Rice paddies that lay fallow for decades in some of Japan’s most far-flung regions are now its hottest properties. As prices surge, these areas are discovering the truth to the old adage: If you build it, they will come.

In Chitose, a city of 100,000 in Hokkaido, billboards seek recruits for the Self-Defense Forces, which saw a 50% shortfall last year. When I arrived on a fully booked plane from Tokyo packed with salarymen in cheap suits and expensive watches, it was easy to see where the competition was coming from: a half-dozen towering cranes jutting into the sky, a jarring contrast against the surrounding countryside. Thousands of construction workers are piecing together at breathtaking speed Japan’s most astonishing industrial gamble, a $33 billion bet that the country can retake the top of the semiconductor industry.

Those cranes are building the first fab for Rapidus, a public-private venture that aims to skip Japan to the head of the chip production queue. Founded just two years ago, it hopes to produce cutting-edge, 2-nanometer chips by 2027, in cooperation with IBM. It’s fraught with risks, and the government’s record in promoting industry is spotty. But this is just the latest and most ambitious example of a series of bets on chips, with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba recently pledging an extra ¥10 trillion ($66 billion) on top of ¥3.9 trillion invested since 2021. Near the other end of the Japanese archipelago, 1,500 kilometers to the southwest, is another. In Kikuyo, just outside the city of Kumamoto in Kyushu, mass production is soon set to begin at a $7 billion semiconductor plant.