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Minutes of the Tokyo eSG Strategy Board,2021

Minutes of the Tokyo eSG Strategy Board,2021

1 Date and time

November 29th, 2021
11:00~12:15

2 Meeting place

Online Conference
(Main Conference Room, 7th floor, Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building No.1)

3 Participants

・Tokyo Metropolitan Government
KOIKE Yuriko (Governor of Tokyo)
MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

・Guest speaker
Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

・Experts
ATAKA Kazuto (Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Study, Keio University/CSO, Yahoo Japan Corporation)
KAWAGUCHI Mariko (Specially Appointed Professor, Rikkyo University/Executive Adviser to CEO, Fuji Oil Holdings Inc.)
KITANO Hiroaki (President and CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.)
KUMA Kengo (Architect/University Professor and Professor Emeritus at The University of Tokyo)
KOBAYASHI Hikaru (Adviser, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo)

4 Agenda

(1) Greetings from the Governor

KOIKE Yuriko (Governor of Tokyo)

Good morning, everyone. Today, thank you very much for attending the Tokyo eSG strategy board despite your busy schedules. This eSG project is a grand project to overcome the two great crises of the world, which are the threat of infectious disease and climate change or climate crisis. And this project envisions a future based on the current challenges and also a long-term outlook for fifty and one hundred years from now. And utilizing the Tokyo Bay area, we are intending to implement a grand project. And in the past sessions, we have already received various inputs from experts. And their suggestions have been received and they often they suggest us to look back at fifty and one hundred years ago. For example, Eiichi Shibusawa, who built the foundation of Tokyo, and also Shinpei Goto are the renowned figures. Eiichi Shibusawa was involved in the establishment of six hundred companies in Japan and has built a foundation of Japanese economy. Shinpei Goto was originally a doctor and he also resided in Taiwan for sometime. And because his background is healthcare, he was involved in countermeasure against infectious diseases and also urban planning in Taiwan and I believe he is also very widely known in Taiwan. And he is the seventh mayor of Tokyo city. It was still a city back then.

In front of the imperial palace, we have the Gyoko promenade and the main trunk roads in Tokyo built after the Great Kansai Earthquake, were built under the initiative of Shinpei Goto. Such legacy is inherited to our generation, and based on the know-how of our predecessors, we are trying to address the current challenges. But also, things have been evolving on a daily basis. Although we need to have a long term view, it is almost impossible to have a clear outlook into fifty and one hundred years from now. As for COVID, we have been detecting new variants and we still face a lot of challenges. But instead of going back to the pre-COVID world, we should envision what we call a sustainable recovery. That is the mindset of this project established by Tokyo. And to realize our ideal future, we must always see things from a higher viewpoint to capture a big picture. And to that end, in this Tokyo eSG strategy board, we're going to be seeking inputs from various members who are attending today, especially from Taiwan, we have the presence of Minister Tang. Minster Tang is very famous and has been active in various areas as the Digital Minister of Taiwan, as it is widely known also in Japan. In the recently taken measures against COVID-19, Minister Tang led the world from a digital perspective, and also advised us when we launched our website in COVID-19 measures for Tokyo. So let me express my gratitude once again. And speaking of Taiwan, I recently met Representative Shay of Taipei Economic Culture Representative Office in Japan and received face masks. Let me take this opportunity to extend my gratitude once again. Now, I'm not going to speak any longer, but today, the topic of discussion is going to be initiatives for the realization of a sustainable city. I'm hoping to hear candid opinions from Minister Tang, and also other board members.

And Minister Tang is joining from Taipei, I assume? And I believe everyone is joining remotely from respective offices and this is a new form of meeting, so to speak. And Mr. Kuma is going to be joining later as well. This concludes my opening remarks. Thank you.

(2) Guest Speaker Lecture

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

Hello, good local time. Can you see and hear me? Is it going through okay? Really happy to be here, to share with you some thoughts as we are facing, as the Mayor said, these global challenges that confronts the global population. In Taiwan, I see digital social innovations continue to accelerate democracy and deepen collaboration across sectors. In Taiwan, we see democracy as an applied social technology that improves when more people work together to achieve a common goal. And just like any other technology, a social technology works as a vehicle to turn the energy spread across different agencies, different sectors into driving force for policy innovation. And the key here is to enable this idea of working with the people, not just for the people. To permeate public policies decision-making. So, in other words, it's about crowdsourcing democracy. So how do we start to bring ourselves to work with, and not just for, the people? Well, for me, the answer is simple. It is to trust our citizens, so not smart cities but smart citizens. Sustainable cities begin with sustainable citizens because to give no trust is to get no trust. Now, I will show some slides that displays some of the recent efforts, first counter-pandemic and infodemic, but also around sustainability with you. And let me bring up the slides.Is this better? Do you see the words? Or is it better?

