“We will gain insights today and tomorrow,” declared Sapporo Mayor Katsuhiro Akimoto in his opening remarks, “into the latest trends in GX and related finance. . . . Twenty-one industrial, academic, government, and financial entities launched the Team Sapporo-Hokkaido initiative here in June 2023 to advance progress in those sectors. This June, the Japanese government designated Sapporo a ‘special financial and asset management zone’ and designated Hokkaido a ‘national strategic special zone.’ Hokkaido boasts the greatest potential of any region in Japan for developing renewable energy, and we are using those designations to make the most of that potential. That will include positioning Hokkaido as Japan’s leading hub for supplying renewable energy and arraying financial functions in Sapporo for supporting that role.”

The special financial and asset management zone designation cited by Akimoto enables the national and local governments to support GX with deregulatory measures, tax incentives, and administrative initiatives. Deregulation is underway in the financial, business, and residential sectors. The administrative initiatives, meanwhile, include broadening the accommodation of English in companies’ and individuals’ interchange with official agencies. As for the national strategic special zone designation, it includes such measures as easing visa requirements for non-Japanese entrepreneurs, relaxing urban zoning regulations, and lifting the prohibition on corporate farmland ownership. Hokkaido Governor Naomichi Suzuki described in his keynote speech the tax incentives that are in store for companies in the prefecture.

“This is Japan’s only special financial and asset management zone devoted to GX. Hokkaido and Sapporo will make the most of that designation by lowering or eliminating local taxes for up to 10 years. Those measures will pertain in prefectural taxation to corporate residence and corporate enterprise taxes and in municipal taxation to corporate residence and fixed-asset taxes. We are preparing to begin offering the tax incentives in April 2025. Experts predict that government and private-sector investment in GX will exceed ¥150 trillion over the next 10 years, and we are counting on our incentives to help attract ¥40 trillion of that investment to our prefecture.”

Suzuki detailed the prefecture’s Japanese leadership in renewable energy. It generates the most electricity of any of Japan’s 47 prefectures, he explained, with solar power, wind power, and small and medium-sized hydropower dams and the second most with geothermal power. The governor also noted Hokkaido’s emergence as a platform for leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing. He invited attention to the impending start of pilot operation in spring 2025 at the Hokkaido foundry of Rapidus. That company, backed by leading Japanese corporations, is moving to begin manufacturing advanced integrated circuits of 2-nanometer architecture in 2027.

“Hokkaido offers the closest proximity in Japan to Europe and to North America,” added Suzuki. “Thus are the EU and Japan backing the laying of an undersea telecommunications cable between Finland and Japan via the Arctic Ocean. That cable’s making landfall in Hokkaido would contribute greatly to the clustering of digital industries here, and we are therefore calling forcefully on the government to make that happen. We are counting on telecommunications networking with Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and other regions to bolster our position as an Asian digital hub.”