How did my '36 years of sustainability' begin?

*It has been 36 years, so I have updated the title from 35 to 36 years.

It probably happened on April 24th (or 26th), 1990, around 2:00 PM, while I was waiting for a train at the back of the outbound platform at Yoyogi-Uehara Station on the Odakyu Line.

In April, when I became a fourth-year university student

It was the time when I had become a fourth-year university student and had to start thinking about job hunting and my graduation thesis.

Regarding job hunting, I only had a vague idea that I wanted to do work related to 'marketing.' As for my graduation thesis, I had absolutely nothing.

At that moment, a peer from my club was going to visit an alumnus at a think tank I was somewhat interested in, so I tagged along on the way back.

Since our club practice was on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I remember the visit was on either a Tuesday or Thursday—days we didn't have practice—the week before Golden Week. Looking at the calendar for that year, I figure it must have been the 24th if it was a Tuesday, or the 26th if it was a Thursday.

The date doesn't really matter, but after finishing what was effectively my first job-hunting company visit, I started thinking again about what this 'marketing' I was interested in actually was.

Q: What is marketing?

I hadn't studied the field in any great depth. I vaguely thought, 'I guess it means creating products that sell?'

And then, for some reason, I found myself thinking, 'But what happens if you create a product you think will sell, but it doesn't?' Looking back, that was a turning point in my life.

In a word association game, 'It doesn't sell, but since you've already made it, you can't just pretend it doesn't exist, right?' In other words, 'It just piles up as inventory.'

'So, what happens to that piled-up inventory?'

You can't just leave it stacked up forever, so 'you throw it away, right?'

I reached the conclusion that a new product developed through hard research and thought, 'if it doesn't sell, it gets thrown away.'

I thought I was looking at things in a negative way, so I reset by assuming the new product developed through hard research and thought 'did sell.'

'That's good.' The effort was rewarded. This must be a rewarding job.

But... 'what happens after it sells?'

Hmm. Eventually... 'the time will come when it's no longer needed, right?'... which means, 'it gets thrown away after all, right?'

A1: Making trash...????

Huh? Whether it sells or not, it 'gets thrown away'?

So, in short, is marketing just a 'job that creates trash'?

At that moment, the story of the 'vomitorium' suddenly crossed my mind. I remember hearing this in an intensive lecture during the winter of my junior year of college: it was said that in the mansions of European gourmet aristocrats of the past, there were 'vomitoriums' where aristocrats who wanted to keep eating delicious food would go to throw up what they had eaten.

Regardless of the truth of this story, I intuitively felt at that time that the world today is just like this 'vomitorium'.

A2: A problem of the social system!

Moreover, it is not just a hobby or pastime for a limited few aristocrats, but the very mechanism of modern society itself.

It is not a matter of each individual or each company, but a problem of the social system in which individuals and companies are caught up.

Doesn't that mean that 'trash will continue to be produced' and 'trash will never disappear'?

Oh dear, I thought I was planning my future, but I've ended up somewhere quite different, but it was too late by then.

To borrow a term that later became a buzzword, it was the feeling of being the only one to notice an 'inconvenient truth'.

Actually, I was a frog in a well; the Tokyo Metropolitan Government had started a waste reduction campaign the previous year, in 1989, and it had already become a social issue.

Anyway, since I was waiting for a train transfer, it must have been at most 5 or 10 minutes. I still vividly remember the scene on the platform, with the soft afternoon sunlight streaming in, along with the feeling of 'I might have realized something dangerous'.

Final Answer: I decided that this is my life's work!

For that reason, I think it was sometime in May, after Golden Week, that I decided to make solving the 'waste problem' my life's work and to make it the theme of my graduation thesis.

At that time, the internet was in its infancy, and I didn't even know it existed. Even if I wanted to research, I had no choice but to search for literature in the university library and the National Diet Library, and then read the actual materials.

Then I found out that, although I was a sociology student, there was almost no prior literature on the 'waste problem' in the field of sociology. Even if I expanded the scope to law, economics, etc., there was really very little in the realm of social science.

In the midst of that, while going through the few related documents, I encountered the word 'sustainable' around the summer.

Nowadays, 'sustainable' is the standard translation, but at that time, there was still debate about whether it should be translated as 'maintainable' or 'perpetuable,' and to be honest, I didn't really understand its meaning at the time.

Anyway, I read all the literature I could get my hands on, and I was able to submit my graduation thesis the following year, just after the New Year. The cover of that thesis is the photo in this article.

