Unlocking the 'Intellectual Resources' of 60,000 People: Edogawa Ward's Survival Strategy

Edogawa Ward, particularly the southern area including Funabori and Kasai, has long been content with its status as a 'bedroom community' for the city center. Its highly convenient railway network has normalized the 'straw effect,' where people, goods, and knowledge are drained toward the city center, transforming this area into an industrial vacuum. However, a look at the national census reveals a surprising 'buried resource.' Approximately 60,000 IT engineers and professionals who support the core of Japan reside in this town.

The survival strategy from here on lies in connecting the 'professional skills' of this active generation to solving the challenges faced by the approximately 45,000 elderly households living alone in the region. The goal is to build a 'digital guild' and 'intellectual commons' where active engineers use their skills to enable seniors to participate in society while maintaining their intellectual dignity. By converting underutilized assets into workspaces, the active generation can design and operate an intellectual platform. What takes place there is not nursing care, but discussions on politics and philosophy—in other words, an 'updating of knowledge.'

In this model, the existing 'long-term care insurance system' reveals its limitations. While the system is adept at 'care that brings a negative to zero' by compensating for deficits, it lacks the concept of drawing out the 'plus' of individual potential. In Funabori and Kasai, there are 'mature adults' who once led real society, now lying dormant. What they need is not one-sided nursing care, but the opportunity to reboot their own professional skills and wisdom as equal peer members in a high-level intellectual exchange space built by the active generation.

It is neither the government nor for-profit companies that can take on this 'solving of regional issues through professional skills.' The government, bound by fairness and precedent, cannot conduct 'sharp experiments' aimed at specific intellectually interested groups, and for-profit companies, which must maximize profits, do not see community building outside of existing systems as an investment target.
Here, the existence of the third sector (NPOs and regional organizations) emerges. They do not privatize the skills of engineers but connect them as a regional shared asset (commons) to resolve senior loneliness. This entity is what will take on the governance of the 21st century, protecting human intellectual dignity.

60,000 skilled individuals rewriting the greatest risk of 'loneliness' into an opportunity for 'intellectual co-creation,' discussing the future together with mature seniors. Is the realization of this 'town where lifestyle and professional skills merge' not the survival strategy for which we should begin writing the first line right now?