Daigan.Founder · Digital assets & applied AI · Tokyo
I build products,systems & the storiesthat move them.
Hello from Japan.
I’m Daigan, from London and now in Tokyo. I work on digital assets from three sides: I founded JOY, a gaming-hardware start-up; I wrote for Laser Digital, Nomura’s digital-asset firm; and I built Japan Regulatory Radar, an AI tool that turns Japanese regulation into English briefs you can check.
01Selected work
A few things I’ve put my mind to.
Different roles, one habit: making something complicated readable.
A published brief. Point at a claim and its Japanese passage lights up.Founder & technical lead · Live
The model was the easy part.
Radar reads Japanese regulatory sources and drafts English briefs. Every claim sits beside the Japanese passage behind it, and nothing is published until I approve it.
The pre-order render, then the working prototype running games.Founder · Now an archive
A physical home for digital ownership.
We set out to build JOY Genesis, a handheld gaming computer with a built-in hardware wallet. We took it from concept renders to a working prototype and a presale. It never reached a production run; the site is now its archive.
Radar archives the Japanese release and splits it into page-addressed passages. Every later decision traces back here.
MUFG press release · page 2
デジタルマネーとしてトークン化預金やステーブルコインの利用を検討
Processing · Explicit fields
Give the facts a shape.
Each change becomes a fact with its actors, instruments and status. A pilot, a proposal and a rule are different things; the fields keep them apart.
Structured fact · simplified
Actors
MUFG group companies
Instruments
Tokenised deposits, stablecoins
Status
Under consideration (検討)
Evidence
Page 2, verbatim
Evaluation · Meaning & completeness
A citation is only the beginning.
A second pass asks whether the Japanese passage supports the English claim. That catches claims that go too far. It can’t catch what’s missing, which is why the last step is a person.
Claim against evidence
Tokenised deposits and stablecoins are being considered for the digital-money leg.
デジタルマネーとしてトークン化預金やステーブルコインの利用を検討
Supported
Decision · Human review
Make the decision visible.
Nothing is published without my approval, and rejected drafts stay private. This brief went out with every claim mapped to its passage.
Published brief
MUFG announces a JGB repo experiment on Canton Network
Approved · Published
1 / 4
03Writing, reading & playing
Other ways of seeing.
A philosophical question, a courtroom argument, or simply getting the timing right. A few things keeping me curious.
James Dale Davidson & William Rees-MoggWritten in 1997, and still a useful provocation.
What happens to power when money and work can move more easily than the institutions built to govern them? I’m interested in where its argument holds, and where reality resists it.
Book
Fluent Forever
Gabriel WynerLearning a language is partly a question of how you pay attention.
Wyner’s approach to sound, memory and association gives me something practical to work with alongside Japanese study.
Book
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan KunderaKundera on love, chance, and the weight we give our choices.
A novel that makes a philosophical question feel uncomfortably personal: how do we know what matters when we only get to live it once?
Game
Persona 5 Royal
AtlusA game about how you spend your time, disguised as a game about changing the world.
The everyday relationships interest me as much as the larger rebellion. And the menus alone deserve a small design essay.
Game
Ace Attorney Series
Capcom · played in JapaneseCourtroom Japanese, questionable witnesses, and no shortage of reading practice.
The characters give the vocabulary somewhere to live; it’s easier to remember a word when you’ve had to use it to expose a contradiction.
Game
Rhythm Paradise Groove
Nintendo · Rhythm Tengoku seriesAn entire interaction reduced to listening and pressing at the right moment.
There’s something instructive about that restraint: a tiny set of rules, enough variation to keep you curious, and timing doing most of the expressive work.
04Beyond the work
Building a life in Japan.
I came to Tokyo from London as a Daiwa Scholar, studying Japanese at Waseda, to turn a long-held interest into an ordinary week. Most days that still means conversations moving faster than I do, and a lot of Ace Attorney.
Language keeps exposing the gap between knowing a rule and being able to use it. Radar is built around the same gap: an English sentence can be accurate word for word and still miss what the Japanese document is doing.
Background
Laser Digital (Nomura Group)Marketing & content consultant
Joy TechnologyFounder & CEO
Somnia Network (Improbable)Head of community
Vega ProtocolCommunity intern to community lead
London Blockchain LabsExecutive director & lead advisor
London School of EconomicsBSc Philosophy, Politics & Economics