Excellent, okay. So, you're looking at my office. Like, literally my office. This is the social innovation lab in Taipei, heart of Taipei City. It used to be an industrial research institute during the Japanese rule of Taiwan. And later on, it became an Air Force headquarters. But now, we tore down all the walls and there's no guards anymore and it's a public park now. Anyone can walk into this public park and have forty minutes of my time, chatting with me. The only condition that I give is that the entire transcript needs to be published into the comments, that is to say public domain, on the website "SayIt", or on the YouTube channel. And in this practically transparent fashion, lobbyists do come and talk to me, but all the cases they make are about sustainability. It is about the common good, it's about empowering the future generations. Perhaps because they know the record will be here literally forever, so it will look quite bad for the next generation if they make any selfish arguments at the expense of the next generation. So, this is a design that uses radical transparency to make sure that people work in a pro-social manner. And this has a long tradition in Taiwan that I distill to three pillars, and they are fast, fair, and fun. So we have a very similar campus, but in the digital realm called the PTT maintained by the National Taiwan University for the past twenty-five years. There are no advertisers, no shareholders. So unlike more anti-social corners of social media. When Dr. Li Wenliang's message at the end of 2019 spread to Taiwan, immediately within twenty-four hours, the people on PTT triaged this message in a pro-social way, which resulted in us beginning health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan, on the very next day, the first day of 2020. This shows collective intelligence can respond to emergent threats. And it's not just about people who are familiar with bulletin board systems. Anyone can call this toll-free number: 1922. Still, you've probably heard that a young boy last April called saying "I got a pink mask that you rationed. I'm a boy. I don't want to wear pink to school. All the boys in my class wear blue." And the very next day, all the ministry and the health officers wore pink masks. It became very fashionable for a while, and the boy became the most hip boy in his class. Now this is about setting the norm, a new norm, a new normal, as part of the pandemic, and it depends on people ensuring the fairness of such measures as mask rationing. So this is of course G-Zero, the erg of zero, a civic tech initiative that builds real-time mask visualization.

And while people in Japan probably have known g0v from the Mask Map, what you probably did not have directly experienced is this May when we faced our real first wave. The same people who built the Mask Map now built a check-in system, so that you don't have to download any app. No app required. Just on your phone's built-in camera, you can point to a QR code and then it sends a message to 1922, toll-free and you just click send. So that's literally three seconds. And this design enabled us to shorten the contact tracing per infected people from twenty-four hours into twenty-four minutes, and that's how we eradicated the virus very quickly because it enabled very precise contact tracing without any sacrifice of privacy because it is not aggregated in a single place. The telecom carriers store the SMS, but the mapping between the fifteen digits and the venue are stored somewhere else, so only the contact tracer have the access of the eleven million or so out of the quarter billion that has been sent and this assured the people this is again a fair data collaborative that people can contribute by making better QR code scanners and QR code printers and so on.

Now the third pillar requires us to not convince people, but provide sufficient material for people to make sure that they can also understand why and how of policies, not just the what of the policies. So this is, of course, a very cute spokesdog that explains physical distance and mask wearing and so on. But we use that not just for pandemic communication, our national dictionaries are a model. A digital double of the presidential office and many heritage buildings. My own portraits are all in the creative commons so that people who want to remix and make a point in pro-social, pro-environmental development can start, not from scratch, but from what's already there as part of the policies.

