The future is already evident in Japan today

It wasn’t long ago that the town of Kikuyo was a sleepy little town, known for its many greenhouses full of carrots. But since the Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC built its first chip factory in Japan there, a lot has changed in Kikuyo and no one talks about the carrots anymore. But, for example, about the long traffic jams around the city with its 44,000 inhabitants, in which some of the best semiconductor engineers in the world stand along with countless trucks and delivery vans almost every day. Even on the connecting roads to Kumamoto Airport, through which engineers and machines fly in from Taiwan, progress is often slow. The traffic has become so bad that “during rush hour I can no longer say how long it takes me to travel one way,” reported a taxi driver.