The morning of 18 March 2042.
People are gathering on the hill. Some came from Japan. Some were born in this country. Some are families who moved here from far away. Everyone still looks a little sleepy.
Below, beside the sea, lies a small town. Dark tiled roofs. Rice terraces under the morning mist. At the harbour, wooden crates of pottery packed in straw are being loaded onto a boat—bound, as every day, for a shop somewhere in the world.
From the workshop on the corner you can already hear a hammer. The master blacksmith, who once nearly closed his forge in Japan, is showing his third apprentice how to strike a blade. Next door, the lids are coming off the indigo vats.
The young man leaning over the vat used to believe, back in Japan, that he had nothing. Today he makes the deepest indigo in town. His fingertips are always blue, and he doesn't hide them.
On the school veranda, children are deciding whose workshop they will apprentice in today. The market fills with vegetables from the town's fields and plates from the town's kilns.
Sixteen years ago there was nothing here. Only a plan on paper, and a few people who believed that what is broken can be mended with gold.
The same morning is beginning in other towns around the world. In a town beside the desert. In a town in a snowy valley.
We want to reach this morning, for real.
That is why we are laying the first stone today.
