistent or at the very least internally consistent for suspended disbelief in gameplay (e.g. running more could give your jinni more legs which is illogical compared to making existing legs stronger but if we create more legs for everyones jinni everytime they run thats internally consistent allowing players to update their model of how the game works and reliably adjust their strategies)

• Final output image quality: Does all of this even generate a jinn that is recognizable as a “living thing”? Is it identifiable as the last jinn we interacted with? Does this jinn evolve in the way we expected it enforcing the core game mechanic?

• How do you deal with a lack of data? Do we treat a lack of data as a negative input to incentive players to collect that data or ignore intentions that have no data to associate with it?

• Limiting personal customizations in the early alpha phase to better understand and test how AI interprets intentions and how tamagotchis visually evolve while still players choose their own adventure.

• Theres many more that I haven't come across yet, can't remember at this time, or cant quite grok or articulate myself.

• Which AI models perform better for all the different needs required - generating LLM prompts, analyzing data, image editing (not generation)

I considered using LangChain for all my AI stuff but a simple 5 word comment on a Reddit post dissuaded me. “Just write your own code.” It resonated with me because I’ve intentionally been taking shortcuts on things to get the app pushed out which i dont feel great about the dependency creep on my backend. I also know that this AI component of the app is Jinni’s secret sauce / core competency (I say as I spill all the beans here) and would like to have more control and insight over how it works. So being able to have the most amount of control and flexibility over it, I decided to do everything in clojure on my existing server. No new microservice to deal with devops, not another language to program in, etc. led me to writing it from scratch. I did still use a blog by LangChain to guide the design of my LLM system, mainly their insight that preprogrammed pipelines have better performance than generalized agent frameworks. And TBH im so happy i did, excluding comments and logs for dev, one of the most critical components of the entire Jinni game only takes ~150 lines of code.

Day In The Life Of A Jinn

Now that you understand all the problems I was trying to solve and how they affect how the game can be played, I’ll be walking you guys through the thought process and technical implementation for how your jinni evolves over time. Now you can better understand how to actually play the game and how your actions in the real world affect your virtual avatar. It will be mostly technical with some graphics but you guys should find it interesting nonetheless.

An up to date schematic of my AI evolution process can always be found in the docs on my github repo.

1. Players set their intentions for self-actualization. You can configure how your jinni looks just like every other widget in the game (TK inventory blog), this allows you to customize your jinni for different base models, aesthetics styles, intentions to guide it, what mood or personality it will have, and analytical and artistic algorithms to evolve it over time. Because of the early testing phase to actually monitor the performance of this whole pipeline, all players will pick from a few predefined options during onboarding and use the same base tamagotchi to evolve from to properly.

2. Players’ intentions are sent to LLM to generate personal “Analysis Prompt”s. The Analysis Prompt is another LLM prompt generated by the LLM itself that uses a players intentions to figure out what types of behavior a player should have to actualize their intention. An example Analysis Prompt is:

   Example Analysis Prompt

   Based on my intentions of cultivating a sexy physique, expressing creativity daily, and self-actualizing, look for actions that align with my ideal attributes of Intelligence and Community.
   
   Reflect on my daily activities: Am I engaging in intelligent pursuits, such as learning new things or problem-solving? Am I consistently making healthy choices to support my physical well-being and sexy physique? Am I practicing mindfulness and self-reflection to better understand my thoughts and emotions, and make intentional choices that align with my desired growth?
   
   If my actions consistently reflect these intentions and attributes, I am on the right path to self-actualization. If not, I must reassess and make adjustments to bring my actions in alignment with my goals
   
   Reflect on my daily activities: Am I engaging in intelligent pursuits, such as learning new things or problem-solving? Am I consistently making healthy choices to support my physical well-being and sexy physique? Am I practicing mindfulness and self-reflection to better understand my thoughts and emotions, and make intentional choices that align with my desired growth?
   
   If my actions consistently reflect these intentions and attributes, I am on the right path to self-actualization. If not, I must reassess and make adjustments to bring my actions in alignment with my goals.

3. Generate text embeddings from player’s Analysis Prompt. These can be used for talking to your jinn about your intentions, discussing how your intentions have changed over time, finding other players with similar intentions to match for summoning circles, and many more AI powered features. This also helps optimize the system so we dont have to generate new prompts everyday, we can reuse your old Analysis  Prompt if you havent changed your intentions.

4. Players equip items that feed energy (data) to theirjinn. Your jinn can only evolve based on what you do in the real world, so we need to know what you are doing. Obv! Once you equip items you commonly use e.g. Soundcloud, Github it can affect your jinn’s evolutions

5. A player’s jinn “conjures” data into the game database. Based on the items you equip, we pull data from each integration to feed your jinn. Apple’s health data will make your jinn skinnier/fatter, Souncloud data will make you jinn happier/sadder. Data is normalized across all data providers so whether you track running in Strava, iHealth, Whoop, etc. it will always be read the same by your jinn (they are digital wizards remember 😉)

6. Synchronized jinn evolutions are initiated for all players simultaneously. Somehow jinn have some magic thing where they just vibe and do shit at the exact same time. Their daily evolutions is one of those things. They all process the data they have been fed all day and go through spontaneous metamorphosis into their new forms from this evolution process. Idk how it works, I’m not a jinn I just channel their energy through my code.

7. Analysis Prompt evaluates player actions and generates an Analysis Output. Every players personal prompt from step #2 are imbued with data they generated from step #4 + #5 to see how their actions correlated to their intentions. This creates a structured output of how (AI thinks) you’ve changed since last time your jinn evolved. This extra step  to output structured analysis also allows us to rerun image evolutions in the future without having to rerun data analysis allowing players to play around with different image styles and base avatar models without compromising their history. I have an assumption which has been somewhat validated in early testing that structured quantifiable outputs help the AI understand what it's trying to analyze and how it's supposed to think for more reliable results.

