Japan Pitches 'Society 5.0' To Keep Its Edge In Tech and Science

The Cabinet Office of Japan is co-hosting an event dedicated to "Society 5.0," a future society the government believes Japan should aspire to. Defined by the Cabinet Office as "a human-centered society [helped] by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space," Society 5.0 is a concept intended to broaden the discussion of innovation from science and technology to all of socioeconomic activity. Nikkei Asia Review reports: The government has also established multiple large-scale programs to encourage companies, involved in everything from health care and mobility to energy, to invest in research and development, not only at the level of pure technology but also to bring it to a pilot level. The exhibition includes some achievements from these programs, including Cyberdyne's HAL, standing for "hybrid assistive limb," which the company claims to be the world's first "wearable cyborg." A HAL exoskeleton autonomously walks on a treadmill at the venue. When worn on a leg, HAL can read faint signals sent to muscles from the brain thanks to electrodes attached to the wearer's skin, determining the wearer's desired movements. "Even if your nerves are not connected at first, they gradually recover through the wearing of HAL, and you can eventually move your own body parts without wearing it," said a person from Cyberdyne. SkyDrive's "flying car" also attracts the attention of visitors, who can observe a full-scale model of the SD-03, which performed the first successful public manned flights of a flying car in Japan in August 2020. Co-founded by former Toyota Motor engineer Tomohiro Fukuzawa, the startup plans to offer commercial mobility service during Expo 2025, to be held in Osaka. "It is as if we are traveling to the future," said Shinji Inoue, a minister of state who heads science and technology policy, when he visited the exhibition last week. Asked by reporters how to make these cutting-edge tools an everyday reality, Inoue spoke of a need to deregulate the market when it comes to obtaining operating permits for such items. Indeed, the government acknowledges challenges in keeping up with the country's capabilities in implementing scientific progress. Digitalization initiatives, the premise for achieving Society 5.0, "could not sufficiently create new business models through data collaboration, like what we see in other countries," said a report from the Cabinet Office analyzing the previous five-year plan through fiscal 2020. Instead, the initiatives aimed at improving the efficiency of existing operations, failing to drive innovation.

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