Six Reasons Why Samurai City is a “Mindful City”
by Kouji Miki
Where is Kamakura?
Kamakura is known in Japan as the old capital of the Samurai. This old city 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.
The leader of Kamakura at that time, Hojo Tokiyori, thought that Zen was necessary to regulate his own spirit and reign over the world in a time of war, and founded a dojo specializing in Zen Buddhism in Kamakura, thus beginning the history of Japan’s samurai society.
That is the reason why many Zen temples located in Kamakura 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.
1.Startup infrastructure
1–1. Well-developed food and childcare environment
In Kamakura, infrastructure for start-ups is steadily being developed. The major driving force behind this is the development of infrastructure for businesses called the “Machi no ◯◯” series promoted by Kayac, Inc. Kayac is headquartered in Kamakura. There are many restaurants in Kamakura, but most of them cater to tourists and are rather expensive. People who work for companies in Kamakura prefer restaurants that are affordable and where they can have a meal in a short time.
However, since there are long lines at restaurants popular with tourists, we can’t waste time standing in line every day. Is there any way to get a good meal in a short time? The “Machi no Shainshokudo” (employee cafeteria in the town) is the solution to this problem of lunch for people working at companies in Kamakura.
Unlike most company cafeterias, you will never get bored of the menu. If you can prove that you work in Kamakura with your business card or employee ID card, you can use this service. Even if you start a startup business in Kamakura, it will not last long if the food is not good, so this is a very nice system.
Every week a menu from a popular restaurant in Kamakura is served, so you can look forward to every day and never get bored.
As part of the infrastructure of the “Machi-no-◯◯” series, the “Machi-no-Nursery School,” a joint nursery school for working families, has already started in Kamakura City. In addition, “Machi-no-Employee Dormitory” and “Machi-no-Human Resources Department” are in the works. For more information, please visit the Kamakura Capitalism website here. I’m very grateful to Kayak for creating an environment where it’s easy for start-ups to work.
1–2. Super high-speed internet connection
Another very important infrastructure for startups is a super-high-speed Internet connection. Fortunately, Neuro, a Sony-affiliated provider that has recently started offering its services to the general public, is also available in Kamakura, although it is not yet available throughout Japan.
A colleague of mine who decided to move to Kamakura at the same time as I moved my head office to Kamakura has also installed Neuro’s Internet service.
According to the data of my colleague who also moved to Kamakura when his company moved, he can download 900M/s and upload 600M/s (about 10 times faster than before).
I have also installed Neuro Hikari, and when we are connected via Neuro in Kamakura, we can use it as if we are on the same LAN line. This connection speed is very attractive for start-ups. When I tested it at home, I got a figure of 1.1G/s with champion data. (*Data may vary depending on the speed test application.
Results of a net speed test recorded at home.
1.1G/s may be champion data, but
Still, I’m getting 400M to 600M/s in normal operation.
2. Rich nature to open up your senses
Surrounded by the sea and mountains, Kamakura has a rich natural environment. I have been living in Kamakura for twelve years now, and when I compare myself twelve years ago with the person I am now, I have noticed a surprising amount of change.
Twelve years ago, I was originally a right-brained person, but when I was working in Tokyo, I think I consciously acted with a left-brain bias. Not only as an innovation researcher but also as a business person, I only wanted to think about how to differentiate my company from others and how to fight for competitive advantage. He was extremely self-centered. He was also very self-centered and self-protective. He was the type of person who would make fun of anything sensational or spiritual that could not be explained by logic. (I break out in a cold sweat when I think about it.)
As such, I spent most of my working time in Tokyo, and my meals and drinks with clients and colleagues were completed in the Tokyo world, so I didn’t realize that my senses were “closed” and I didn’t need to open them in the first place.
However, after I moved to Kamakura and started to open my senses little by little, the way I work started to change little by little. The way I work has changed from left-brained logic-based thinking to one that emphasizes my intuition and senses. Yes, I have become a little closer to my true self.
This year, I moved my company to Kamakura, and instead of spending my day in the office district of Tokyo, where I used to wake up in the morning, jump on the bus, take the train, and go to work, I started meditating for about an hour in the quiet morning air, listening to the sound of birds and waves, and commuting to the office near the station by bicycle. I started to commute by bicycle to the office near the station. With this change in lifestyle, I feel that I have been able to come up with many good ideas that would not have been possible in the Tokyo business environment.
