# Why Japan Builds Like Nowhere Else ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else.webp]] **Creator:** The B1M · **Published:** 2026-07-27 · **Length:** 1:29:41 · [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbmXZUZwdeg) > Caption source: YouTube English (en-GB) manual captions via the TubeAlfred transcript connector, after yt-dlp hit HTTP 429 on the subtitle download. Section headings follow the video's own chapters. This is a compilation of earlier B1M films, so a few links between segments refer back to "earlier on". Screenshots were grabbed from the 1080p HLS stream. The presenter is Fred Mills (the description plugs "Fred's book MEGA BUILDS"); interviewees are named only as they appear in the captions, and several Japanese names and places are mis-transcribed in the captions, so the spellings below are corrected where the right name is clear and flagged where it isn't. ## Outline ### 0:00 Intro - **0:02** Japan is known for its natural beauty, with 26 World Heritage Sites including its bamboo forests and **Mount Fuji**, but it has also become a world leader in engineering. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t0005.webp]] - **0:30** Of all the Japanese projects Fred has visited, one stands out: the mega plan to disaster-proof **Tokyo**, the world's biggest city, against five massive threats for the next 100 years. ### 0:54 The £100BN Tokyo Resilience Project - **1:54** Tokyo had bullet trains while other countries still ran steam locomotives and was an electronics powerhouse "when Steve Jobs was still working out of his garage". It feels indestructible, but it's constantly on the brink of disaster: earthquakes, floods, landslides and volcanoes. - **2:50** A quarter of Japan's population lives in greater Tokyo and the centre produces more than **20% of Japan's GDP**, so a disaster here would hit the whole country and the world. - **4:44** From the **Tokyo Skytree** (completed 2012, its lattice designed to withstand a magnitude 7 quake) you see how vast and flat the city is. Japan's mountains push cities onto flat plains, which makes them "sitting ducks" for natural disasters. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t0500.webp]] - **5:40** The **Pacific Ring of Fire** (a 40,000 km tectonic belt) left Japan with **111 active volcanoes**. Japan sits across four plates and gets **18% of the world's earthquakes**, plus typhoons and tsunamis from the Pacific. - **6:30** With 40 million people here, Tokyo can't be razed again. In **December 2022** the city launched the **Tokyo Resilience Project (TRP)**: 18 years and **17 trillion yen** (about **$109BN**), the biggest infrastructure project the channel has covered. It mixes soft infrastructure (evacuation routes, faster response) with huge tunnels and the widening of **324 km of rivers**. - **7:50** The TRP names **five threats**: - **Volcanoes**: Mount Fuji could blanket downtown in ash, so clearance routes are planned; residents of nearby islands get new evacuation points and chartered ships. - **Pandemics**: more than 2 km of new parks, cycling routes and riverside walkways give people alternatives to crowded transport. - **Blackouts and lost communications**: by **2040** a new power and communications grid, reinforced undersea cables, new satellite capability and business cloud storage aim to ensure Tokyo never loses power or connectivity. - **Floods** and **earthquakes**, the two "mega threats" covered in depth below. - **9:45** At **NIED** (National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience) Fred sees the **MOWLAS** network (captioned "Molas"), set up after the 1995 Kobe earthquake: about **2,000 seismometers** on land and the seafloor watch for earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes in real time. The control room is too secure to film. Two islands south of Tokyo, **Izu Ōshima** and **Miyake-jima**, have erupted seven times in 100 years, and permanent evacuation infrastructure is being built. - **11:30** Tokyo is shaped by water: more than 100 rivers and canals and the moats around the **Imperial Palace**. **124 km²** (a fifth of central Tokyo) lies below sea level. Seawalls are being raised for a **60 cm sea-level rise by 2100**, more than twice the rise since 1880. - **12:45** The urban heat island and climate change are making Tokyo more subtropical; heavy downpours in Japan have almost doubled in 40 years. - **13:50** In **1992** the government began **G-Cans**, the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel: five silos feed river floodwater down a 6.5 km tunnel into a "concrete cathedral" **25 m high, 177 m long and 78 m wide**, **50 m** underground. It cost **$2BN**, took **17 years** and pumps **200 tons of water a second**. