A Search for Resonance: Michelle Huang’s Journey to Solve Japan’s Akiya Crisis
A DAO is hoping to convert some of Japan’s vacant homes — known as akiya — into artistic residences without losing its creative soul
After traveling for enough years, new places begin to blur into ones already visited. Inevitably, our brains associate new with old, and that great sense of wonder begins to dissipate. Globalization has only made this more so. But Japan – bless Japan – has managed to maintain a profound sense of self.
In August I spent nearly a month in the country. The resilience of the Japanese spirit and tradition has made it less affected by western-style habits and materialism, for which I was grateful – not just for the renewed sense of wonder, but because new worlds offer fresh eyes to reflect on oneself and the world around them.
After two weeks touring the western half of Japan’s mainland, I arrived in Tokyo, a behemoth of a city. Dense and deafening, it is a world unto itself. Outside of it exists a more bucolic place, expansive farmland dotted with minka (traditional Japanese homes, literally “house of the people”) and, increasingly, akiya – unoccupied homes in rural areas.
By 2030, an astounding one third of all Japanese homes are predicted to be vacant, due to an aging population and those deafening calls of urban opportunity.
While I was in Japan, Michelle Huang was guiding a residency for Akiya Collective, a community-driven project aimed at renovating akiya into creative residences and interactive habitats.
“The greatest duty we have as human beings is to help each other reclaim parts of our own worlds – and this involves spending time with people who bring out these resonant (and sometimes hidden) parts of ourselves,” reads the AKIYA manifesto. “In being mirrors for each other, the opportunity for transcendence arises and the tradeoff between selfhood and friction in belonging ceases to be.”
Organized as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), Huang and a thousand Akiya members are searching for that thoughtful convergence, helping each to see one another. When Huang and I connected virtually, she’d just come from the onsen – a Japanese hot spring – and from preparing some ramen with the second residency’s 10 participants. Her face was still flush with health and good conversation.
At the origin of Akiya’s journey toward reclamation, I learned, is Huang’s own search for resonance, one that’s always been oriented toward healing. Through trial and error across tech and bureaucracy, her path persists, and with Akiya, there’s an imminence of balance and filled space.
Huang grew up in Houston. From a young age she was interested in medicine, and she pursued pre-med at NYU. But she quickly grew jaded by the medical industry’s politics, deciding the system was too broken to justify her becoming its agent. She never became a doctor, but medicine still called, so she pivoted to medical metastructure.
Huang at a minka summit
“One of the [insights] that I had,” she told me, “was if the metastructure is created by capital – which is basically the blood that operates the system – then I should probably learn more about capital.”
Huang changed her major to finance and worked at Goldman Sachs her first year out of school. A year, she said, was more than enough, and it wasn’t as useful as she hoped it might be. But it still helped lead her to a product gig at a healthcare startup in San Francisco, working in what felt closer to healthcare systems. "I was working for what I thought was my dream company,” she told me.
On paper it felt right. It fit the narrative – it legitimized her dabbling in finance, and helped dovetail her training into her passion for medicine. But it didn’t take long to realize she was still an agent for that same broken system. After just a year, she was already burned out.
Needing a mental health break, Huang took a creative respite in Taiwan. She spent time making art, focused on mixed media and immersive experiences that hybridize physical and digital worlds – she’s had work featured in spots like BBC, NPR and ABC. Huang realized that she wanted to be creative full-time, and to help empower others to do the same.
"I started looking for places where I could start hosting these creative sabbaticals, kind of cabin-in-the-woods style, like Carl Jung – immerse myself in the collective consciousness. But not as a hermit, with friends,” she said. (A little closer to where Huang grew up, Creator Cabins is doing similar work.)
An article had first piqued Huang’s interest in Japan’s akiya crisis. And in 2019, while still based in the states, a friend – and now Akiya contributor – had asked Huang if she’d be interested in purchasing an akiya with her friend group. Now in Asia, she was able to start looking at the crisis more seriously, so she turned toward Japan.
When she arrived, she discovered a multitude of emerging artists, writers and researchers who shared her goal of turning their creative practices into full-time work. Huang also began to find appeal in the Shokunin kishitsu, which translates roughly to “craftsman spirit.” Shokunin is the pursuit of mastery, of taking joy in the act of doing, and the meticulous care to perform that work – from “sushi skills to bouldering” – carefully, with beauty and to the utmost of one’s ability.
“This kind of resonance is a foundation that I want to build my practice and my art around,” she said. At that same time, web3 was gaining steam, so she thought a DAO would be the best way to harness that resonance, leveraging it to revitalize spaces that might help people channel their Shokunin spirit.
