What Changed Was the Way Town Hall Staff Lived: The Evolution I Saw at the Ogal Festival

The Executive Committee Chair After Three Years, and a Month of Terror

Young staff members told me they wanted to hold the Ogal Festival in July instead of the usual August. The reason was to avoid the extreme heat.
Then, they asked me to serve as the executive committee chair for the first time in three years.

It was only a matter of moving the event up by one month. Even so, people get anxious. Will it be okay during the rainy season? Will customers come? Can we recreate the same scene as last year, but a month earlier?

Moving the schedule is nothing less than removing the most reliable backrest that everyone had been leaning on until then: the "just like last year" approach. People look at their feet so much when just one backrest disappears.

There is only one way to eliminate anxiety

I only know one way to remove this anxiety. Simply put, it is to create sales in advance.

As I have written before, in volleyball, there are two ways to score: side-outs and breaks. A side-out is the one point you get by receiving the opponent's serve, defending, and winning it back. A break is the point you go for in succession from your own serve without giving up the momentum. It is always the latter that moves the game. As long as you are just defending and winning points back, the score remains even, and only your heart gets worn down. You can never win unless you break at some point.

The exact same thing can be said about anxiety.

Worrying about the weather, worrying about attendance, and being afraid of comparisons to last year is exactly like standing there waiting for a serve.

So, I stopped waiting. I bowed my head to many media outlets, including FM Iwate, Cassiopeia FM, and the Iwate Nippo, and as the executive committee chair, I went on the air myself and provided hospitality at the venue myself.

I reached out to friends in Okinawa and had them come to Iwate to open stalls. I went around asking for requests from everyone, including those who had been participating for thirteen years and those who were joining for the first time this year, fixed what could be fixed, and welcomed the thirteenth morning.

This is not a process of praying for whether people will come. It is a process of building up the reasons for them to come, one by one, from our side. That is what a break is.

The design called 'stay duration' changed by the coolness

More than thirty volunteers gathered from all over the country. Most of them were people who had participated in the Zakioka School. Thank you so much.

And holding it in July brought about an unexpected design change. Because it was cooler than in August, the customers' stay duration became longer. Since it was shortly after the summer solstice, there was still a faint light in the sky until around 19:30. In the field of community development, we often use the term "stay duration."

The longer people stay in a place, the more consumption, encounters, and reasons to come back increase.

The fact that the sky stays bright for an extra hour is equivalent to the performance time on the stage of the venue being extended by one hour. The number of people who said, "It's dark now, so let's go home," visibly decreased.

And above all, the number of children was incredible. As a result, even though it was a beer festival, we ran out of beer. As a festival, this is the happiest cry imaginable.

Who was it that shouted, "We're going to sell out the beer!"