Rich nature opens up closed senses.
It is very important to have an environment where you can take in and work with the sensations of nature in your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and body, which are your sensors, on a daily basis. I feel that Kamakura has an environment that facilitates access to intrinsic motivation, which is the root of innovation.
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.
I deeply sympathize with Dr. Funabashi of Sony CSL about the possibility of “augmented ecosystems”, which can be used in human living areas and urban spaces to increase biodiversity and various ecosystem services according to the purpose, and I am trying to develop this in Kamakura. And we would like to develop such a community in Kamakura.
I believe that a landscape where such agriculture and nature are scattered among the houses of Kamakura will become a symbol of the Mindful City Kamakura.
3. Shrines, Temples, Churches and Mindful Communities that Create the Atmosphere of Kamakura
In Kamakura, there are many shrines, temples, Christian churches, and other religious facilities in abundance. The role of these religious facilities in shaping the town of Kamakura is very significant. This is because the tone of the entire town becomes very calm.
In Kamakura, there is a conference called the 3.11 Kamakura Religious Conference, which aims to go beyond the religions of Shintoism, Buddhism, and Christianity to learn about each other’s religions. Just like this conference, there is an atmosphere in Kamakura that encourages people to connect with each other across all domains. In Kamakura, there is a large, warm current swirling around that embraces and fuses all religions, races, ages, and genders. This atmosphere is difficult to describe in words, but we believe it is a major factor in creating a “mindful city.
I have been fortunate to be able to participate in regular zazen sessions at temples and other places, as well as to be able to attend a monthly zazen session led by a priest of the Rinzai sect at a co-working space called “Tabisuru Shokuba,” where we have newly registered. Through this experience, I have deepened my understanding of Zen and use it as a reference for organizing my mind and preparing myself as a manager.
In addition to my corporate activities, I am one of the organizers of Zen2.0, a conference held at Kenchoji Temple in Kita-Kamakura, a temple with a tradition of more than 760 years, inviting experts on Zen and mindfulness from around the world. There was even a professor from the U.S. who attended this Zen 2.0 conference as a speaker and was so impacted by Kamakura that he decided to move to Kamakura in the future.
Through the planning of this conference, I have interacted with monks, meditation practitioners, mindful facilitators, happiness researchers, bodyworkers, brain scientists, AI researchers, consciousness transformation researchers, business consultants, artists, and athletes from Japan, the US, Europe, and Asia. We were able to create a community of mindful volunteers who were united in creating the event together.
The members of this community are mainly from Kamakura City but also from as far away as Kyoto, etc. We call it the Zen2.0 community, and the key point is that we have very talented members in all fields as members of the community. D. student in Nishida’s philosophy, community leader, meditation practitioner, Buddhist researcher, and many others. I also feel that this mindful community will be a major driving force in making Kamakura a mindful city in the future.
While planning and organizing the annual Zen2.0 event, the community also holds regular meditation sessions and overnight camps to practice dialogue and take care of each other’s hearts and minds and is growing into a community with real sangha-like meaning.
Speakers and volunteers at Zen2.0, an international conference on Zen and mindfulness, held in September 2018.
4.Compact city, openness, and diversity of people.
Even though Kamakura is a compact city, the diversity of its people is unbelievable.
In big cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, there are many different kinds of people, so if you move consciously, you will be able to create many networks. I don’t think there is any other city like Kamakura where a wide variety of people gather and create a loose network within the area that can be traveled by bicycle starting from the station.
There are restaurants around the station where people who work in Kamakura go to eat during their lunch break, and since most of the main members of the group know each other, they often bump into each other at the “town cafeteria,” in front of the bank, at a cafe, or on the way to the station. We start chatting, and then we say, “Let’s hold an event together next time! or “Let’s collaborate”.
The titles of the people who gather around me are as follows. Just looking around. There are so many people.
