Kirsty KawanoRead Kimiko Hirata’s assessment of Japan’s energy system in this companion article: Climate campaigner Kimiko Hirata on how to change Japan’s energy system.
Despite the success of Kimiko Hirata’s efforts as part of the climate action NGO Kiko Network that helped halt the construction of 17 planned coal-fired power plants and won her the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, she is the first to say that she is still learning how to create social change. She will admit, though, that during about nine years of grassroots campaigning and an extra 20 or so working on climate policy, she has learned a thing or two. She shares some of those with us here.
How Hirata’s climate journey began
When the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Hirata was a university student, floating along with the rest of Japan on the tail end of its bubble economy. What she learned from the summit clashed with the tone of her comfortable life and it struck a chord.
“I learned that that normal everyday life was doing something bad. I had thought I would be able to continue to live a peaceful life, but the information was different,” Hirata says. She was shocked to discover that humans’ daily actions were wrecking the planet.
She went on to work at a publishing company, but knew she wanted to work on climate change so searched for a way to make it happen. She decided that joining a nongovernmental organization was the best way to tackle the problem head on. Since NGOs in Japan were not very active in climate change at the time, she quit her job, went to the U.S. and started as an intern at the Climate Institute in 1996.
“I have always thought that the actions of NGOs are extremely important in solving this problem, so even now, I’m still with one,” says Hirata.
She returned to Japan and joined Kiko Network in 1998. She is now a director there, and a representative at Climate Action Network Japan. She has written books on climate change and is a part-time lecturer at a Japanese university. As well as learning about NGOs, while in the U.S. she also studied English. She suspects her work caught the eye of the Goldman Prize because she publicized her climate efforts in English, as well as Japanese.
Changing tactics to meet new challenges
For more than 10 years, Hirata’s work focused on crafting and evaluating policy proposals, and on influencing international rules, laws and systems. After a tsunami caused a meltdown at a Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, Japan halted its nuclear reactors to run safety checks. To make up for the fall in energy production, 50 new coal-fired power plants were planned. The sudden scheme to accelerate the use of the world’s dirtiest fuel spurred a change in Hirata, too. She became a grassroots campaigner.
As Hirata describes in our article about her insights into Japan’s energy policy, local action can only be achieved by locals. Her role as part of the NGO was to inform the community and give locals the knowledge they needed to decide whether the proposed power plants were good for their community or not.
“First we went to the community to sow seeds (of information). We did it over and over again,” she says. It took two or three years of talking with local people, but slowly those people talked to other people. More people got involved and word spread to the local media, and then to local politicians.
“At some point the local community started taking action themselves. It became active like that and the community was able to stop the plan,” Hirata explains. “So speaking from experience, even for things that you think the other side is just too big and it’s hopeless, if local people, in particular, take action on something that is really necessary and raise their voices and make that visible, change will occur.”
“Based on that experience, if you don’t have a voice, you can’t stop anything. If you do have a voice, you may be able to spur change.”
In Hirata’s experience, the concerted effort of about a dozen active locals is what made the difference. That many may have been enough in Japan because the culture is one that is still unaccustomed to public inquiry and criticism, even of political actions. It is also a country that is content to keep its people uninformed. Even now it happens that people living near a plant that is being built don’t know anything about it, Hirata says. Information and understanding are important bases for action, so sharing them with others can be powerful.
Applying all of one’s skills
Focusing on grassroots campaigning did not mean that Hirata left behind her previous experience. She, and other campaigners, tried everything they could.
“We really closely watched each case and spent a lot of long time considering how we could stop each one,” she says. “But it’s not just grassroots action, now decarbonization is a global movement, so we used various overseas reports to say ‘this will become a stranded asset,’ or ‘it’s bad for asthma.’ We also researched various approaches that we could use to talk about with local people.”
One of those approaches was air pollution. Hirata says that, in Japan, it is not seen as much of an issue these days. “Also, Japanese coal-fired plants are cleaner than those in other countries, due to filters and good quality control. So, I wasn’t sure that air pollution would strike a chord, but since CO2 wasn’t moving people, I decided to try it.”
She ran a simulation of a Harvard University model on Tokyo and Osaka and took it with her when she spoke with people in local communities. It sparked reaction: “asthma is already bad in this region,” “you mean this plant would release PM2.5?” What approach strikes a chord really varies according to the person, Hirata notes. It comes down to trial and error.
Gathering hints to climate solutions from the rest of the world
Hirata says she thinks a lot about how to apply in Japan, methods that are being used overseas. Since Japan is slow to take action on climate change, the rest of the world provides precedents of what can be done, and research to support it. She keeps her eye out for effective approaches that can be applied here.
One that she has had success with is the shareholder proposal approach that she first applied to the Mizuho Financial Group last year. Although only a third of shareholders voted for the proposal to align the company’s business with the Paris Agreement guidelines, it created a ripple effect in corporate Japan.
Although such proposals are quite common overseas, Hirata says she wasn’t sure how it would go in Japan. “I thought about it for a while, and even though many people were negative about it, since it had worked overseas and had had a big impact we decided to give it a try.”
Hirata drew on her network of contacts to first discuss the method with someone overseas who is very good at using it. She explains modestly, “What we have done—all we have done—is learned from what other people have done overseas and applied that here in Japan. Each time we wonder whether it will work and think about it and try it as we do it. But I feel that, generally, things that have an effect globally have some effect when tried in Japan.”
The particular challenges of campaigning in Japan
The work that Hirata does is not easy to do in Japan. NGOs and the need for them are not understood.
“Worldwide, NGOs are seen as organizations that work to solve social issues. They work on behalf of others to realize the kind of society they want to create, and people support them in that. But that basis of understanding does not exist here,” Hirata says. “Working on climate change in that environment is hard. But I see changing that as also being part of my job.”
In asking us to take up climate actions, Hirata asks us to expand our area of influence from the individual level to that of social interaction. It is also a rule of thumb for creating social change, and a reminder that you are not alone in your goals.
“For things that you can’t do alone, finding others to do it with will open a new way ahead,” Hirata says. “In order to take the next step on an issue you are concerned about, consider ‘what can I do, where can I do it, is there anyone already doing anything about this.’”
For climate change, Hirata says that if you look for people to work with, you will find them in all sorts of places, thinking about and working on this issue. This is likely also true about many issues. Hirata advises finding an approach that suits your style and working on that together with others. Things that we are unable to do alone can be achieved together.
Read Kimiko Hirata’s assessment of Japan’s energy system in this companion article: Climate campaigner Kimiko Hirata on how to change Japan’s energy system.
[Website] Kiko Network