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t1430.webp]] - **15:20** The TRP is doubling that capacity. Fred walks a new diversion channel 50 m underground: **12.4 m wide** and **5.4 km** long, linking with two other tunnels into a **13 km** network, the biggest of its kind in Japan. - **16:20** It was dug by a **2,800-ton TBM** with a **12.5 m** cutting head. An erector places lining segments into rings while hydraulic jacks push off the last ring. A **slurry** mix balances pressure at the face, and **carbide cutter bits 48 times harder** than a conventional TBM's let it break into connecting tunnels, which had never been attempted before. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t1640.webp]] - **19:00** In a storm the tunnel can siphon off up to **1.4 million m³** of rainwater from rivers across west Tokyo and release it back once levels fall. With G-Cans it's part of a network of **28 regulating reservoirs**, with seven more being built to handle **100 mm of rain an hour**, more rain each hour than London gets in two months. - **20:30** The **1923 Great Kantō earthquake** (magnitude 7.9, 50 km south-east of Tokyo) killed over **142,000** people (the video's figure) and left nearly 2 million homeless. Later disasters include **Kobe** (1995, magnitude 6.9) and the **2011 Tōhoku** earthquake and tsunami that triggered the **Fukushima** meltdown. Nearly **600** magnitude 4+ quakes hit Japan in 2024 alone, and many fear "the big one". - **23:10** Back at NIED, the **giant rock friction apparatus**, the largest of its kind, presses two 10-ton rocks together (the machine weighs 200 tons) and forces them to slip, mimicking a fault. Sensors record the slip spreading little by little, giving clues for **earthquake prediction**. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t2330.webp]] - **26:10** **E-Defense** in Hyōgo Prefecture, about 400 km away, is the world's largest earthquake simulator: a massive table shaken on three axes up to magnitude 7. - **26:40** The **Mori JP Tower** (completed 2023, Tokyo's first supertall, with apartments, offices and retail) has, five storeys underground, backup generators, a well-fed water supply, batteries and food. A **97-ton generator** sits on isolating springs. The storeroom holds enough to feed **3,600 people for three days**, so the tower works as a local refuge. - **28:30** Hundreds of **oil dampers** sit around the building. Kai Toyama of the structural design team shows a scale model of levels 33–34 and **viscous wall dampers**, about **300** in the tower, hidden behind cupboards and corridors. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t2850.webp]] - **30:20** Evacuation centres hold just over **3 million** people, not enough for Tokyo, so the TRP aims to make evacuation unnecessary: when it's done, **100% of Tokyo's housing** should withstand a magnitude 7 quake, so people can stay home. - **31:30** Secondary effects matter too. The Great Kantō firestorm started from lunchtime stoves in timber homes. About **86 km²** of old wooden housing is earmarked for redevelopment with roads, taller buildings and parks as firebreaks, and overhead wires along **more than 1,000 km** of roads are going underground. - **33:10** Over **400 bridges** are being seismically retrofitted. Fred visits one on a site with a bridge for 300+ years; the previous one fell in the Great Kantō earthquake, and its replacement became a symbol of Tokyo's renewal. Devices on its sides counter longitudinal and lateral forces. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t3320.webp]] - **36:00** Fred's verdict: he's never seen a city as prepared as Tokyo, because no other city has to be. "It's not a case of if disaster might strike, but when." ### 37:46 The Tokyo Skytree - **37:46** At **634 m**, the Skytree is the third-tallest freestanding structure in the world, with the **Tembo Deck** at more than 350 m and the **Tembo Galleria** about 100 m higher. Japan records some seismic activity about every five minutes, yet this is one of the safest places in the city during a quake. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t3810.webp]] - **39:40** Wind dominates tall-structure design: the **Eiffel Tower**'s tapered wrought-iron shape channels wind to its base, and the **CN Tower**'s propeller-shaped cross-section (also used for the cores of the **Burj Khalifa** and **Jeddah Tower**) cuts sway. But that rigidity is deadly in an earthquake zone. - **41:10** Japanese buildings have survived by flexing instead. The five-storey pagoda at **Hōryū-ji** in Ikaruga (captioned "Hiroji Temple in Ikaraga"), thought to date from around 711, uses unfixed beam joints that slide and absorb energy, balanced by a central pole, the **shinbashira**, whose timber dates to 594. - **42:30** The Skytree's base is a triangle like the CN Tower's and Burj Khalifa's, with clusters of **wall-pile foundations driven 50 m** deep at each corner, linked by a shallower reinforced-concrete wall foundation. Continuous walls add friction with the ground. - **43:20** Above ground: a lattice of high-strength steel (twice standard strength; base pipes 2.3 m wide and 10 cm thick), a cylindrical middle section with four lift shafts, and inside it a separate **375 m reinforced-concrete shinbashira**, 8 m wide, with walls 40–60 cm thick. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t4450.webp]] - **44:30** Fred crawls into the core. The shinbashira vibrates at a different frequency from the truss, cancelling some movement, and **oil dampers** connect it to the steel tower. Together they absorb up to **50%** of earthquake forces. It rests on **six rubber base isolators**, each 1.4 m thick. - **45:45** The tower should stay open even at the epicentre of a magnitude 7 event, which the video likens to 1.8 billion kg of explosives. It's essential to disaster planning because its mast broadcasts emergency information. - **46:40** Two **tuned mass dampers** (like **Taipei 101**'s) steady the antenna "Gain Tower": **40 tons at 620 m** and **25 tons at 625 m**, inverted pendulums on springs and universal joints that prevent wind resonance and TV transmission interference. ### 48:35 The Hyper-Kamiokande - **48:35** Something more than 80 m high and nearly 70 m wide, costing over half a billion dollars and 20+ years in development, is being hollowed out of a mountain in a remote corner of Japan. - **49:20** Science lesson: **neutrinos** pass through matter, including your body, without interacting. They can be studied by smashing particles together (as at **CERN**'s **Large Hadron Collider**) or by "listening" somewhere remote and quiet. - **50:30** In **Kamioka**, a town in the Japanese Alps, the **Hyper-Kamiokande** is being built under a mountain (captioned "Mount Nugo"; it's Mount Nijugo): a **$600M** experiment led by the **University of Tokyo** with researchers from **21 countries**, set to be the world's largest neutrino observatory. It follows **Kamiokande** (1983, built with a local zinc-mining company's expertise) and **Super-Kamiokande** (1996). - **51:30** The cylinder is **88 m high and 69 m wide**, big enough for a Boeing 747 on its end. Plans date to 1999. Work on the **2 km** access tunnel began in May 2021 by drill and blast and took nine months. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t5205.webp]] - **52:20** The dome roof sits **681 m** below the peak and was reinforced with a steel truss (completed October 2023). Crews are now blasting down **71 m** to form the cavern. The rock's shielding equals sitting 1.7 km under the ocean, blocking cosmic rays. - **53:20** After concrete and waterproof linings, **260 million litres** of water (nearly 4.5 times **SeaWorld Abu Dhabi**'s aquarium) will fill it over about six months, purified so it can dissolve metal. - **54:00** Neutrinos occasionally hit electrons and give off a faint **Cherenkov radiation** glow. Super-Kamiokande, drained for maintenance, shows the gold photodetectors, each sensitive enough to see a torch on the Moon. Hyper-K gets **40,000** new ones, almost twice as sensitive and built to bear 260,000 tons of water. Construction should finish in 2026, with detection by 2027. