About

I was born in Tokyo, but spent most of my school days abroad because of my parent’s work. In college, while majoring in entrepreneurship, one of my friends, Russ, invited my two friends, Pao and Gab, and me to join the FIN / SUM WEEK 2017 Idea Camp in Japan. We pitched a Visa Issuance system using blockchain and won the Nikkei Newspaper Special Award. I became friends with the Philippine blockchain-based project (Loyalcoin) team and joined several of their meetups, including their blockchain conferences in Cebu. That’s how my interest in decentralized technologies built up.

My friend Russ was getting really into Holochain, inspired me to take a look at this technology, and eventually I became obsessed with the unique architecture of Holochain too.

Partly from my father’s influence, who has been in the software industry for 40 years, I returned to Japan upon graduation to start a software development company name “Yumeville”. We develop mobile and web apps for clients with the team “Beyonder” in the Philippines, while researching Holochain architecture every day with the objective of designing a new concept that uses Holochain.

Why did you choose to get involved in the community work of Holo, as opposed to other projects?

In Japan, the handling of personal information by companies has been regarded as a problem since around 2014, there have been questions about the centralized accumulation of personal information by companies and their commercial usage of these data often without clear explanation to their users.

A prominent example is the one-sided commercialization of personal information at a major video rental store. The reason for this being a problem was that the sales were made by selling personal information such as the videos you rent, where you used your points and what you bought with it. They sold to an undisclosed third party, whose purpose was completely different from the initial reason stated for collecting personal information when the users agreed to their terms. In February 2017, the Cabinet Secretariat IT General Strategy Office's Data Distribution Environment Improvement Study Group came up with a statement in which they said that in order to achieve a smooth distribution of large amounts of varied data, they need a system that promotes data distribution and utilization with the involvement of individuals (information banks, etc.). Currently, a legal system that considers the regulations of giant IT companies is being developed in Japan. According to a major newspaper, "The government will develop legislation with a view to regulate huge IT companies from the perspective of protecting personal information by 2020." The government wants to have a similar legislature like the GDPR because it regards the protection of personal information as a national matter.

Conventionally, personal information has been stored on a centralized server, and it has often been leaked outside due to hacking. Going back in time, Ethernet and the Internet removed the inconvenience of the mainframe computer era, but in exchange exposed external attacks such as those we are experiencing today. The Internet was originally open and was envisioned as a platform where anyone could freely share ideas and opportunities across borders. However, this is not the case now. A few large companies are hosting our personal data under the disguise of “free service” and commercialize our personal identities without our knowledge or consent. In hindsight, it feels like Holo and Holochain are trying to realize the original vision of the Internet. I think this is the reason why so many expectations have gathered around the future of hApps (Holochain applications) and Holochain technology.

Accomplishments

We publish various information about Holochain on our company website yumeville.com. Timely updates are announced on our Twitter page and we are answering questions that the Japanese community has in the Mattermost chat and Telegram chats.

Highlights

We are currently preparing to introduce Holochain to Rust developers in the coming RustTokyo conference.

Goals

We want Yumeville in Japan and Beyonder in the Philippines to facilitate growing an active developer community where everyone can learn from each other, share knowledge and ideas, create new synapses, and collaborate on various projects.

Running the first Holochain Meetup in Tokyo (stay tuned!)

Training four top-class Holochain engineers within the next year (2 in Tokyo, 2 in Manila)

Building a forum-like social media app named “Idobata Forum” with Holochain as the infrastructure

Check out the Translated Version Here

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