Below is a conversation from June 1, 2023 with Akiya founder Michelle Huang discussing the creation of the AKIYA project (initially “akiyaDAO”) a bit about its history, and generally the lore, ethos, and progress of the community thus far.
Questions used were formulated from different members experiences with the onboarding process of understanding the progress of the project and how to contribute, and that’s what we’re focusing on in this FAQ.
If you’re looking for the TLDR version (thank u chatGPT for ur summarization here):
A great question! Oftentimes, I get asked, “How did you even come up with this idea?” A lot of it is because it honestly came from a very personal initiative that I had, in the sense that I was on a creative sabbatical in Taiwan. I had just left my tech job in San Francisco. I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to be creative. And so I went to Asia to basically increase my runway, have space to do art, and to think and not feel like I had to pay multiple thousands of dollars of rent every month in order to sustain myself. And so Asia to me was a really fantastic place to do that.
After I was in Taiwan for a bit, I was starting to look into places where I could continue my creative sabbatical. And Japan actually, again, for me—I'm a huge nerd about design UX—Japan has got that on lock! And I felt like it was always a place that was really interesting to me in terms of how much creative nuance that there was, and how much like—there's a term there called Shokunin spirit, which roughly translates to artists in spirit. The way that I describe it is there’s sort of a fractal vision there where you can completely tunnel in on on your craft, and just explore and continue to see detail and nuances and layers that were not there initially, when you started your craft, so for me, it was a fertile place to explore. And that's when I actually got more introduced to the Akiya situation, which is, the amount of abandoned houses in Japan. And a lot of them, you can actually purchase an Akiya for a year rent in a place like New York or San Francisco! So I was like—okay, perfect—let me do this! And so started looking into that process, but realized that there were a lot of financial, operational and logistical things that I just had no idea about, for example, contacting people from Akiya banks, needing a certain kind of hanko, or signature stamp, in order to sign documents, and how do we think about taxes? How do we think about the tourist visa and time there? And so this group was very much created from on me wanting to purchase an Akiya, kind of like asking people, my community and network, whether or not they were interested in going in on an Akiya with me. We started basically just to form a community to build in public, to share insights, share learnings, and to potentially go in on a home together. And now it's kind of resonated with a lot of people that have come across this project, and has turned into kind of just a very, very open community and a large initiative for people to share learning together.
Anyways, I know that's a long winded answer, but I'm kind of giving some background on art, and having places and having community building towards something that we could all share and learn from each other collectively from.
Initially, I think there's multiple waves of it starting because it was just a personal project between me and a couple of friends. It was pretty small and casual and so my co founder and I at the time (William), we decided to basically just create a discord together and see how many people resonated with the idea and kind of start to do things that we were doing even operationally and logistically around this project. And just do it in public!
So that the start of the Discord was sometime around, I would say March or April of last year [2022]. Back then it was super casual. We were both interested in Web3, and so we asked, is it possible to form some sort of DAO around this, to have some sort of incentives to play around with different governance models, and potentially even have a shared treasury where a community could go vote on funds, pull out funds, and potentially vote on new houses in new places? So for us, that was a really interesting, like more of an experimental place. And then the community grew over time.