Lessons in building civic leadership in Japan with COJ

Inspiring lessons from adapting organizing to the Japanese context, seeding and growing campaigns in a society with a strong stigma against social activism.

Organizations Learn Series is a space dedicated to sharing and learning from successes and failures by organizations training and practicing the organizing and Public Narrative pedagogy. In this first session of the series, we were joined by Kanoko Kamata, Akira Nakajima, Toor Kuzumaki, and Ryutaro Arakawa from Community Organizing Japan (COJ), which started in 2013 to spread community organizing in Japan. They shared lessons from their journey seeding and growing campaigns in a society with a strong stigma against social activism, and how they strategically built pathways to move people to action.