A hippie consultant, a Buddhist priest, a city hall employee, a hardware startup, a power stone seller, an app developer, a snack bar mom, a web development company owner, a monk, an Ayurvedic food researcher, a meditation practitioner, a domestic university professor, an American university professor, a shakuhachi musician, a Christian Sisters, Video Directors, City Council Members, Share House Owners, Akashic Leaders, Photographers, Organizational Development Practitioners, Magazine Editors, Strategy Consultants, Restaurant Owners, Business Coaches, Investors, Human Resource Specialists, Novelists, Graphic Designers, Simultaneous Interpreters, Coworking Space Operators Architects, artists, spiritual healers, musicians, chiropractors, Shintoists, and occasionally visitors from other parts of Japan and abroad gather to make new friends.
Most of them are business owners or freelancers, running their own small businesses. The organic connection of people who can make their own decisions and spend their own time and money is very effective when trying to launch a new event or new business at high speed.
From Stanford University, staying for a week to learn about “Mindful City Kamakura
From March 22 to 29, 2019, with the support of ANA, Professor Stephen Murphy Shigematsu of Stanford University and seven students from Stanford’s Heartfulness Lab will spend a week in Kamakura to learn about the Zen culture of Japan. Seven students from Stanford University’s Heartfulness Lab and Professor Stephen Murphy Shigematsu, who practices mindfulness-based education at Stanford University in the U.S., spent a week in Kamakura to experience the Zen culture of Kamakura.
It all started when Professor Stephen Murphy Shigematsu took the stage at the Zen 2.0 conference two years ago and became interested in the Zen culture of Kamakura. With the support of ANA, Zen2.0, a general incorporated association of which I am co-chairman, decided to support the program.
The students had an authentic tea ceremony experience and zazen experience in Kamakura, and also had a dialogue with the mayor of Kamakura to learn about the mindful government of Kamakura. They also had a mindful brainstorming session to create a mindful city together and came up with a number of ideas. They presented their own ideas on how to create a mindful city Kamakura and “travel x learning” through dialogues between ANA employees and Kamakura citizens.
In this workshop, we were able to experience that if we do enough mindful work before brainstorming and create a safe and secure place, we can come up with high quality ideas that transcend language and culture.
I feel that the students of Stanford University learned a lot from this workshop, but I also feel that the organizers who provided various learning opportunities for the Stanford group also learned a lot.
5.Kamakon, a community for Kamakura citizens to get together and improve the city
I have personally been a member of Kamakon, a non-profit organization of Kamakura citizens, for about five years now. Kamakon was initially established as a network of IT entrepreneurs, but now it is a group of people with a wide variety of occupations and titles. At the regular monthly meetings, about four presentations are made, and the participants brainstorm and come up with ideas. Depending on the project, funds are raised through crowdfunding to fund the activities, a company is formed, or the project grows into an international event like Zen2.0.
When Kamakon started, basically only companies were allowed to participate, but I wanted to participate as a citizen, so I became the first member who was allowed to participate as a citizen.
In Kamakon, I became a member of the management team of the Kamakura-specific crowdfunding program, and also became a member of the team that spread Kamakon-like activities throughout Japan, visiting various regions in Japan to help with brainstorming sessions and to create human networks with those regions. We have been working to create a human network with these regions. Currently, I am participating as a facilitator specializing in brainstorming, and my goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible in each brainstorming session. Zen2.0, which I mentioned earlier, is a project that was created through a presentation at Kamakon.
6. Concentration of Mindful Business Companies
At present, there is a concentration of “mindful business” companies in the Kamakura area, which are businesses that include mindful elements that encourage people to become aware of their minds and update their minds. The companies listed here are just a few, but these mindful businesses range from human consciousness transformation to organizational development, coworking spaces, akashic leaders, IT companies, yoga, school children, manufacturing, guesthouses, and more.
Company / Organization
◯TransTech / Mindfulness
◯Spiritual
◯Hardware
◯IT / Web Services / Marketing
◯Education
◯Hotel/Guest House/Restaurant
These are just a few of the companies that I have introduced, and since last year many more mindful businesses are gathering in Kamakura.
Products → Finance/IT → Mind : The “Mindful Economy” in Kamakura, the World’s Future Industry
In summary, there are four main reasons why we moved our company from Shibuya to Kamakura.
1. Better infrastructure for startups
2. Abundant nature that embraces the mind
3. Various religious facilities and a mindful community of compassion
4.Human resources with diverse talents and companies related to mindful tech.
All of these points were not necessarily in place when I started my business nine years ago, but since then, there has been a major transformation in the manufacturing industry that we have been involved in. I would like to introduce some of them below.