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t5450.webp]] - **55:35** "What has particle physics ever done for me?" Medical scans, cancer treatment, fluid dynamics for pipelines and weather forecasts, and **Tim Berners-Lee**'s World Wide Web, built for particle physicists. ### 56:24 The World's Biggest Indoor Rainfall Simulator - **57:17** Fred visits the **Large-Scale Rainfall Simulator** outside Tokyo, a building like an aircraft hangar. The USGS calls 8 mm/hour heavy rain; this machine goes up to **300 mm/hour**. - **58:10** Japanese houses lose value and are usually rebuilt after about **30 years**. That's because Japan, pushed out of the sea by tectonic forces, is the most earthquake-prone country, with violent typhoons, and over **80%** of it is mountainous, so landslides are a real threat. **Impermanence** is ingrained in the culture, and prefabricated homes are a pragmatic response. - **60:30** The simulator is at NIED's headquarters in **Tsukuba**, 75 km north-east of Tokyo, also home to the Japanese space agency (JAXA). It was established in **1974**. It covers 50–300 mm/hour; 300 mm is just shy of the strongest rainfall ever recorded (1947), and the video notes **Hurricane Ida**'s 2021 one-day maximum was 200 mm. - **62:10** A **75 × 15 m** hangar suspends thousands of pipes and nozzles **16 m** up so drops reach terminal velocity, fed from an underground reservoir, with drains around the test area. It tests homes, self-driving cars, soil erosion and landslides. - **63:00** The building **moves**: electric motors drive each wheel along rails about 400 m long at roughly **1 m a minute**, covering a rainfall area of over **3,000 m²**. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t6230.webp]] - **63:30** Landslides cause around **half** of disaster deaths and missing people in Japan and strike too fast for easy warnings. **Dr Sakai** is developing slope-condition sensors tested at full scale. - **64:30** **2,176 nozzles** of four types control droplet size (0.1–8 mm), speed and intensity to mimic natural rain. - **65:15** With NIED, house builder **Ichijo** (captioned "Ichio Cotman", likely Ichijo Komuten) tested the world's first **flood-proof house**: hollow gaskets on windows like car doors, **float valves** in air vents, and **backflow-prevention valves** on utility pipes. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t6530.webp]] - **66:00** Bonus: Fred, in wellies and holding a $2 clear umbrella, stands under what staff call "light rain" and then much more. "The stuff I do for YouTube." ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t6650.webp]] ### 69:00 The Chūō Shinkansen - **69:30** Japan's **maglev** trains levitate on dedicated tracks and have hit **603 km/h**, against 210–320 km/h for today's bullet trains. Tokyo to **Nagoya** would take **40 minutes**, faster than flying or the 1.5-hour Tōkaidō line trip. - **70:00** Opening was meant for **2027** but has slipped to at least **2034**, largely because of Shizuoka governor **Heita Kawakatsu**. - **70:50** The first **Shinkansen** opened in **1964**. Maglev could cut Tokyo to **Osaka** to **67 minutes** via two new lines, Tokyo–Nagoya and then Nagoya–Osaka. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t7500.webp]] - **71:30** In 1964, while the world chased aviation, Japan doubled down on rail: the **Tōkaidō Shinkansen** ran at 210 km/h with streamlined shapes, distributed electric motors and dedicated tracks with minimal curves and gradients. It cut Tokyo–Osaka from six hours to four and helped power the **Japanese economic miracle**. The network grew from 515 km to **2,951 km**, with top speeds of 260–320 km/h. China now has the largest high-speed network. - **74:30** Maglev dates to the 1960s, but **JR Central** modernised it with **superconducting magnets** cooled to **−269°C**. The train runs on rubber wheels to 150 km/h, then lifts off; track coils levitate and propel it. Service speed will be **500 km/h** (record 603 km/h in 2015). The trains are autonomous, controlled from the track, can run in almost any weather and cost less to maintain. The routes will cost more than **$64BN**; construction was approved in **2009**. - **77:00** The delay comes down to **9 km** of the **287 km** route, tunnelling under the **Southern Japanese Alps** in northern **Shizuoka Prefecture**. Kawakatsu's main worry is the **Ōi River**, which feeds the region's tea industry (**25,200 tons**, about **36%** of Japan's tea) and hydroelectric dams. JR Central promised to pump water back, but its own reports suggested a loss of about **2 tons a second**. Shizuoka gets no station and already struggles with overtourism (it's planning Mount Fuji trailhead fees). ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t7740.webp]] - **79:00** In **March 2024** JR Central said it couldn't meet 2027. In **April 2024** Kawakatsu was recorded saying his staff were smarter than people who sell vegetables or raise cows, and he resigned within a day amid public outrage. In September the new government allowed a boring survey for the tunnel. - **80:10** Other delays remain: soft ground in another prefecture pushed one tunnel back more than five years to January 2030, and the Osaka extension isn't expected before **2037**. China has announced its own intercity maglev in **Hunan**, which could start a maglev race. ### 81:11 Japan's Mega Seawalls - **81:20** The **2011** earthquake and tsunami left about **20,000** dead and triggered a nuclear disaster. Since then nearly **400 km** of tall concrete seawalls have gone up along the coast. "But the question is, at what cost?" - **82:50** The town of **Tarō** (captioned "Tero"), hit hard in 1896 and 1933, became a global example with an X-shaped system of **2.4 km of 10 m seawalls**. On 11 March 2011 walls built for **8 m** waves met waves of **12–15 m**; many were overtopped or crushed, and Fukushima wasn't protected. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t8300.webp]] - **83:50** Tsunami expert **Dr David McGovern**: Japan was the best-prepared nation, but the tsunami was simply bigger than expected. The new approach is big walls designed not to fail structurally when overtopped. - **84:20** Japan set aside **$12BN** for nearly 400 km of new walls up to **14.7 m** high on foundations around **25 m** deep, with wider bases and reinforced inner walls. McGovern built an indoor tsunami simulator with **HR Wallingford** (captioned "HR Wingoot") and **UCL**. Real tsunamis arrive as a continuously rising, unbroken flood, so the load on a wall is essentially **hydrostatic**. - **85:50** New guidance includes **geotextile membranes** in sea dikes, wider breakwater rubble mounds and interlinked, reinforced concrete blocks. - **86:10** Downsides: very high walls could act like a dam and release a worse torrent if they break. Some walls are nearly four storeys high, blocking the sea and making locals feel imprisoned, with fears for tourism and seaside culture. - **86:56** **Level 1** tsunamis (every 50–160 years) are what the walls defend against; **Level 2** (every few hundred or thousand years) also need education, evacuation routes and warnings. Alternatives include **tsunami mitigation parks** mixing hills and trees with grey engineering, a project (captioned "Marino project") pairing concrete breakwaters with deep-rooted trees, and moving public facilities to higher ground and banning building on coastal flatlands. ![[images/Why-Japan-Builds-Like-Nowhere-Else-t8730.webp]] - **88:30** McGovern: existing infrastructure worth tens of billions needs checking or retrofitting, and new infrastructure must be designed for stronger, more frequent storms and sea-level rise, even though "we still don't really know precisely what the future will hold". ### 89:30 Outro - **89:26** "Japan, we love you. Keep making these insane projects." Fred's favourite segment was "the one where I didn't need an umbrella". ## Things Mentioned ### Projects & structures - **Tokyo Resilience Project (TRP)**: launched December 2022, 18 years, 17 trillion yen (about $109BN); five threats (volcano, pandemic, blackout/communications, flood, earthquake); 324 km of river widening; 100% of housing to withstand magnitude 7; 400+ bridges retrofitted; 1,000+ km of overhead lines buried; 86 km² of wooden-housing districts redeveloped. - **G-Cans** (Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel): begun 1992, five silos, 6.5 km tunnel, 25 × 177 × 78 m tank 50 m deep, $2BN, 17 years, 200 tons/second. - **New west-Tokyo diversion channel**: 12.4 m wide, 5.4 km long, part of a 13 km network; 2,800-ton slurry TBM with a 12.5 m head and extra-hard carbide bits; 1.4 million m³ storage; 28 regulating reservoirs plus seven more for 100 mm/hour. - **Mori JP Tower** (Azabudai Hills, completed 2023): Tokyo's first supertall; 97-ton generator on isolators; supplies for 3,600 people for