Now I talked about it, the dissemination part, and now the convergence part. Whenever there is an emergent solution that purports to solve some environmental or sustainable issue, there's bound to be people that are wary and fear uncertainty or doubt. And in Taiwan, we use a topic infrastructure maintained by the state polis.gov that became entirely open source, free software that's powered by assistive intelligence can visualize people's whereabouts, where they take understands on those emergent issues. So you're looking at the actual 2015 UberX map, and this is my friends and families We look at the same facts, open data, just like the Mask Map and then we crowdsource our feelings and the feelings after three weeks of resonating with one another coalesce into ideas that we then turn into regulations. And again, this is unlike Facebook - you can't reply to one another so trolls cannot grow, but you can resonate or not agree or disagree with one idea and feelings. And if you agree, you move towards me and if you disagree you move further away from me. And you can also propose your own ideas and the beauty of this design is that people don't spend a lot of time on the divisive statements, polarizing statements, but discover after three weeks most people agree with most of each other on most of the values most of the time. Which is why immediately regulated Uber using this crowdsourced agenda, and that has been very successfully in setting our key metrics progress, not in the top-down way, but in a crowd-sourced collective intelligence and connective intelligence way. And this applies not just to traffic, but also to air quality sensing. The primary school students maintaining air boxes, writing to a distributed ledger so that we can give the education of not just literacy, but the competence to change the public policies by measuring their water qualities and air qualities. And those water qualities measurements, we take an idea from Japan, I believe it's called mymizu, but it's turned into this Pokemon GO-like game where you can collect coins and make friends and learn about the local histories and so on, simply by using your water bottle to refill instead of using more plastic. So again, it creates environmental and digital competence tool. So I believe that in the future, if we think about fifty years or so, we can't anticipate that, but our next generation can. So we need to enable democracy as an agency, not just vote in front of current generation, but common in the infrastructure so that people in the future generation can also have their say and give them plenty of room to remix and match the material that we put in the commons to put the values in the systems in a truly intergenerational way.

Now in the last minute, I would like to again read my job description and look forward to the panel discussions. My job description describes the role of the digital minister as effecting partnerships on reliable data and open innovations, it goes like this. When we see the internet of things, let's make an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember that plurality is here. So that's my initial remarks. Thank you for listening.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Once again, Minister Tang, thank you for your wonderful speech. Now, first of all, let me ask the governor for her comment in response to the speech.

KOIKE Yuriko (Governor of Tokyo)

Minister Tang, thank you for your speech. You introduced episodes based on your experiences, which was very convincing. And also, there were a lot of inspirations. Fast, Fair, and Fun. The three pillars that you described. Each one of them is necessary in order to expand and if one is missing, it cannot be communicated enough to the citizens, so be fast, fair and fun and connect with the three pillars is important. And a shift from singularity and plurality is something you describe in the end. And I believe it is about being human-oriented and I think that is what Tokyo aims today.

Minister Tang has made a tremendous contribution in using the power of digital technology to contain COVID-19 effectively and protected Taiwan from its threat. I would like to express my deep respect for your efforts. With regards to COVID-19, in the summer, Tokyo has just realized a safe and secure Tokyo 2020 while preventing the spread of infection. And we believe it is our responsibility to hand over this great legacy to the next generation. And this year's chief project will, as I mentioned earlier, 'e' is for ecology, economy, environment, and so forth. And 'S' is the initial of Shibusawa Eiichi, and then G is for Goto Shinpei. And at the same time, eSG is a great tide we seek globally today. So this project aims for a city which integrates nature with convenience, which is something that embodies plurality. Also, we need to build a sustainable city that is resilient to climate crisis or infectious disease, and we also need to strongly promote the structure reform of our society with innovations. And we believe it is the mission of our generation. Furthermore, we need the power of the youth and children who are going to be playing a central role in fifty and one hundred years from now. And I believe that is why democracy is so important. So, in terms of creating future with children, we have held an event where we used Lego blocks to build the future bay area with children and they worked out an amazing city full of hopes and dreams. And I believe that is fun and also, we saw, full of dreams in that city. Generations Z and Alpha, well at least these are the terms used in Japan, but I am interested how these generations are called in Taiwan.

They have lived with digital technologies throughout their lives ever since they were born, and they have completely different sensibilities from grown-ups. By combining the power of digital and the power of young people, I hope we can unlock a brighter and more exciting future. In that sense, I always say that we need great ambition and empathy. So we need to have a great ambition for the good of the society to make it a policy, but unless there is empathy from the people, it cannot expand. I believe that is quite similar to what Minister Tang addressed today. Hikaru Kobayashi is someone I worked with as a former environmental minister, and we have a humid and hot climate in Asia, I assume also in Taiwan. And when we wear ties and jackets, it is too hot, so we started cool biz initiative. And it became so popular because it is more comfortable, and I think this is the fun part of your three pillars. So I have always said that the combination of these - ambition and empathy - is important. I was inspired and empathized a lot with the strong message from Minister Tang today. So I'm looking forward to receiving opinions from the attendees in the following discussion.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you, Governor. So may I ask Minister Tang to say a few words in response?

