Smart Cities and Japan's Energy Transition

Maciej M. Sokołowski, PhD, DSc, is a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the Faculty of Policy Management of Keio University and is also affiliated with the Faculty of Law and Administration at the University of Warsaw. Professor Sokołowski has extensive experience in energy law and the energy sector; he has authored 100 papers and reports, including three solo books on energy regulation, combined heat and power, and the energy transition. Professor Sokołowski is a fellow of several institutions and networks, including the Sustainability College Bruges, the SI Network for Future Global Leaders, the Polish Electricity Association, the Australian Network for Japanese Law, the Japan Association of EU Studies, and the Japan Society of Public Utility Economics. Professor Sokołowski is also a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Cities and is responsible for Chapter 4: “How to Facilitate and Accelerate Change”. He has been awarded numerous distinctions, including the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, the Swedish Institute Visby Programme scholarship, and the Prime Minister of Poland’s Research Award. In 2024, Professor Sokołowski was named one of Stanford University’s “World’s Top 2% Scientists”.Fumio Shimpo, PhD, is a Professor of Law at the Faculty of Policy Management of Keio University. Professor Shimpo is an active scholar in the fields of data protection, privacy, information law, AI, and robot law in Japan. He serves as the chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Association of Law and Information Systems, the executive director of the Japanese Constitutional Law Society, a board member of the Japan Society of Information and Communication Research, the director of the Law and Computer Society, and a senior research fellow at the Institute for Information and Communications Policy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. He was previously the commissioner for International Academic Exchange at the Personal Information Protection Commission of Japan (2018–2023) and the former vice-chair of the OECD Working Party on Security and Privacy in the Digital Economy (2009–2016).

• Foreword (Winston Chow) Preface (Maciej M. Sokołowski and Fumio Shimpo) Acknowledgements (Maciej M. Sokołowski and Fumio Shimpo) 1. Smart Cities and Japan’s Energy Transition: Connecting Yesterday with Tomorrow (Maciej M. Sokołowski and Fumio Shimpo) 2. Japanese Smart Cities in the Context of Local Decarbonisation and International Cooperation (Muneki Adachi and Klaudia Pryjmak) 3. The Role of Inward and Outward FDI in Sustainable Smart Cities (Jesper Edman) 4. “Smart” Cities and Dumb Solutions: The Risks of Technology-Reliant Solutions for Decarbonisation in Japan (Jordan Carlson and Gregory Trencher) 5. Deepening the City-Region Divide in 21st Century Japan: Smart Cities as a Tool to Achieve Administrative Neoliberalisation (Kie Sanada and Marco Zappa) 6. Learning the Characteristics of Vacant Houses: Smart Solutions for Japanese Municipalities (Yuki Akiyama) 7. Legal System and Public Policy of Smart Cities in Energy Transition: Germany – Japan Contexts (Fukuzo Hasegawa) 8. Heat Decarbonisation: A Solution for the Future Compact Cities in Japan (Makoto Tajima) 9. Satellite Applications for Sustainable Urban Energy (Damian M. Bielicki) 10. Energy Transition in Japan’s SDGs Future Cities: Toyama, Sapporo and Kumamoto (Hiroshi Ito) 11. Smart City Development Underway: Lessons from Shin-Sapporo’s Smart City (Carin Holroyd) 12. Democratic Legitimacy of the Smart City: A Case Study of Yokohama (Yuichiro Tsuji) 13. Sustainable Smart City Tokyo: Between Problems of the Past and Chances of the Future (Maciej M. Sokołowski and Fumio Shimpo)