Grand Design and Social Hope

Recently there’s been somethings on my mind that has gotten me thinking.

Working here at Gungendo and living in this town of Omori has been one of the best choices I have made in my life. Yes it is a small town of 400 people, but I’ve had the chance to meet and connect with really amazing people, especially with community leaders of small countryside towns from all over Japan.

Although I graduated Berkeley almost a year ago, the themes of hope, alternative living, and the possibility in creating the new meaning of a “life worth living”in this post-growth society which I explored in my thesis are constantly present in my life here in Omori.

It’s almost been a year since I moved to Omori, and I feel like I’m starting have a deeper understanding of what makes a town like Omori one of the many centers of innovation for that lifestyle with new value.

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SOCIAL HOPE AND GRAND DESIGN

This is what I arrived upon recently, that this is two of the components so essential in the development of a sustainable, attractive, and realistic countryside town with alternative lifestyles in the Japanese countryside.

So what am I talking about when I say social hope and grand design is:

Social Hope is for something to come true through action with others

Grand Design is to design an overarching blueprint for the future

The definition for social hope is something that I’m pretty familiar with since I’ve studied various theories of hope. This is about the process of making something that is “Not-yet true or not-yet existing” come into existence or “to come true”. I say the process because for me I feel as though just thinking about something coming true is just “dreaming”. Hope for me implies that people want to act upon those dreams, to make it a reality. Building on top of this, social hope is about working with others who share this goal of making that “something” come true.

The definition of Grand Design is something that I just made up. There is probably some better definition under some more official word, but you know I googled this word and all which came up was Steven Hawking’s book, so I just decided to make my of definition. My chairman Daikichi-san has been using this word a lot recently. He uses this word when he talks about designing the town and how he “wishes it to be”. I think a better way is that he is imagining and designing a vision or direction in which the town should head towards. It’s not so much about designing something physical but designing the intangible, almost like designing a new value that people live by.

These are the two conditions which I see being satisfied by the towns and key stakeholders or players that are becoming the leaders in sustainable alternative lifestyles in the Japanese countrysides.

So much of these countryside revival project start with creating some solution for a problem, such as a diminishing population. So they plan a workshop, stick post-it notes on a wall and do one of those information organization sessions and figure out “we need to bring more young people into the town!”. There is no problem with this in terms of problem solving, but what becomes the issue is what happens afterwards. Let’s say that that this town does bring in a couple more young families into the town, now what? Exactly, people work towards some sort of vague concept of town development, but become lost again after they finish a task because they haven’t been able to draw a larger plan or a vision to work towards to. Essentially:

THE PROCESS BECOMES THE GOAL AND ULTIMATELY THE LARGER GOAL GETS LOST

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THE DANGER MODEL AND THE VISION MODEL

Just recently I had the pleasure of meeting Abe-san who is the founder of a company called 風と土と(Kaze to Tsuchi to) from Amacho. Just as a side note, Abe-san is probably one of the people I respect the most ever since I moved to Shimane. This man has such deep insight to so much about town development and alternative systems of living and working, when he was visiting Omori a little while ago he spoke about this danger model and the vision model.

The danger model for town development is essentially when people feel that the town is in some danger and decide to act in order to solve the problem. This is essentially the example I gave above about solving a population problem. As Abe-san explained, this model is very speedy and projects move forward because the goal is easy to see. The problem though is what happens afterwards. Let’s say a certain degree of success is achieved, the question then becomes what should we do afterwards? Without a larger mission other than simply solving problems in front of you the sustainability of the town is compromised.

The vision model on the other hand is about not outlining the problems, but about drawing up a future for the town. To draw and to design a “not-yet” town with a vision and a strong identity. The vision model is not a solution but simply a far off goal which keeps expanding and changing as each step towards it is achieved. What is more, this vision is something which people can empathize with, they can become one of the characters to the story which was written for the town. The vision model however, can be slower than the danger model, for the next step towards that ideal can be quite unclear. Yet in exchange for speed, the projects under the vision model can be sustained for longer and can collect more people who want to become part of that community.

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As some of you may be catching on, what I am leading to is that town development under the vision model has both grand design and social hope. The storyline of the vision model is the grand design, the particular “worldliness” of the town in which the people are aiming towards. The social hope is the ability of the grand design to draw people in to work towards making that vision come true.

In other words, there seems to be some main stakeholder who has this grand design which she/he has drawn or imagined and others see this grand design, empathize with it, and work together to make that vision come true.

The town of Omori for me had both of those characteristics.

Grand Design: Daikichi-san and his wife Tomi-san had this vision for the town: A town which protects its lifestyle from neoliberal forces, all the while coming up with tactics which ride the waves and trends of the current era. A town which embraced Restorative Innovation: To create something new by protecting and restoring the past. A town which does not run to the title of World Heritage Site and sell out its lifestyle just for some immediate but temporary gains in economic growth from tourism. A town which does not simply look outside for resources and innovation, but looks inwards to search for the treasures under our own feet.

Social Hope: All of the people who have gathered in this town who share the same want for the Grand Design and vision of Daikichi-san and Tomi-san to come true. The young people who have doubts about the social and economic system of the current age in Japan and want to test their ability to create something alternative to that in the Japanese countrysides.

There are other examples of this such as Hamaguri-hama in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture where my friend Kameyama-san is currently rebuilding his town after the 3/11 tsunami. This man literally lost everything to the Tsunami, but he recovered his will and decided to draw a picture of how he wanted the town to become. People saw this picture he drew, empathized with it and decided to come help him rebuild, and currently he even has staff members who have moved to this town to work and help him achieve his Grand Design.

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I think it would be a really cool project going from town to town talking to these local stakeholders and listening to their grand design and to analyze what sort of people have gathered to make that dream come true. Being able to compare and contrast information gathered on the basis of the same themes is a great way to find underlying similarities between things which seem different on the surface.

The interesting thing is that even though I mostly write about countryside living these concepts can be applied to in the cities of Japan as well. However at the moment it is probably a lot easier to take action like this in the countrysides at the moment. In a place with so many vacant spaces (both social and physical) there is a lot of possibility in more grassroots projects to take hold. I find the cities to be a little too saturated with little room for people to find these vacant spaces to fit into. This does not mean its impossible to do this in the cities, but there must be a way to incorporate these themes using different methods.

So all in all, Grand Design and Social Hope, a good way of analyzing town development projects in the countrysides of Japan.