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

Yes, definitely. I am really heartened to hear this Lego block making. Something that we also do here in Taiwan, envision scenarios. But usually with young people and not quite with primary school level young children. So you're even further in the future, it seems. And I really look forward to more collaboration with Tokyo. Not just the environmental side of vision building, but also making this digital commons to enable more pro-social conversations to further democracy together. I really learned a lot. Thank you.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you very much. Now I'd like to ask the experts for their comments. And I have also received a question from Mr. Kuma prior to this event.

(3) Exchange of Opinions

KUMA Kengo (Experts)

Yes, Thank you for your wonderful speech. What I was impressed the most was your comment related to smart city. Smart city has been a topic in Japan recently, but you said it must be smart citizens, not smart cities. First, you need to establish smart citizens and that will naturally nurture a smart city. I realized that Japan tends to focus on building the framework and hardware beginning and then we address the human aspect. But we need trust as the fundamental element according to your speech and that was very inspiring. I have been joining several smart city discussions as an advisor, but today's comment from Minister Tang was very inspiring. And when we think about trust society, there is also a monitoring or surveillance society. And how can surveillance live with trust? When surveillance is needed for trust, trust is not going to be natural, authentic trust. There is such risk, and we cannot have pure trust, but we would be trusting each other because there is surveillance. Once people start to feel that way, I think other smart cities are not going to be a warm being, so we also need to think about the relationship between surveillance and trust. Then, Minister Tang, can you please give us a few words in response?

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

Definitely. The contact tracing case that I presented is a case in point. In many other jurisdictions, there seems to be a tradeoff. You either use something like Bluetooth that doesn't concentrate surveillance, but is entirely voluntary and is difficult to calibrate. Or you use something that is very effective, easy to calibrate, at a cost of privacy because people will aggregate data to someplace they do not trust. But in Taiwan, our way is called secure multi-party computation. It is one of the privacy-enhancing technologies that brings the best of the two worlds. Because like puzzle pieces, the privacy data is spread among different stakeholders. If they do not collude together, and they don't have the reason because the five telecom carriers are competitive to each other. So unless they collude together, it is not possible to reverse engineer one's whereabouts. But a contact tracer, once they look into the check-in records, it will also give a record. So anyone can use their phone to ask for the full audits in the past four weeks, of which municipalities, which numbered contact tracer has looked at their whereabouts and why. And this is entirely voluntary. We did not say "You have to use this or face a penalty". People, at any time, can use pen and paper, but they choose this method, the SMS method, because they understand it's swifter and safer than pen and paper. This is the adoption comes from, grassroots. So, I believe investments in the trust infrastructure based on privacy-enhancing technologies and explaining it clearly is a must.

KUMA Kengo (Experts)

Thank you very much. In Taiwan, what we feel regarding Taiwan's society is it is very kind and very warm, but I understand that there is connectivity enabled by digital technology and you still have the warmth and kindness. That is the type of digitalization that should be pursued in Japan as well. Thank you very much for your reply.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you very much. We would like to now invite comments from other members. Please limit your comments to about two minutes and you can also ask questions to Minister Tang if you wish. Ataka-san, please.

ATAKA Kazuto (Experts)

This is Ataka speaking. I didn't know that it was Japanese alphabet order. So Kawaguchi-san will be next. Thank you very much Minister Tang, it was very impressive. And as Dr. Kuma has mentioned, to believe in the citizens, trusting the citizens is very important and that resonated very well for me. On our part, there is so much for us to learn in this area, and as the governor has mentioned, the fun portion. It has to be fun. It has to be enjoyable. Otherwise, we cannot make progress. How can this be reflected in design? It requires a high level of sensitivity. How can we enhance the fun portion? Going forward, how can we enhance this factor of fun? That's my first question. Second question is that, in Taiwan, you're very fast in implementing measures. Your phenomenal speeds, by different total compared to other countries. Why are you so agile, why can you implement measures so quickly? Can you give us ideas? Because we are the reverse in Japan. We are very slow. How can we realize this in Japan? That's my second question. Third question is as follows. I believe that Taiwan is similar to Japan. Japan is prone to natural disasters. There are typhoons, there are also earthquakes, as well. We are also very similar, I believe, in Taiwan as well. How can the pandemic experience be utilized in dealing with disasters going forward?

