In the 17th century, a samurai could walk 500km from Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital, to Tokyo on a route called the "Tokaido Road."
Towns built around the thoroughfare's 53 stages, or stops, prospered as travellers would stop for food, lodging and other necessities. Kameyama, in western Japan, was one of those towns.
Almost 400 years later, prosperity has found Kameyama again -- but this time the town's good fortune has come in the form of liquid crystal displays (LCDs), used as screens in everything from mobile phones to ultra-thin televisions.
Sharp Corp's flagship Kameyama plant is the most advanced factory of its kind, manufacturing TVs from huge, super-thin sheets of glass -- the size of three 180cm tall men standing shoulder-to-shoulder.
The factory is now flanked by a plant belonging to one of Sharp's key color-filter suppliers, Toppan Printing Co, while other LCD-related firms such as JSR Corp and Nitto Denko Corp have also built facilities only minutes away.
"It's rescued people in my line of work," said Toyosuke Ando, a taxi driver who makes the 30-minute trip to Kameyama from the prefectural capital, Tsu, several times a day for a US$60 fare. Trains between Tsu and Kameyama run once an hour.
"I went there only once a month before Sharp arrived."
Rural towns like Kam-eyama, with about 40,000 residents, were the hardest hit by the "hollowing out" of Japan's manufacturing sector as firms shut factories to build new ones in China, where a company can hire 20 workers for the price of one in Japan.
"We can't prevent companies going overseas, because we are significantly weaker on labor costs," said Kazuhiro Fujimoto, executive director of the Industrial Investment Promotion Team for Mie prefecture, home to Kameyama and Tsu.
"However, we are starting to see firms in the high-tech industries returning to Japan, because they are afraid of their technology being leaked to foreign competitors," Fujimoto said.
Mie, better known for its famous Matsuzaka beef than its electronics, wants to become the heart of Japan's flat-panel display industry under a prefectural government initiative called the "Crystal Valley" project.
It has already attracted 53 display-related companies to build factories or facilities in Mie and that number is expected to climb because of the explosive growth being forecast for LCD televisions, a market predicted to expand ninefold by 2008.
"We were pondering whether to go overseas or stay in Japan," said Sharp's LCD business head, Zempei Tani. "But LCDs are still a developing business in need of improvements and we felt it was best to have the engineers close to the manufacturing equipment."
The prefecture shelled out ?9 billion (US$84 million) in tax incentives and rebates to encourage Sharp to build the Kameyama plant, which employs about 1,500 people. The municipal government threw in an additional ?4.5 billion in incentives.
Sharp has another LCD factory in Mie in a town called Taki, a 45-minute drive from Kameyama via a highway known as the "LCD road."
Powered by strong LCD demand, the Osaka-based company -- which derives its name from one of its founder's earliest inventions, the "ever-sharp" mechanical pencil -- forecasts record sales and profit this year.
The economy of Mie, home to nearly 1.9 million people, is also starting to show signs of life.
In December, the ratio of jobs to applicants in the prefecture rose to 1.04, dwarfing the national average of 0.77 and marking the first rise above one since February 1993.
A recent jobs fair aimed at filling 600 positions in the Kameyama area attracted only 400 people, an unusual problem in a country that 14 months ago had record-high unemployment.
"We're now hoping that people who left for major cities in search of jobs will come back home to work," said Fujimoto.
Despite the changes, taxi driver Ando said the town had not lost its roots, pointing to the Tokaido road that still runs through Kameyama. Nonetheless, he is hoping for one more addition -- some nightlife.
"There is still nothing to do here at night," he said.
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