In the last month since quitting my job I've traveled almost all around Honshu (Tokyo to Osaka and back again, huzzah) talking to entrepreneurs, and I'm very optimistic for the future here. Japan has a lot of things going for it: dissatisfaction with salarymanhood as a career and life plan is at an all time high, the talent pool for engineering and visual design is deep and cheap (approximate salary of engineering employees in Nagoya: age times $1,000), and outside of some parts of Tokyo bootstrapping is a very appealing option.

The cultural issues are tractable, especially after we get a few exemplars of success in local communities. In my town we have a little iPhone development subculture because a handful of guys struck it rich on the App Store lottery, and folks tell me about it everywhere I go. When I went to file the tax papers for my business they assumed I was in iPhone development because, hey, young guy with a software business, clearly he is one of those new App Store millionaires. That beats the previous image of a young guy with a software business: homeless vagrant.

There are now about twenty-ish firms doing iPhone stuff within two miles of my apartment. This is in Gifu. (Americans can pretend I just said Kansas, which is our spiritual counterpart in the US.)