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Minister Tang, would you like to address these questions?

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

Certainly. I think the key element of fun is just to pay attention attentively to each other in a relaxed atmosphere. And this relaxed atmosphere is what makes this pro-social part of social infrastructures work. I often compare the kind of conversation we have, our join platform - polis, PTT, and so on - is the digital equivalent of a university campus or a public park, where fun is to be had. Because in 2016, we classified the budget to implement the investment into those digital commons, as infrastructure budget. Prior to that, only things made from concrete, like concrete bridges and buildings, qualified for infrastructure budget. But after 2016, we say these digital commons, where people can relax and have fun, is as important as the physical parks. Because if we don't invest in those, then the citizens will be forced to not have fun, but rather talk about public issues, like Uber or whatever, in Facebook, which would be like talking in a nightclub with very loud music, smoke-filled room, you have to shout to get hurt, private bouncers, addictive drinks, I can go on. I don't have anything against the entertainment sector, but it's not the place to relax and have these kind of pro-sociality, conviviality to talk about public matters. And this is also the answer to your second question, because when people get into the mood of co-creation, they're not captured by the outrage or polarization that concentrates energy on vengefulness or discrimination. Rather, people will be encouraged to try out their own way. If people criticize that the map of masks is not usable for elderly people, people can say, just go ahead and make a chat bot. Or for people with really seeing difficulties, people can say go ahead and make a voice assistance. And with more than 100 different applications in just the first week of the Mask Map, what we did as a government is not procurement, which tend to be slow, but reverse procurement. Like we are the vendor, we look at what they need in terms of data quality, addressing data pilots and so on, and we make sure that we fix those things in our data pipeline, but the people facing part is always from the social sector, the civil technologists. And so that helps with the resilience. Actually, the communication tool called Line that we use a lot in Taiwan, if I understand correctly, was born from the great earthquake where people need to communicate without going through the old or broken communication infrastructures. So again, trusting the citizens is the key to resilience, because people closest to the pain already have an idea of how to address the suffering. But if you don't empower them with the commons, with the amplification of their innovation through reverse procurement, they will be stuck. And their solution only work on the very local way. So our work as the state is just to amplify the norms set by the social sectors, by the people closest to the disaster and the suffering.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you. I'd like to receive one comment from each member for Minister Tang. So, Kawaguchi-san please.

KAWAGUCHI Mariko (Experts)

So I was listening to Minister Tang's response and I have many more to ask. In Rikkyo University, I've been teaching sustainability and after listening to the discussion, what I like about it is internet of beings. Internet of human beings. And I believe Minister Tang has strong trust in humanity and that is the basis of digital community that you're trying to build and I'm very impressed with that. On the other hand, a city is an environment for humans, and it must function as a shelter for humans to be protected. And when we think about sustainability and the environment of a city, what kind of viewpoint do we need? Aside from great nature, when we try to build a city, utilizing digital technologies to enhance an environment, we should also think about climate change because it is the consequence of people exploiting natural resources excessively. So there is a gap and how can we use digital technology to close that gap? That is my question.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you. Now Minister Tang?

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

Yes. I think there is a balance here and the idea that I often say is that I strive to be a good enough ancestor. Not a perfect ancestor that foreclosed the possibility for future generations, but not a bad ancestor that only cared about the current generation at the expense of the future planetary society. So good enough has two meanings. One is that one needs to be good in the sense of taking care of negative externalities and work on the positive externalities. And, of course, a public good is something that is even better when more people contribute to it. The visualization of air quality, water quality, encouraging the primary shcolars to start to measure, so that their families, before they're deciding whether to go and jog, can double check their air quality measure by their children, and the same goes for the mymizu-like game, shows that people want to care about the environment if that initial burden is low, and if it makes a direct impact to their friends and families which is why we made it part of the basic education curriculum. Because otherwise, it is very difficult to teach sustainability in the abstract. Just like it's hard to teach data literacy or data stewardship, data bias. This means nothing for a middle Scholar or a primary Scholar But once they start measuring for climate and contributing to the environmental sensing that affects their community decisions, suddenly these ideas click in their minds, so the soonest that one can make a real contribution, the easier will it be for us to make sustainability and digital transformation one and the same thing because it amplifies to more people. That's the first part about the public good.