On the other hand, as for 'making the waste problem my life's work,' since I had originally gone into the humanities because I was bad at physics, chemistry, and mathematics, technical solutions from the field of science and engineering were impossible.

To get involved from the perspective of the administration, you have to pass the civil service exam first, but it was already too late to think of that in the spring of my senior year of college.

So, thinking that the think tank industry would allow me to be involved in this theme broadly, extensively, and for a long time, I appealed during my interview by saying, "I want to solve the waste problem," and by referencing Kenichi Ohmae's already best-selling book "The Mind of the Strategist," I claimed I wanted to be a "social strategist" or something similar, and managed to secure a job offer.

From the perspective of the hiring side, I must have been quite an oddball, but I was picked up as a "novelty" item, likely because the bubble economy era allowed for a bit of leeway, thinking, "It looks interesting, let's hire him."

In 1991, there was a major revision of the Waste Management and Public Cleansing Act; in 1992, the Earth Summit; in 1993, the revision of the Basic Environment Act; and in 1995, the Containers and Packaging Recycling Act. In the first half of the 90s, many university departments and academic societies with "environment" in their names were born, and an environmental boom arrived where many "environmental books" were published in the blink of an eye.

Thinking about it now, I was just a little early to notice.

It was only after I had aged quite a bit that I understood that the background, or rather the driving force, of this "flow" included the discussions surrounding "sustainability" in the mid-1980s, the rise of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, the birth of the term "biodiversity," and the 1987 Brundtland Commission report that defined the concept of "sustainable development."

However, the fact that 1990 was my encounter with "sustainable" remains unchanged.

Since then, 30 years of sustainable history.

After working as a researcher at a think tank for a little under 12 years, I thought about a company name when I went independent in 2002. I worried about it quite a bit, but the final candidates were "Smart Design" and "Sustainable Design."

Ultimately, I thought the word that would remain throughout the 21st century would be "sustainable," so I decided on "Sustainable Design," but it was not understood at all and did not get through to anyone.

Currently, there are about 10,300 pieces of business card data (approx. 10,300 people) in my database, and of these, 10,000 people are either unresponsive or ignore the word "sustainable."

By the way, I intended for "design" to mean "planning" rather than "artistic design," but most people still asked, "Is this a design firm?"

In the late 2000s, "Smart [something]" started to become popular, such as smartphones and smart cities. At that time, I regretted a little that I should have gone with "Smart Design."

After that, the 2030 Agenda including the SDGs was adopted in 2015, public interest in the SDGs began to rise around 2017, and from around 2019, requests for lectures and seminars, as well as inquiries and consultations regarding the SDGs, began to increase.

Speaking of 2019, that was 17 years after the company was founded.

In May of this year, there was news in North America about the mass emergence of the "17-year cicada," which has the longest cycle among "prime-numbered cicadas." The larvae that were born in 2004 emerged from the ground 17 years later to become adults.

Thinking that my company is also a "17-year cicada," I don't want to end up short-lived like a cicada.

Currently, I introduce myself to first-time acquaintances by saying, "The 'S' in SDGs is the 'sustainable' in my company's name; the SDGs are from 2015, but my company has been around since 2002," and it has started to get through. Even so, counting from 1987, 15 years had already passed.

Things I have been involved in

If I were to list the themes of the work I have been involved in related to the environment, both in my previous and current jobs, it would look like this (mainly commissioned work, but also including non-profit activities).

Since I traveled frequently for work, I have stepped on the soil of all 47 prefectures at least once, and there are only two prefectural capitals I have yet to visit (Maebashi and Matsue).

Projects based overseas look something like this. They are mostly places where few people go.

In the 2010s, I focused mainly on management support for small and medium-sized enterprises, which looked like this.

As a result, I entered the 2020s equipped with expertise in both "Eco-Firsts": Ecology-First and Economy-First.

The 2020s are for Sustainable Corporate Design.

In this way, a sudden idea on the first day of my job search has led to where I am today, more than 30 years later.

I didn't specifically envision things turning out this way today, nor did I design my career for this purpose, but I believe that deciding "this is my life's work" has influenced me in both direct and indirect ways.

Finally, we have reached a world where news like this is being published.

From here on, I will simply push forward with the mission embedded in my company's name.

That is, Sustainable Corporate Design.

And the vision is,

to create a world where this is the norm.

The action is human resource development to produce a large number of CSOs.

I would like to connect with everyone who is interested in becoming a CSO themselves or in training CSOs, and work toward realizing this vision.

On the final day of GGW2021, I have looked back on the past and put my future path into words.