   Example Analysis Output:

   {:analysis {
   
     :brain 0.1  :reason "Assuming the pet has remained intellectually stimulated, leading to slight improvement in brain development.",
   
     :eyes -0.2  :reason "Assuming the pet's eyes have aged slightly, becoming more expressive and nuanced.",
   
     :heart 0.15 :reason "Assuming the pet's emotional well-being has remained stable or improved, leading to a slight increase in heart size.",
   
     :posture 0.05 :reason "Assuming the pet's posture has remained relatively unchanged, with only slight modifications based on natural aging."
   
   }}

8. There are still some prompt engineering kinks im working out for formatting the structured output which can be seen above. This isnt being used by actual code so its fine but not perfect.

9. Augmentation Prompt uses Analysis Output to generate an “Augementaion Output” DALL-E prompt that will modify your current jinn into their new form. An Augmentation Prompt prompt is a completely templatized LLM prompt that only takes in an LLM generated Analysis Output. It generates a new DALLE prompt daily based on what you have changed since last time you evolved. 

   Example Augmentation Prompt:

   {:prompt "Based on the analysis data provided, your avatar will have a brighter and more vibrant color palette to reflect your increased creativity and improved nutrition. The eyes will sparkle with a slightly larger pupil to represent your enhanced focus and energy from increased exercise. The heart shape will be fuller and more defined, symbolizing the growth and nurturing of your relationships. Your posture will appear more upright and confident, reflecting your newfound self-assurance and progress towards self-actualization."}

1. DALL-E edits your current jinn image using Augmentation Output

2. Your jinn’s new image is saved as the base model for the next round of evolutions and appears in your app home screen as your new avatar image.

Game Updates

• Initial AI pipeline development almost complete! Still ironing out last details on the recurring image modification. Having issues uploading PNG to DALL-E which is literally the final step and then it’s done. Still need a lot of work on prompt engineering but unclear what direction that will need to take until DALL-E augmentation step is complete.

• Starting to go harder on community engagement and direct/structured user questioning. First initiative is for signaling which image people want as the first base tamagotchi which is an obvious thing to crowdsource now that core idea, tech, and UI is validated. Maybe I’ll even do a community call before I fly to Japan next month. I’ll post in the early adopters telegram chat if I do so join if you want to participate. Next will probably be more  feedback on abilities, widgets, and integrations people want. 

• Bank account created!!!! Now we can make real $ not just crypto 😛. Now I’ll be exploring grants and MOU contracts harder.

• Got a $2.5k grant in credits from Open AI for image editing!

• 5 users onboarded to Android App. Not all of them have accounts in the database due to early config issues. 2 players with complete profile + customized homepage widgets setup.

• Almost 50 waitlist signups! Mostly for iphone :/ Great data signal to get that up asap. I want to get the core game more streamlined and tested before rolling out to a larger audience but it's great to know I can 10x my players instantly once I want to.

• Product analytics dashboards is developing. The top chart shows daily total players, average activity per player, and total activity across all players. The bottom chart lets me see who has created accounts, who has added integrations, and who has started customizing their homepage as steps in onboarding flow and engagement with game mechanics.

• Most of this is me of course. get-playlist must be 0 because i haven’t built homepage playlists yet. Me and everyone seems excited for this feature so that’s why its my target metric for onboarding.

• Updated widget config to allow customization per jinni instead of per player. This was mostly to allow for communal jinn which dont belong to a single player and would need different config than the owner. It also allows unlocks the ability for every player to have multiple jinn to customize with different gameplay styles, personalities, and homepage layouts.

• Added API endpoint to automatically conjure all data from a player across all existing integrations they’ve added. Now I can very easily update every players’ jinn with no scripting, in app actions, etc. so tomogatchis constantly evolve without players needing to check in everyday.

• Created redirects (portals) with analytics tracking. I’ve been making arbitrary links to Jinni owned pages for campaigns or partner sites for referrals. Better analytics for marketing campaigns, cleaner sharable urls, and branded URLs.

• Last month the Jinni dev blog on substack had a 7% increase in subscribers, 14% increase in views, and 10% bump in open rates making it almost 50%!

• Made my first breaking change to prod server! Had to happen eventually, just a  minor syntax mistake when adding some Cypher to an existing database query. With all the changes I’ve made to :Avatar and :Widget which are pretty core to API and backend I think its great this is the first thing thats broken. (it was on a :Widget query but nothing to do with logic, just syntax)

• Using my hand as an onboarding tool. I got an NFC chip implanted in my hand at Vitalia and have programmed it to use my new portals to bring people to the new install page on the website

• Results for Zuzalu quadratic Funding round are almost finalized. It looks like I’ll receive somewhere between 4-8 ETH in addition to the 1.3 ETH (now $5k since i hodl’d) in direct donations I received. This makes me one of the largest recipients in the round! Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone that donated and make sure you DM me your donation tx if you haven’t already!

  

Next steps

• Figure out DALL-E image formatting to finish AI divination pipeline. Its a super annoying and basic thing that is blocking literally the most important thing in the game. Classic software development.

• Finish home page playlists feature for Spotify. Mostly UI/UX work, backend logic and API should be done already

• Integrate Soundcloud. Most players ive talked to use it voer Spotify which is my preferred platform thats currently integrated. Mostly just a copypasta process from Spotify code with new data transmutation spells

• Do more user research with Zu event organizers about what a communal jinn would look like, what widgets and actions they want players to take on their profile, what insights they want into community health and how they want to improve it,

• Build summoning circle features on backend + frontend for communal jinn. Already have most of it pseudocoded out, just need to refine it based on user research, finish code, and test in the app with Jubmoji cards.