But the other part about good enough is because we don't want to spend a lot of time just arguing over the details of what solution is a little bit better, what solution is a little worse at the moment. Because all these solutions will change as technology progress. So, we take an idea of good enough consensus or good enough running code, this is from internet governance, rough consensus in running code. So that as soon as we agree on something that we can live with, then we go out and try and experiment. And even if they show data bias, the correction of those data bias, as long as it's quick, it actually educates more people than compared to if we don't make any mistakes at all, but move slowly. To move fast, and fix things, that's the two parts of the good and the good enough.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you very much. Next, Kitano-san please. And after that would be Kobayashi-san. Kitano-san, please.

KITANO Hiroaki (Experts)

Thank you very much. Last year, in April, I had the opportunity to discuss regarding COVID-19 measures. I'm delighted to have another opportunity to speak to you. My question is as follows. Regarding digital services, as well as enabling digital services to make change. This is having a significant impact on eSG as well. I think what is common between Taiwan and Japan, there are three challenges. The first is the pandemic. It is likely that is not the last pandemic going forward. We will be facing more pandemics in the future as well. Second is climate issues in the area of energy, for example. Whether be Taiwan and Japan, we have a semiconductor business, so this is a very important industry. It requires significant amounts of energy. High quality electricity is necessary for this industry. And biodiversity must be abundant. So from digital to having an impact on the physical real-world will be very important.

Now a third area is earthquakes. We have similar problems. In 2030s, the Nankai Trough earthquake is expected. 220 trillion yen economic damage is already expected. So how can Japan recover from such a disaster? Whether it be pandemic or climate issue or disasters. These are occurring in the physical real world. How can we enable the digital technologies to change the mindset of people into have a transformation in the physical real world, using the power of digital? You were very fast in digital, for pandemic as well, the time is very limited. And for earthquake, we only have several years to build this matter. The Nankai Trough earthquake is going to be very significant, and we don't have ten years left to come up with the disaster resilience plan. What can Japan do, given the limited time left? For Taiwan, physical real world, the transformation, how can that be made by utilizing the power of digital?

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Can you respond, Minister?

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

This is a very wide scope question that is like a seminar level. I will try to be brief. I've pasted a link to Webex about our civil IOP project, specifically on the earthquake early warning part. That was the infrastructure in the digital realm that I referred to when we invested in 2016. It's not just to reduce the alert time to essentially half, it's for people to receive the cellular broadcast in their phones, and automated shutdown of elevators and plants and things like that. But also, it is about participatory pedagogy, like making sure that people understand the impact and what to do in each and every level of the different alerts. And this works directly with the pandemic, because we use exactly the same, SMS notification, for exposure notification. The quarantine alert is shaped exactly the same as the earthquake alert. And so on. It comes from a source where people already trust it, and people already - via the drills and so on, every September 21st, we have the national drills and so on. We understand what to do when we receive such an alert, so people don't panic. And this is probably the most important thing, in that when a disaster hits, if people panic and do some counterproductive things, that second order panic actually makes the disaster worse because it means resilience is very difficult. You can't rebound when people do not essentially know or have the willingness, the how-to to communicate with one another. So, all this points to this communication infrastructure that is not hurt by earthquakes or tsunamis, typhoons, and things like that. And people's instinct via the drills after the various smaller earthquakes and pandemics to go to those communication infrastructures, to coordinate together and to plan together. I don't have time to go into the details, but please check out the civil IOT website.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you so much. Next, Kobayashi-san please.

KOBAYASHI Hikaru (Experts)

Yes, thank you. I'm not going to repeat due to time constraints, but thank you very much for your wonderful speech. The point that I was the most impressed with was the importance of motivation of an individual and paying respect to an individual to make a bottom-up type of effort. And my question is related to the question from Kawaguchi-san, but I would like to know a more specific example. So digital technology can be used for environment challenges. For example, in this year's Nobel prize Professor Manabe developed a climate assimilation model.

