Japan: celebrating 10 years of Transition

Words and pictures by Shunro Yoshida

It was the moment I’ve been waiting for since 2017 when I visited Santorso, Italy for the Transition Hubs Gathering.  At Santorso I felt so blessed to meet all those Transitioners from all over the world, all motivated by the same intentions and hopes – trying to make the world a better and more sustainable and kinder place for every living life on the earth.

For this Gathering in Japan, our main theme was gratitude and celebration.

I wanted us to celebrate the passing of these 10^th miracle years and to grow people’s goodwill and energy for doing Transition in Japan.

At this 10^th anniversary we shared the event with a partner organisation that started at the same time, and with the same founder – Hide Enomoto – called “Seven Generations” (associated with the Pachamama Alliance/Change the Dream Symposium). Many people are involved in both activities (Transition Town and Change the Dream).

Over 200 people came to our event in Fujino, for the weekend of September 8th and 9th. We had 150 participants on day one and 210 on day 2. We came together to celebrate ourselves, learn new things and vision together what we can do together to shape our future.

The first day was looking back 10 years over what we have done and where we were at that time, starting in 2008.  At the beginning, it was Hide Enomoto’s vision to get the movement Transition Town and Change the Dream Symposium started with just a few people, including myself.

We just celebrated from our hearts, congratulating each other and patting ourselves on the back for all the things we have done to make the difference.

The most special and challenging aspect of this two day event was having two similar groups (Transition and Changing the Dream) working together to make this event successful. And all the event resources were from participants and people wanting to contribute goodwill and donations!

This is our program:

1^st day

• What is Transition Town and Change the Dream Symposium?

• Opening: Where did we come from? How did we start our movement? Let’s celebrate our gathering together!
• Mapping – as an icebreaker
• Introducing messages from our friends – video messages from Rob Hopkins and from Lynne and Bill Twist
• Reflecting 10 years of our activity – drawing a spiral line and reflecting with slides of pictures and interviewing people at that time.

• Workshop: What brought us here? Finding our grass roots
• Workshop: Joanna Macy’s “Bodhisattva Check-In”

And then it was time for music and dancing!

Second day

• Opening: Introducing Key words
• What is Permaculture?
• Introducing Paul Hawken and his Drawdown project – how we can reverse global warming?

• Introducing our guest Maisa Arias from Pachamama Alliance, and Soran and Transition Korea

Then we divided into two groups, with Transition and Change the Dream Symposium in different rooms.

• Transition: Discussing our movement and issues we are facing
• Workshop: Movement medicine
• Back casting seven generations
• Transition timeline

Next, we used Open Space Technology for the following session, with the key question, “What next steps can we take for the future?”

After that, we shared our discussions from the Open Space. We had many teams discussing what we can do together for the next ten years – and we will take forward some of these activities as projects.

And then it was time to close… we appreciated ourselves and we announced our personal commitments.

Party! And adjourn!

We had blessings and congratulated each other with hugs and smiling faces.

It was enough for re-energizing ourselves to move on forward.