Creating a Mindful City
by Kouji Miki
Creating a Mindful City in Kamakura
In January 2019, I moved enmono Inc. from Shibuya, Tokyo, where I had been based for the past 9 years, to Kamakura. I am very grateful to Shibuya, Tokyo for all the help and the many networks I have made there. However, over the past few years, I have noticed that the atmosphere in Tokyo has become somewhat less comfortable. For the past 9 years, enmono, Inc., which I represent, has been running a school for new product development and innovation, zenschool, mainly for the manufacturing industry. The company has now trained 190 innovators as graduates. Some of the graduates have gone on to develop completely different businesses, such as a traditional mold manufacturing company in Toyama Prefecture that became an art museum with a stunning design, and the owner of a processing company in Higashi Osaka that created a members-only snack bar for manufacturing business owners.
Where is Kamakura?
Kamakura is a seaside town about an hour’s train ride from Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Kamakura, with a view of Mt. Fuji, the beautiful sea, and lush greenery, has a deep connection with Japan’s samurai culture, as the first capital of Japan’s samurai was established here about 800 years ago.
Kamakura is also home to many Zen temples and is known as the birthplace of Zen in Japan. Recently, due to the new coronavirus, many people from Tokyo have moved to Kamakura, and the city is becoming a center for many IT companies.
I realized that the people who come up with such crazy ideas and make them happen are not necessarily the young people who gather in the glittering places of Aoyama, Roppongi, Shibuya, and Akihabara in Tokyo, which have a strong image of design, art, and innovation. Yes, I noticed that many of them were rather introverted and not good at self-expression, or what I call “unattractive” people. However, it turns out that these people actually have a huge amount of creativity inside of them, and by uncovering their intrinsic motivation, they can become very creative and passionate.
The so-called “cool” creators are skilled at efficiently gathering, editing and creating information from outside themselves, while the “not-so-cool” innovators access their own internal motivations, rather than external information, to extract creativity and passion from within themselves and create innovations that have never been seen before. It has become clear that innovators access their own internal motivations, not external information, to extract creativity and passion from within themselves and create innovations that have never been seen before. From the trend of graduates so far, I noticed that the “not-so-good” graduates are by far the most powerful and can extract completely original things. When I saw graduates who were active, I thought that absolute creativity based on one’s own internal motivation, not external motivation, was lurking in them. Yes, there is an enormous amount of creativity lying dormant not in the world of facts, but in the hearts of people.
Extrinsic motivation or intrinsic motivation?
While realizing the potential of intrinsic motivation, I made the decision to move my company when we held workshops in Tokyo and Kamakura related to a particular job. At that time, the participants in our Tokyo workshop were corporate planners from major companies who came to gather information on the possibilities of innovation. However, many of the participants could not see the world without their own titles, and asked questions based on factual and conventional thought patterns (not interesting questions to be honest).
On the other hand, in the case of the workshop in Kamakura, where freelancers, start-ups, and people working in general companies participated, most of the questions were not based on facts but on their own intrinsic motivations, whether they would become innovative new businesses or not, and many of the questions were “personal” based on their intrinsic motivations, and the interactions were very stimulating.
As a result, I have come to the conclusion that there is a difference in the intentions of the people who are drawn to the Tokyo and Kamakura locations, whether they are based on external motivations, i.e., instructions from the outside or missions from the company, or internal motivations, i.e., excitement within themselves.
Intrinsic motivation. After all, when we are surrounded by concrete buildings and all the noise of the city, our senses naturally close down. When we close our senses, our bodies become slow to respond. As a result, it becomes difficult to notice one’s own intrinsic motivation, or excitement.
On the other hand, in Kamakura, there is a lot of nature, and our senses are more open. I think the result of this is the difference in awareness of the workshop that I wrote about earlier. When I realized this, the option of choosing Tokyo as a place to work, where I spend most of my working time and where it is difficult to notice intrinsic motivation due to the various noises and closed spaces, disappeared. So I decided to move my company from Shibuya to Kamakura.
Mindful City Kamakura Project
Four years ago (2017), I founded Zen2.0, an international conference on Zen and mindfulness, with a number of friends, and we have been holding it at Kenchoji Temple in Kita-Kamakura, a temple with a long history. The key concept of the conference is the concept of “mindfulness”.
The meaning of the word “mindful city” is the concept that creative people from all over the world, attracted by Zen and mindfulness, will gather in Kamakura to create new businesses. These words were coined at Watami in front of Kamakura Station at the end of 2015, when I was planning an international event on Zen and mindfulness, at a tavern with four friends: myself, Shishido-san, who runs the Kamakura Mindfulness Lab, Matsushima-san, who is currently the editor-in-chief of the Japanese edition of WIRED magazine (at the time, NHK Publishing), and Suzuki-san, who sells kimonos. It was a concept that came up during a talk at a pub with four friends.
The initial members of the group felt that Zen should be one of the roots of “mindfulness,” and that they wanted to disseminate more Zen to the world from Kamakura, the birthplace of Zen in Japan. I wanted to make Kamakura into a city where creators from all over the world would gather to extract what is truly valuable from themselves by looking at themselves, rather than being misled by outside information.
