The Encounter of a Matt Citizen and Yamakoshimura, Japan

This year, like many Taiwanese, after the epidemic was lifted, they all embarked on a long-awaited overseas journey, and like many people, they preferred Japan as their starting point. However, for my trip to Japan this time, I have a small special itinerary design, which is related to NFT and Web3.

That was last year, when NFT was still a hot topic in Taiwan, in addition to watching the excitement and buying by myself, I stumbled across a very interesting NFT project in Japan: a Yamakoshi Village in Niigata, which had a large population due to a major earthquake Moved abroad, in order to raise funds for the construction of the village; at the same time, they also want the world to pay attention to this small village again, they came up with an NFT digital villager certification scheme that can be compared to Estonian digital citizens: as long as you are willing to hold the exclusive NFT designed by Yamagushi Village , you have obtained the digital villager certification of Yamakoshi Village.

As a result, digital villagers were really recruited from all over the world, and the number is already more than the original villagers!

Details can be found in this report , written by Arthur, a blockchain legal expert who is well versed in Japan. Because of the exposure in the traditional Chinese world, I also got to know Ms. Takeuchi, who was in charge of the project in Yamakoshi Village, and Izumi, who assisted in translation and tourism promotion.

Then, on vacation this year, I went

Want to actually see this small village, perhaps as a kind of fieldwork plus tourism to test NFT projects? It turned out that the plan was really just to go to the local area by car. Unexpectedly, when she wrote an email to ask Koizumi for directions, she said enthusiastically: I can drive you there that day.

Outside of Web3, the real experience of Yamakoshi Village is, first of all, really hard to get to. It is definitely not just "take a 10-minute walk to a certain station" as written on a Japanese travel website. You have to go around layers of mountain roads. This is a beautiful, quiet but never lonely forest town, with a sense of paradise and like Northern Europe. The locals are very cute and straightforward, and Koizumi was invited to drink tea at home by the carp-raising grandfather.

I also met the enthusiastic Ms. Takeuchi that day. Through Koizumi’s translation, besides tweeting each other quickly, I really chatted a lot. Interestingly, before the end of the conversation, they suddenly picked up their mobile phones and told me that there was a Discord event in the Chinese Web3 community that seemed interesting, but unfortunately it seemed to be speaking Mandarin, so they probably couldn’t understand it. I saw that it was Matters! (Then naturally spent five minutes introducing Matters and asking them to look forward to the English activities that Matters may have in the future)

This led to the meeting between Matt City and Yamakoshi Village.

In order to celebrate this little accident, I have just obtained the Matt City ID card, and the newly launched "My favorite #Yamakoshi #NFT" by Yamakoshimura this year is listed below. Let's hope that the two small settlements that believe in Web3 can prosper day by day.