Another major reason why we moved our office from Shibuya to Kamakura is because we feel that the stream of Japanese industry is gradually changing from “mono” (manufacturing) to “finance and IT” (finance and IT), and beyond that, “Kokoro” (transformation of the human mind) and change is inevitable. Can such a thing as “Kokoro” (transformation of the human mind) become an industry? In fact, many people have said something to that effect, and I have just heard a rumor from the VC community in Japan that “mindfulness” stocks are not a good investment target.
However, we feel that it will become a very big industry in the future. We moved our headquarters to Kamakura because we felt that Kamakura would be the center of this industry.
Initially, enmono’s target industry was manufacturing companies, mainly small and medium-sized manufacturers. Not only traditional small and medium-sized companies, but also so-called “Makers” companies. We were able to create some success stories out of them. After that, we started a crowdfunding business to raise funds, and were able to create some IT business cases.
Then, about two years ago, we started focusing on the minds of innovators and realized that their businesses would grow without our support if they could prepare their minds and realize what they really wanted to do. This is the culmination of our efforts. The culmination of these efforts is zenschool, a course for fostering innovators, which is our main business.
However, some of you may be wondering, “Is there really that much business opportunity in the mind? You may be wondering, “Is there really a business opportunity in the mind? In fact, many VCs are skeptical about mindful brands. In fact, many VCs are skeptical about mindfulness stocks, as there are few Japanese tech companies that have generated significant revenue from mindfulness-related business. But where there is little profit, there is a blue ocean.
According to a February 7, 2019 article in Venture Beat, Calm, a developer of mindfulness apps, has raised 9.6 billion yen in funding. This may come as a surprise to you.
This may come as a surprise to some, but the company has been steadily generating revenue over the years, developing various variations of mindfulness apps, and the VC’s estimate of the corporate variation is over 100 billion yen. It is the first mindfulness-related company to become a unicorn.
Is this example of corporate growth just another case of good fortune?
No. We feel that there will be many more companies that will follow this example. In fact, there are many companies in the U.S. that are aiming to follow this example and upgrade people’s minds. What do you call such companies in the US? In the U.S., they call it “Transtech”. Last November, a conference for the trans-tech industry called the “Transtech Technology Conference” was held in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley in the U.S. It was a small conference with only 1,000 attendees. It is still a small conference with about 1,000 attendees, but one of my colleagues from Kamakura attended the conference and was able to give me detailed information about the conference.
An IT journalist I know, Mr. Yukawa, attended this conference and wrote a very clear article about it, saying that the future market for this category is expected to be a whopping 330 trillion yen.
For more information about the conference, please click here. For more information about TransTech’s technology, please refer to this video.
A market of 330 trillion yen? In fact, in 2015, three years before this figure was announced at the Palo Alto conference last November, we estimated the size of this market in 2025, 10 years from now, to be 310 trillion yen. When we estimated this figure and released it publicly, most of the responses were “I don’t believe it” and “It’s just a dumb idea. Oddly enough, however, the scale of the global market for trans-tech, as estimated in the U.S., is also in the hundreds of trillions of yen, which in itself is an indication of the potential of this market.
We call this category of market. We named this category of market “Mindful Business”. For more information on the specific definition and content of mindful business, please refer to this page.
Kamakura to become the center of mindful business
We believe that Kamakura will become the epicenter of what we define as “Mindful Business” in Japan. For a more detailed definition of mindful business, please read here, but if I had to define it, I would say that it is a business that helps people to improve their mental abilities.
In the past, religions have played a major role in providing people with mental stability and awareness. However, I believe that the number of people who want to gain peace of mind and awareness through private commercial activities as well as religious activities will increase in the future.
This is because there are more and more activities that include elements of mental stability. For example, yoga, meditation, dialogue courses, jogging, trail running, tai chi, breathing exercises, sailing, and other sports and activities that involve the body and mind have increased dramatically since the days when only religion was available.
Technology can only be leveraged when there is wisdom backed by tradition.
In Kamakura, there are many traditional religious facilities such as shrines, temples, and Christian churches, and IT start-ups such as Kayak are increasing little by little, but the Internet and other technologies have only been created in the last 50 years at most, counting the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.
