This is the front page of yesterday's morning newspaper.
According to the news, the price of rice plunged this year
and rice farmers are facing great difficulties.
Akita rice was sold at 8,400 yen,
2,800 yen cheaper than last year,
and rice farmers are crying out in pain.
What do you think when you hear about this news?
You may think: "Oh, that's too bad. It must be hard for the rice farmers."
However, once you've finished reading this newspaper
you will probably forget about this news.
These farmers who make our daily rice are struggling.
It can't be dismissed as irrelevant to us.
But why don't we care enough?
It's because we don't know these farmers in person.
If you have a farmer you know in person,
this news probably wouldn't seem as irrelevant anymore.
The relationship with others fosters empathy.
Here in Japan, consumers and producers are divided by a big distribution system.
The information that we consumers can get about the food we eat are
its price, looks, taste, calories, etc.
These are all information for consumers.
Of course, these are important in selecting food,
but something essential is missing.
It is the actual people who are working behind the scenes of our food.
How many producers do you know in person
among the food you eat every day?
Many of you may not know a single person.
Now that we have lost empathy,
Japan's primary industry is in a dire situation.
In 1970, just before I was born, there were 10.25 million rice farmers.
This has sharply declined to 2.6 million,
and 75% of them are 60 years or older.
There are only 170,000 young farmers who are 40 years or younger.
As for fishermen, there were 570,000 in 1970.
Now there are only 170,000. The majority are 60 years or older.
There are only 20,000 of those who are 40 years or younger.
In 10 years, in 20 years, who will be making our food?
Now you must probably be thinking:
"We must do something about our primary industry."
Still, right after you leave this venue,
that feeling will probably fade away.
What we crucially lack is empathy.
We need to think of this issue as directly linked to our lives.
In order to rebuild our primary industry,
we must get to know the people who work behind the scenes of our food,
connect with them, and enhance our empathy.
And so I came up with this,
"Tohoku Taberu Magazine," a monthly magazine that comes with food.
We feature producers in the Tohoku region every month,
and we enclose the food they produce and send them to the readers.
Usually in food delivery service,
we receive boxes packed with vegetables,
along with just a single piece of paper introducing the producer.
We do the opposite.
That piece of paper that shows the life of the producer,
that is our main service.
The food is just a supplement to the magazine.
One year has passed since we've started, and now we have 1400 readers.
First of all, by reading the pages, the readers get to know the producers,
and then they cook and eat the food.
That's not the end.
We connected the producers and the readers through Facebook group.
Then, they began to actively communicate.
The readers found out for the first time who was making the food they eat.
Many readers posted pictures with recipes
showing how they cooked the food with their son, for example,
and conveyed their gratitude,
"Thank you." "I was impressed." "I enjoyed it."
They thanked the producers everyday.
For the producers, until now,
their last task was to distribute the food.
But once they saw how happy the readers were everyday,
they became even more motivated to make something more delicious.
Moreover,
not only do we have online interactions over SNS,
but we are also hosting events inviting the producers to Tokyo,
or inviting readers to visit the farms,
to experience the actual process of delivering the food.
So we are hosting experience-oriented events as well,
and offering these series of events as a package every month.
With these experiences, the readers empathized more and more.
Recently, there was a good example where this empathy led to action.
In our issue last October,
we featured Mr. Kosei Kikuchi, a rice farmer in Akita prefecture.
By using a unique farming method of not plowing the rice fields,
he makes rice that is friendly to both nature and human.
But due to the prolonged rain this year,
the rice field became muddy in the harvesting season.
and the combine harvester didn't work in the mud.
Even with the help of his wife and two small children,
not even 1/10 of the usual crop could be harvested.
He used Facebook to post his painful situation
and sent out an SOS call to the reader's group of Taberu Magazine.
Then, nearly 200 people, including readers,
came all the way to Akita prefecture,
went into the rice fields by barefoot, and harvested together by hand.
This baseball field-sized rice field of about one hectare,
is to be reaped, all by human hand.
The readers and the producers are becoming like a family.
By knowing who is behind the scenes of our food,
they felt that this farmer's suffering was connected to themselves,
and pushed themselves ahead to visit the site.
Today, as human relationships grow weaker and weaker,
I see future in a community that connects those who eat and those who make.
Throughout this whole year, we have made this community.
The fishermen and farmers are up front.
The readers are at the back. Look at these smiles.
Not only the producers,
but the consumers are also becoming happier and happier.
The readers that helped the rice farmer in Akita
came back to the cities looking refreshed.
By learning about the food that support our lives,
where the food was made, and how the producers made them,
readers say their lives become richer.