The four concepts of Mindful City Kamakura
1. Regarative Nature
Kamakura has a rich ocean and mountains. In Kamakura, there are many sports activities that take place in the embrace of such rich nature. Marine sports such as sailing (yachting), windsurfing, and surfing, as well as trail running through the lush green mountains, are popular. There is also a large population of joggers.
Just by being in nature, our senses naturally open up and absorb the stress. Nature seems to have a natural healing effect, and I have personally experienced many times when my stress was blown away just by gazing out at the ocean and feeling “faint. It is an important element of mindfulness to maintain the rich nature of Kamakura and to play in it.
In this context, Synecoculture™, which I introduced in a previous blog, naturally comes into play.
While feeling and cherishing nature in Kamakura, we will do Synecoculture™ farming which is based on Human Augmentation of Ecosystems, and while sharing the farm produce with the community, we will use the sensitivity we gain from the farming experience to create a mindful life. This completely pesticide-free, completely fertilizer-free farming is going to change the world. This farming method has a proven track record of turning the savannahs of Africa into jungles in a year. The method is completely free and open source.
With the help of Dr. Masatoshi Funahashi, a Sony CSL researcher, who has researched and this farming method and made it available as open source, I opened a “Mindful Farm” in my backyard with my friends.
The experience of moving our bodies together and creating a farm together helped us to regain our physical senses that had been lost due to the corona and to rekindle our relationships with our friends.
Touching the soil and the greenery will refresh your body and mind. If you can eat delicious vegetables with this, I think you have nothing to complain about. I would like to spread the fields of this farming method little by little to the vacant land all over Kamakura, and make the Mindful City Kamakura.
2. Compassion and Empathy-Oriented Education and Community-Building
Zen2.0, a Zen and mindfulness event, has led to the creation of a community in Kamakura that practices mindfulness by sitting together with the Zen2.0 community. Every month, there is a meditation session called “Kamakura Mindfulness Day”, a donation-style meditation session where people can casually participate, and there are also frequent meditation sessions and workshops by expert mindfulness teachers from overseas who have come to love Kamakura because of Zen2.0. Through these meditation sessions, we have come to know each other better. Through these meditation sessions, a community of mutual healing has naturally emerged.
We also believe that local agricultural experiences using the Synecoculture™ method can have a great educational impact on children in the future.
3. Human Consciousness “Upgrade Technology” (Transtech)
Daily practice is extremely important for mindfulness, but it is difficult to continue on one’s own. Therefore, in order to support continuous practice, we can use technology such as meditation apps to log data such as the frequency and duration of meditation and share this information with the community so that we can help each other maintain a sustainable practice. Technology companies are beginning to emerge, especially in Silicon Valley, to accelerate the practice of mindfulness to reduce stress, improve concentration, and increase creativity.
In addition to the simple practice of mindfulness, the development of devices that effectively use sound and light to induce a change in consciousness is also expected to grow rapidly in the future.
It may be difficult to imagine upgrading people’s minds with technology, so I would like to introduce you to a company that is easy to understand.
The company is called VIE STYLE, headquartered in Zaimokuza, Kamakura. The founder of this company was a professional jazz musician (also a friend of the author of this blog), and he wanted to enrich people’s lives through music, so he developed “ZONE” as a trans-tech product. It measures brain waves through the earphones, and inferring the mood state of the person from the brain waves, provides music to lift the mood if the person is feeling down, music to improve concentration if the person is distracted, and music to relax the brain if the person wants to rest. As of March 1, 2020, the company has already raised 18 million yen through a crowdfunding campaign called Indygogo.
I believe that one of the important features of mindfulness is the creation of many start-up companies in Kamakura that develop hardware and software aimed at upgrading people’s consciousness and creating new industries. Therefore, the company to which I belong operates zenschool, an innovation school for corporate executives to accelerate businesses related to mindfulness and trans-tech, and offers consultations on mindfulness-related businesses in the atmosphere of Kamakura. He also holds consultations on mindfulness-related business in the atmosphere of Kamakura.
4. Mindful economic system
Many of the economies of local cities that support huge industries such as the automobile industry are built on a subcontracting system, with small and medium-sized companies subcontracting to huge companies. However, in the age of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), where the business environment changes at a very fast pace, such an industrial system is extremely vulnerable because it cannot respond to environmental changes in a timely manner, and in a sense It is becoming obsolete.
Therefore, the economic system that Mindful City aims to create is a web-based industrial system in which excited sole proprietors, small and medium-sized businesses, and startups that have awakened to what they really want to do work together like a spider web to create mindfulness-related businesses and trans-tech related products and services. This is an industrial system. A mindful economic system in which a coalition of small businesses are connected like living things, supporting each other, and changing freely while mutually supporting each other instead of competing, is an essential element of a mindful city.
In the next blog, I will explain the current status of the concept of Mindful City Kamakura, based on the four concepts I have outlined so far.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my blog. We would like to publish “True Innovation”, a book about Zen innovation theory written in Japanese, in English and other languages. If you are a publisher and would like to help us, please contact us.
A book “True Innovation”
