Today I stumbled upon a TED talk which I wanted to post here because I thought it was really interesting. Japan with a (severely) declining population is seeing a massive urbanization trend which is leaving many remote and rural villages veritable ghost towns. I can see this even in Gotemba with so many large bits of infrastructure and buildings all closed up with no business. This guy basically started out restoring really old abandoned houses and modernizing them and found that there was actually a market for getting back to the old Japan with the creature comforts of today.
His catch phrase is "The appeal of "Nothing Special"". Very cool.