Through my work on Taberu Magazine, I have connected consumers and producers.
I have also realized something.
In this world, where consumers and producers are divided,
it was not only the producers who were lost.
Consumers were not happy, and their lives did not feel rich.
By removing this barrier between these two,
and by interacting with each other,
they can exchange their spirits and their energy.
That is what I learned from them.
Now, we are living in a fully developed consumer society.
With this single smartphone, you can huddle in your room,
buy anything you want, and lead your life.
However, there are no ups and downs nor hardship of life.
The nature that grows food,
or the producers who devote their time and effort,
they are lost out of our sight.
In this complete consumer society,
with prediction, control, order, and justice,
we may have lost the joy of life, or what it feels like to live,
without realizing we had lost them.
I wanted to overturn that small, narrow-minded world.
I wanted to open a crack in this consumer society.
I realized how to do it by Taberu Magazine.
I'd like to share this method with you today.
You don't have to migrate to rural areas and become a producer.
You can still do it while living in the city.
That is to move away from the poor, replaceable relation
between money and food,
and return to the rich, irreplaceable relation
between consumers and producers.
The act of eating can be revived as a circuit,
allowing you to connect with others,
or to the vast, unknown world.
Through the circuit, although it may be very small,
I'd like to make a creative space in this consumer society.
From this space, we are going to regain
the power to live, the joy of life, the feeling of life, and imagination.
We humans are now locked inside a small world.
We must unleash our intrinsic potential and spirit to the future.
What lies ahead of that is, I believe,
a new frontier where we feel joy of life.
In Japan, where we live now,
our lives are not feeling joy, but feeling uncomfortable.
Why are we in this situation?
This is what I think.
It is because our mind and body have lost balance.
We all may have become big-headed.
This consumer society was created from our minds.
In contrast,
there is something we cannot create no matter how hard we think.
That is nature.
We originally came from nature,
so we feel comfortable being in touch with nature.
But the consumer society has completely excluded nature.
In a sense, our body is originally nature itself,
as this cannot be created by human hand.
So when we feel comfortable, or beautiful, or impressed,
we feel those feelings not by our mind but by our body.
At times, even this nature of our body and feelings
are deprived of by this consumer society.
The same is true of Japan.
There must be some part where we can balance our body and mind.
Once we lose this balance,
we feel uncomfortable.
The relation between body and mind
is similar to that of urban and rural areas in Japan.
Things are increasingly concentrated in Tokyo,
and rural areas are on the verge of extinction.
After the war, the eldest son remained in the rural areas.
The younger brothers migrated, and made our large cities today.
The urban and the rural areas were connected by blood.
That is why everyone returns to their hometown on Bon holidays.
However, in 20 to 30 years,
the so-called holiday traffic congestion is said to become vanished.
It means that a large number of people will be born and raised in cities
and will not have a hometown.
This will decisively separate the urban and rural areas.
A large number of people
will be confined in the consumer society,
not feeling the joy of life.
Living creatures have evolved
by adapting to the changing environment
that threatened their survival.
Japan has led the modernization of our consumerist society,
and our lives lost joy.
We may be at the forefront of human evolution.
This evolution means
balancing the mind and body, urban and rural areas,
and furthermore, to balance developed and developing countries.
This will be an extraordinary challenge.
In the 1970s, we saw the rise of personal computers.
It was an era when information was a luxury.
People were uplifted in those days.
You could access worldwide information from wherever you were.
Then, someone turned that big box into something portable and convenient.
That was Steve Jobs.
The iPhone is an extension of that.
However, we have already cultivated this world of mind, inside this box,
and information is no longer a luxury.
Rather, in this world's most-advanced consumer society,
the relationship with others and feeling of life
are becoming our luxury.
This relationship and feeling of life
cannot be bought on your iPhone while staying inside your room.
It is something you create on your own, with the producers, out in the nature.
That is going to be the new frontier where we feel joy of life.
This frontier can no longer be cultivated by any genius.
It must be cultivated together by those who eat and those who make.
I'm sure a new hometown will be awaiting us there.
This "Apple" enriched our mind and knowledge.
On the other hand, if we connect to this,
this apple, the real food that supports our lives,
this can enrich our heart, and make our lives shine again.
In order to realize that, I'd like to wisely use this Apple as well.
It's the fusion of the mind and body,
the urban and rural.
Please remember that each one of you have the power to change the world
from the simple action of eating.
Know your food, change the world.
Now everyone,
why don't we enjoy the forefront of evolution
and embark on a journey to change the world?
Thank you.
(Applause)