The Akiya project was initially bootstrapped, but when more people joined, Huang orchestrated a crowdfund through Gitcoin, successfully funding their first Japan research trip. She and a group of friends began looking to purchase an akiya.
“We ran into a lot of logistical blocks,” she said, “All these legal and accounting and language barriers. And we realized that there's not really a centralized playbook for all of this to work out.”
So they created one, building an open-source guide to both serve as documentation of their progress and to be used by other groups in the future. They also started organizing residencies.
“The purpose of the residencies has been about exploring different regions and communities to find our first home,” Huang said. “We shifted from finding the ‘ideal’ house online, and instead wanted to prioritize communities that we would be able to integrate well in.
“We’ve been meeting people, and doing on-the-ground exploration to find our community home,” Huang continued. “We believe that this process allows for a much greater chance of long-term sustainability for our project.”
Akiya Collective now have an accepted offer for their first akiya – they’re just a few final logistical blocks away from making it official. Meanwhile, the second eight-week residency is happening in a home five minutes away from that akiya, to have an “umbrella location” from which they can renovate the house post-purchase, Huang said.
This residency’s diverse roster of folks have been working with Huang to find that integrative community, including a software engineer on Tinder’s founding team, a professional street dancer getting her Ph.D. in anthropology and a former physics professor/music producer who’s amassed two million followers on TikTok.
“It's been really humbling to see and learn and relate with people differently,” Huang said. “It's interesting because you go to some parts of Twitter and it's very heady, and then you go and speak to some farmers and it's very embodied. But how do we create a mix for that?”
Akiya, like Huang’s art, hybridizes physical and digital spaces, seeking balance between the global reach of the “heady” digital world and the localized intimacy of “embodied” physical spaces. Consequently, there are choices between scale and more focused community care.
Therein lies a dissonance that continues to tug at Huang: there are countless rural areas that could benefit from Akiya’s work, but if they were to scale the project, at risk is nothing less than the community’s soul.
The relevant example at scale is written on the walls of Airbnb properties. “I go in and I see these ‘love’ and ‘pray’ signs,” Huang said. “Does anyone even live here? No one can hate these signs, but no one really loves these signs either.” Huang called it a “lukewarm compromise,” and it’s not one she wants to make.
“I would prefer everyone not to join Akiya now,” she said. “I'm trying to keep it safe – not in terms of gatekeeping, but when a project is so young, you want to protect it. When communities scale they inevitably become less authentic – especially if there is some sort of profit mechanism that is helping make it sustainable.”
Huang has tried to fight that by leaning into less scalable economics like the barter system – exchanging art for free housing, for instance. “You feel like you're part of it and you leave a part of yourself behind. Therefore, when you return again, you can point to something handedly – I made that piece of it, or I helped make that koi pond.
“How do we create more spaces that feel like home and that feel inspiring when you walk in?” she continued. “Untangling that and creating a network for more spaces to feel embodied and artful – that's my dream. If people want to join me, they can, but I'm not really trying to speak out from a loudspeaker and preach.”
One of my days in Tokyo was dedicated to Mount Fuji and a break from the clamor of the city. I took a two-hour train to Kawaguchi, and then a funicular to Kawaguchiko Tenjozan Park, a hillside that offered excellent views of Japan’s tallest mountain.
For a couple hours, I just sat on a log looking at the mountain. The allure of a non-city life came on strong, quickly followed by the familiar calculus of pros and cons, and the hefty weight of making the impossible decision of where – of all the wondrous places in this world – to spend one’s time.
I was reminded then of a parable I once heard. “There are many ways to the top of the mountain,” it goes. “Get to know the routes, consider them, and eventually, choose one and start your climb. The path won’t lead straight up and sometimes it won’t feel like it’s going up at all, but at least you won’t spend your life circling the mountain.”
These words drifted up again at the end of my conversation with Huang, now reckoning with the impossible decision of how to spend one’s time. “I think we all contain un-potentiated parts of ourselves,” she told me. “A quote that I heard recently that I found really beautiful was, ‘every seed contains the hologram of a tree.’”
It’s a balancing act. To guide Akiya “like an art project” – as Huang described the current approach – that could just end up being “one house we do really well and people love” is to eschew the potential of a global network that may have greater impact but also more pray/love energy. It can be tempting to just stay a seed and dream of a thousand trees.
But perhaps by taking joy in the act of doing, and orienting ourselves toward others who reflect the potential we have yet to see, we’ll find that sense of fullness no matter how we climb. “I'm always of the belief that there’s this essence, even if people pivot a million different ways, they always end up at the outcome,” Huang said. “Although you may grow this way and you may grow that way, you iterate until you get to that point where you're like, ‘ah, yes. Okay. This is what we've been waiting for.’”