ZuCity Japan Popup City Recap - Unlocking Community-Owned Coliving Infrastructure
We hosted our first Zuzalu popup city at our permanent hub in Japan in September. ZuCity's community-owned houses, cars, and venue make coliving experiences in rural Japan easy, fun, and unique.
Last year we realized Japan’s demographic collapse has created an asymmetric arbitrage opportunity: world class housing and infrastructure available far below international prices. ZuCity was started not merely as a nomad community; it is a proof-of-concept for a permanent large-scale coliving hub, owned and operated by us.
Read ZuCity Japan’s 2025 recap
It has been one year since we started building ZuCity and the results have moved beyond theory.
Neighborhood: We acquired two homes and our 🏴☠️ fleet’s first vehicle with two more homes on the way, all within 5 minutes of each other.
Diplomacy: We’ve met city government twice and submitted a proposal to buy an abandoned school in our neighborhood. This would change ZuCity from a community experiment to a public-private partnership. The decision arrives early Jan. 🙏
Reinvest: Popup city tickets generated ¥480,000 (~$3,200) in revenue. Critically, 26% of this was immediately converted into hard assets (a car and furniture) rather than lost to operational overhead.
Solvency: We were breakeven on the event purely through ticket sales, proving the model requires no grants, subsidies, or sponsors to survive.
After gaining momentum acquiring properties, making friends with locals, and growing our online community we decided to do our first event hosting a 2-week Zuzalu popup city in our neighborhood. Following on all of this success we are continuing to scale up our properties, vehicles, and other public goods to onboard more communities and popup organizers in 2026.
ZuCity Popup Principles
Rural revitalization requires cultural integration. Much of our focus at the popup was teaching Japanese culture and establishing it as our own. We also treated treating locals as our own and invited them to our events. A few simple principles guided us to creating a great experience for our residents while learning how to assimilate.
If we are organizing an event in Japan we should capitalize on making a unique Japan experience
Teach rural Japanese culture and what its really like to live in ZuCity.
Spend as much time with locals friends and communities, not just our Zuzalu crew
Act and speak Japanese as much as possible.
Refine our community culture and membership qualifications optimizing for long term members.
Unforgettable experiences together
Leverage community-event driven real estate development for our network of properties
Popup Goals: Validate Our Model’s Pillars
Verify our chosen city and location is great for popups
Validated: Everyone loves our city and location.
Use community funds to invest in more popup infrastructure
Validated: ¥480,000 total ticket sales (not including rent) was converted into ¥125k of assets (26% reinvest rate) - ¥80k for a car and ¥45k for furniture.
Document ZuCity culture, principles, future ownership and operation plans
Validated: Refined existing values (e.g. mottainai, collectivism) and added some new values (e.g. zen, silence). Our main community meme
~~~~~~is starting to propagate; merch maybe coming soon?
Launch Highlights
We had an intensive, immersive experience into what makes ZuCity a special place, going on quests in the area, working on our community model, jumpstarting our neighborhood activation, and making unforgettable memories together as always.
The popup started a couple days early when the first guests arrived in town and we explored the surrounding area a bit. We visited an artist friend up in the mountains who invited us to a temple stay the next week, a waterfall that causes the ground nearby to turn orange, a sauna center / log cabin building school, and other quests for community bonding and cultural immersion.
We kicked off the official event with a tour of the neighborhood we are acquiring property in. Popup residents got to visit all our current homes, homes we are looking to buy, event venues we are investigating, local landmarks, and the 5 year vision for ZuCity in Komoro. We ended the day helping Akiya Collective with some weeding in their yard near us and finishing off with an onsen session and group dinner.
We had a couple community dinners including one birthday party.
We were invited to a zen buddhist temple for a 1-night stay. 12 people stayed for the first couple meditation sessions until dinner, 3 people stayed overnight and left after a couple more meditation sessions and lunch.
We bought our first car for more trips and moving furniture. It arrived late so we mostly used a rental car and drove over 1,600km in it during our quest maxxing.
We threw a closing party rave at an abandoned building.
The day after the popup I went down to Osaka to present at the World Expo for a biotech and DeSci event at the Swiss Pavilion organized by Una. The presentation went great and we connected with a couple people that we’ve known only virtually.
The best part is we got gifted an amazing one-of-a-kind bioart present from the Swiss government for our community proving that rural Japanese villages can host global intellectual capital.
Some other launch highlights:
Continued furnishing and decorating the first ZuCity house
Toured abandoned properties in the ZuCity neighborhood and put an offer on a HYUGE, beautiful akiya that’s well taken care of. Unfortunately someone put an offer in the day before us so we didnt get it 😭
Continued the Zuzalu fish slapping tradition
Many music tasting/exchange sessions - mostly Japanese (obv), Brazilian, and Latin.
Half a dozen onsen trips ♨️ #longevity
Picked up a carload of furniture and home goods from a community member moving out of the country.
Popup was breakeven WHILE ALSO buying infrastructure assets
This only includes event specific expenses - car rentals, car purchase, gas, activities / entrance fees, etc.
Excludes long-term investments for houses like furniture and kitchen equipment
Didn’t charge rent for members staying in our houses.
$0 in grant funding or subsidies, only paying customers.
Our first popup city was a ton of fun going on adventures around the area and introducing our community members to our local friends in the area. We are also glad to see our sustainability model proven. Breaking-even while hosting people for free and acquiring assets that dramatically reduce cost + overhead for our next popup means we are on our way to a positive feedback loop of increasing capacity and value add combined lower costs. Our next step is to scale up our properties, vehicles, and other public goods to onboard more popup organizers.
Upcoming Events
December 8th, 00:00 UTC - Town Hall
February - Some people are planning to come, give a shout in our Telegram if you want to join.
March - *IF* we buy the school from the government in Jan we will host a small popup in March to help plan the future of the school, clean it up, and work on our new houses. Stay posted for more details