three days; about 300 viscous wall dampers plus oil dampers. - **Tokyo Skytree** (634 m, completed 2012): Tembo Deck and Tembo Galleria; 50 m wall-pile foundations; high-strength steel lattice; 375 m concrete shinbashira core; six 1.4 m rubber isolators; 40-ton and 25-ton tuned mass dampers at 620 m and 625 m; the Gain Tower broadcast antenna. - **Hyper-Kamiokande** (Kamioka): $600M, 88 × 69 m cavern 681 m under the peak, 2 km access tunnel, 260 million litres of ultrapure water, 40,000 photodetectors, detection from 2027; predecessors Kamiokande (1983) and Super-Kamiokande (1996). - **NIED Large-Scale Rainfall Simulator** (Tsukuba, 1974): 75 × 15 m movable hangar, nozzles 16 m up, 2,176 nozzles, 50–300 mm/hour, drops 0.1–8 mm, 3,000+ m² rainfall area. - **Chūō Shinkansen** (SCMaglev): Tokyo–Nagoya in 40 minutes (at least 2034), Nagoya–Osaka (2037+), 500 km/h service, 603 km/h record (2015), 287 km route, $64BN+. - **Post-2011 seawalls**: nearly 400 km, up to 14.7 m tall, about 25 m-deep foundations, $12BN; Tarō's pre-2011 X-shaped walls. ### Research facilities & systems - **NIED** (National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience), **MOWLAS** seismic network (about 2,000 sensors), the **giant rock friction apparatus**, **E-Defense** shake table (Hyōgo), **CERN** Large Hadron Collider, HR Wallingford/UCL tsunami simulator. ### Other buildings & places - Mount Fuji, Japan's bamboo forests, the Imperial Palace moats, Izu Ōshima and Miyake-jima, Kobe, Fukushima, Hōryū-ji pagoda (Ikaruga), Eiffel Tower, CN Tower, Burj Khalifa, Jeddah Tower, Taipei 101, SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, Tsukuba, Ōi River, Southern Japanese Alps, Shizuoka, Hunan, Tarō, London and New York (for comparison). ### Disasters & events - 1923 Great Kantō earthquake; 1995 Kobe (Great Hanshin) earthquake; 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima meltdown; Tarō's 1896 and 1933 tsunamis; Hurricane Ida (2021); the COVID-19 pandemic; Kawakatsu's April 2024 resignation. ### Engineering concepts - Pacific Ring of Fire, moment magnitude scale, earthquake prediction, base isolation, oil and viscous dampers, tuned mass dampers, the shinbashira principle, wind-tapered and Y/tri-lobed tower plans, slurry TBMs and segmental linings, drill and blast, Cherenkov radiation, superconducting magnetic levitation, hydrostatic wave loading, Level 1 and Level 2 tsunamis, geotextiles, green-grey tsunami mitigation parks, impermanence and 30-year housing lifespans. ### Channel & promotion - Fred's book **MEGA BUILDS**; Get Construction Talking (mental health in construction); The World's Best Construction Podcast; theb1m.com. ## Biographies - **Fred Mills**: Presenter and co-founder of The B1M. He fronts the on-location segments here, from G-Cans and the Skytree core to getting soaked in the rainfall simulator, and the description promotes his book *Mega Builds*. - **Kai Toyama** (as captioned): Member of the Mori JP Tower's structural design team who shows Fred the scale model of the tower's dampers. - **Dr Sakai** (as captioned): NIED researcher at the Tsukuba rainfall simulator developing slope sensors to warn of landslides. - **Heita Kawakatsu**: Economist and Governor of Shizuoka Prefecture from 2009 until he resigned in 2024 after remarks about farmers. He opposed tunnelling the Chūō Shinkansen under the Southern Alps over fears for the Ōi River's flow, which delayed the maglev by years. - **Dr David McGovern**: Tsunami and fluid-mechanics researcher in the UK who built a large indoor tsunami simulator with HR Wallingford and UCL. In the video he explains why Japan's 2011 defences were overtopped and how tsunamis load seawalls. - **Tim Berners-Lee**: British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN, cited as a spin-off of particle physics. - **Steve Jobs**: Apple co-founder, mentioned to show how early Tokyo became an electronics powerhouse. - **Organisations**: **JR Central** (Central Japan Railway Company, builder of the maglev), the **University of Tokyo** (leads Hyper-Kamiokande), **NIED**, **Ichijo** (the house builder behind the flood-proof house, as best identified from the captions), and the **Tokyo Metropolitan Government** (runs the Resilience Project). - **The B1M**: UK-based construction and infrastructure video channel ("the definitive video channel for construction").