Investor Presentaiton
coffeeshop.
1000km
First some facts, figures, and fiction. Shimane Prefecture is the second-
most western prefecture in Honshu and borders the Sea of Japan. In size
the prefecture is 1/6 th of that of the Netherlands, but with 670.000
inhabitants it counts 1/25th of the population in the Netherlands; in
Japanese statistics: 0.5% of the Japanese live in Shimane on 2% of its
area. After adjacent Tottori, Shimane is the least populous prefecture
and with Tottori it was the last area where Starbucks established a
Nowadays you could call Shimane Japan's backwater, but history shows it was very different.
In 2009, a team of archaeologists announced that they discovered in Shimane's second
largest town Izumo City the oldest stone tools ever found in Japan. The 20 tools dated back
to an estimated 120,000 years, about 80,000 years earlier than previous estimates of when
the first humans arrived in the Japanese archipelago, and most probably ‘Japan' began from
here. The Kojiki, the oldest Japanese chronicle of myths, songs, genealogies, oral traditions
and with semi-historical accounts concerning the origin of the Japanese
archipelago, the kami (or gods) and the origin of the Japanese imperial line was composed in
711-712; it describes Izumo as a place from where the gods ruled over the Japanese islands.
"Shinkoku is the sacred name of Japan - Shinkoku, the Country of the Gods; and of all
Shinkoku the most holy ground is the land of Izumo," wrote one of the first foreign writers
after Japan's opening in 1854, Lafcadio Hearn, in his book 'Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.'
Izumo Taisha, also known as Izumo Oyashiro, is said to be the oldest shrine in Japan
having existed on its present site for 1,500 years. As I mentioned above, the thousands or
even millions of Japanese deities gather every year in November at the shrine to confer. I
could not resist thinking about Mount Olympos in Greece, home of the Greek gods, with the
same human traits as their Japanese
colleagues.
The area that is now Shimane used to
be a rich part of Japan, thanks to its
favorable geographical features, for
agriculture, fishery, and trade with the
Korean Peninsula. And: the Izumo
region was rich in mineral resources
such as iron and silver. The iron sand in
the region, in particular at Izumo-
Yokota, was used from ancient times to
forge a superb type of steel known as tamahagane, the basis for the Japanese sword or
katana and 80% of all Japanese swords are made from steel (tatara) from Yokota. A Japanese
sword has almost divine powers and this also contributes to Shimane's reputation as an area
of myths. In 1860 the population of Yokota and surrounding villages was more than 30,000
since about 25,000 workers and their families were engaged in the tatara industry at that
time. Now no more than 12,000 people live there and the number of employees engaged in
social welfare and long-term care services has increased substantially.
The Iwami Ginzan silver mine, often indicated on old Dutch maps of Japan, was said to
have produced one-third of the world's silver production at its peak period in the early part
of the 17th century; part of that high-quality silver was exported through Deshima. Shimane
has more connections with the Dutch: Nishi Amane from Shimane's town Tsuwano was a
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