Ogawa town begins revitalization project leveraging on the SDGs

A small town outside of Tokyo has started a community-based project to revitalize the town by harnessing its natural and cultural resources. It aims to reverse population drain by pursuing sustainable development goals to make it a town that draws people to it.

Ogawa Town, in Saitama Prefecture, is starting from a solid base. Only about a one-hour train ride from Tokyo, the town features a rich natural environment, historical buildings, boutique sake distilleries, an organic farming industry and a traditional papermaking technique that has been recognized by UNESCO as an intangible cultural asset. It is attracting attention as a town that may be able to achieve the SDGs.

The Ogawa 6S Commitment

The town launched its ‘SDGs town x people project’ in June 2020. It focuses on six key goals, which it refers to as the ‘Ogawa 6S Commitment.’

• Slow: To treasure the town’s slow pace of life amid a rich natural environment away from the big city.
• Story: To value the ‘story’ told by the town’s history and culture.
• Social: To create a town where people from diverse walks of life interact and support each other on a daily basis and use those connections to solve shared issues.
• Sustainable: To become an independent, circulatory and symbiotic society through a style of living that is in line with nature.
• Safety: To create a town and people capable of overcoming difficult times.
• Small: To co-create regional revitalization through town-building that values quality over quantity.

The project aims to have its residents take the leading role in town revitalization and will create a community-based platform to achieve that. It will work with individuals, associations, companies and public administration both inside and outside the town to achieve SDGs by working to fully draw out the unique characteristics of Ogawa Town. It will fund its activities via a regional revitalization subsidy from the national government.

Ogawa is facing a population drain too

Like many other towns across Japan, the population of Ogawa Town has been shrinking, particularly due to a lack of people in their twenties and early thirties. This year, the town set a strategy of keeping the town alive by making it desirable to live in. It is also incorporating the SDGs to create sustainable town revitalization and keep it on the map forever.

The project is creating the ‘Ogawa 6S platform,’ to which it will invite speakers with experience in regional revitalization to share their wisdom with Ogawa Town supporters in regular workshops. Here, residents can think together, learn together and share information. Supporters will form various operational groups that will come together as an executive committee to carry out revitalization measures.

It kicked the project off with an online forum on June 28 that featured a panel discussion by experts and a speech by a regional revitalization consultant.

A test case for the country

Ogawa Town is already seeing how some people grow attached and visit it regularly, with some even making it their new home. Its revitalization plans aim to capitalize on that “relationship population” trend. However, it will not be easy to attract the job-focused younger generations. Resource-rich Ogawa Town is, however, set for success. It is an important test case that the whole of Japan needs to watch.