On the other hand, if we look at the religions in Kamakura, Shintoism in Kamakura has a history of over 1000 years, and Buddhism has a history of nearly 800 years. In the field of “transformation of human consciousness,” each religion has gone through trial and error in many clinical trials over such a long period of time, and has developed its own methods of practice within each system. These practices were then systematized and perfected.
While inheriting the wisdom created over such a long period of time, we are now in the process of trying to generalize these techniques for consciousness transformation with the help of technology such as the Internet and AI.
This city is transforming itself into a “mindful city” based on the traditional religion of the past. We relocated our headquarters from Shibuya to Kamakura in order to create a new industry by gathering and supporting people who are starting mindful businesses in Kamakura.
For more information on mindful business, please refer to this page. The point is that the more advanced a country becomes, the less labor-intensive jobs will become due to the spread and development of AI and robots, and the next will be the knowledge industry, such as accountants, tax accountants, patent attorneys, and lawyers.
As a result, the focus will be on the unique mental characteristics of the individual. We are now in an age where the focus is on what kind of person we are, what kind of dreams we have, and what we want to accomplish. Who am I? and “What do I really want to do? This will be the source of creativity. This is the part of intrinsic motivation that I have mentioned several times before.
In addition to this, the core concept of mindful business is the work of helping people to update the potential of their minds, such as compassion, concentration, resilience, and EQ.
In the past, religions helped people to update their minds, but in the future, it will not only be religions that will rewrite the operating system of the human mind, but also various education programs for working people, workshops, and sometimes even the use of AI and robots.
There are already businesses in almost every industry that have elements that support the updating of the human mind, which I have summarized as “mindful business. The percentage of these businesses that promote the updating of the human mind is expected to increase from a few percent to several dozen percent in the future.
Working at a café in Zaimokuza, Kamakura (closed as of 2021) while watching the sun set over the ocean.
This kind of working environment that opens up the “senses” is also an important infrastructure for creating new ideas.
In 2015, when I was inspired by the ideas of “mindful business” and “mindful economy” that I wrote about in this blog, it was only a hypothesis. However, as I mentioned earlier, a very similar concept was presented at a conference in Silicon Valley in the U.S., with a market size of 330 trillion yen, and the idea of “trans-tech” is beginning to be defined in much the same way as our definition of “mindful business”.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the famous fictional fable of the Hundredth monkey effect, but like this fictional fable, it seems very strange that Silicon Valley in the U.S. and Kamakura across the Pacific Ocean in Japan had almost the same inspiration and almost the same project, the “Transtech Technology Confrence” and the “Zen2.0” conference. It seems very strange to me that we were holding a conference called “Zen2.0” in Kamakura. In fact, in February, right after our company moved to Kamakura, I visited a non-profit organization in Silicon Valley that hosts Transtech and had a dialogue with them about the business possibilities of human consciousness.
Silicon Valley’s way of thinking was much more technology-oriented, while our way of thinking in Kamakura was based on the wisdom of humanity cultivated through traditional religions such as Shintoism, Buddhism, and Christianity, and leveraging it with technology to widely spread the update of human consciousness. Despite the differences in thinking, we came to the conclusion that this market related to the evolution of human consciousness would grow more rapidly than we had imagined, and that it would be almost the same.
I hope to update Kamakura as a true “mindful city” with tradition, technology, and abundant nature, with the potential to make a great leap forward in the next decade, together with my friends from Zen2.0 and Kamakon.
By that time, I would like to work to create a calm and vibrant city where all generations can help each other and live vibrantly, where we can combine a compassionate and mindful community, and where creators and entrepreneurs interested in Zen and mindful business can come from all over the world.
April 9, 2019
Kouij Miki
December 2019 note: A content-related article on Zen 2.0 was introduced as an academic paper.
Something related to the content written in this blog was turned into an academic paper titled “Context Transformation in Kamakura City through Zen: Capturing the Kamakura Religious Conference and Zen2.0” by Professor Kaori Nakano of Komazawa University’s School of Business Administration in August 2019. This paper was published in a book titled “Regional Marketing Context Transformation” published by the Association for Regional Design.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my blog. For more information on mindful business and the innovative methods that create it, please refer to my book, “True Innovation: How Zen Dialogue Changed the Minds of Employees". If you are interested in this book, please feel free to pick it up.
We would like to publish “True Innovation” in English and other languages. If you are a publisher and would like to help us, please contact us.