I think it is a global digital chain, in other words, and this is for the good of the future generation. And we were able to learn what it is not to sacrifice the future generation. And when it comes to motivating individuals, protecting ourselves from COVID, for example, maybe that is one motivation from a healthcare point of view. And quit using plastic bags or paying money for plastic bags. I think this was a plastic bag movement by a Filipino girl. And as Governor Koike said earlier, I have an experience of working together with her. I've always been in the environmental space. I'm very happy when I see CO2 emissions goes down, I think that is not usual. I think it is not common among the general public. They would not be extremely happy even if they see a decline in CO2 admissions. So, are there any other tangible examples of using IT to strengthen the motivation of an individual or people? When you addressed Kawaguchi-san's question, I understood your philosophy, so if you have any specific examples of using IT to strengthen people's motivation for environment, I would like to know. Thank you.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you. Now Minister Tang?

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

The most significant for myself is just to replace air travel with the video conference that we are having today. And this is actually very significant because, even we're post-pandemic, or I should postponed pandemic, I think people do not unnecessarily travel anymore. People understand that it's actually clearer to see each other this way as compared as to wear a mask in in-person settings. And we invested heavily in our educational or governmental facilities so that the highest bandwidth that enable us to see each other's micro-expressions so that the non-verbal part of our communications can be transferred across is invested there. So it is, I guess, a fundamental digital investment broadband as a human right, and broadband not just in downloading, but in uploading as well. And it also makes sure our teleworking, our tele-education, tele-medicine and so on. Other laws and regulations are changed in a very quick way so that when people, even postponed-pandemic, meet face-to-face only when there's a need to meet face-to-face. Like the nightclub, I guess. But for business, for education, for telecare and health-related issues, we can cut down unnecessary international and domestic travels by using the digital in a way that is even more beneficial than the face-to-face visits. And we've seen a real uptick of these things in Taiwan. So maybe it's not about incentive building in a nudge kind of way, it's about offering the digital space as directly a better way for people and people to connect closely together, posing AI as an assisted intelligence with all the noise cancellation that enable me not to wear earphones now, and the co-presence some people are calling a metaverse now. I call it shared reality and so on. All these are very important if you want to cut down the air travel and other carbon emissions that comes from the unnecessary travels.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you very much. So Ataka-san, you had a follow-up question? We have about until 12:13, so we may take follow-up questions so please indicate if you wish to speak by raising your hand.

ATAKA Kazuto (Experts)

I have two additional questions.

First is to use digital as an infrastructure. Digital infrastructure improvement is a significant achievement. But when we talk about Japan's infrastructure, it's about the roads, it's about the bridges and road building. It's a different thing altogether. So the fragmentation of the industry is very significant. It's a massive, they are forty people working in the infrastructure industry. So I think it will cause a confusion with that kind of thinking. With Kitano-san, I'm launching the i-Construction initiative. That is the first question. How can we overcome the confusion? Conviviality is very important. Digital convivial. What is convivial, using digital? How can that be realized? I'm also teaching at the university. There is much more excitement when its face-to-face communication at the university. So how can we have conviviality? Work can be done online, but what about excitement to be nurtured amongst people. Conviviality, how can that be promoted with online, digital? Tang-san, please.

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

Thank you. I just used the great Japanese invention of emoji to show some conviviality. I think of course, emoji is a beginning, but conviviality, I think, comes from this idea that there is a community that's already there and always there and you can rejoin it. And that's what the university does, if you are an alum, if you go back and visit your university, it's still there and you can still tell and hear stories that make sense to you and it enables a longer time relational, not transactional, people to people tie. I think transactional relationships versus a long-term relational relationship is the defining quality between just having fun for the moment and conviviality on the longer term, which is why I stress the ideas of permanence, of the digital infrastructure, of bringing the shared experiences to the digital social innovation lab, my office. So you can physically visit my office, but you can also join one of our shared reality tours. When I tour around Taiwan, talk to people in various different communities, staying for a few days with them so I can put myself in their shoes and so on. My colleagues in the social and innovation lab do not travel with me. But I travel with a high-resolution camera, sometimes 360 camera, so they can also attach themselves to me, attach their attention to me and I always make sure we use wall-sized projections, so that when people talk about the central government's policies, exactly the central government's officials appear in a one-to-one size as the local people so we can dance together or something. And then they see that the public servant in the central government, not as an anonymous name, but rather someone, even just for an hour or two, that they can really relate with and speak to them on their own terms, on their home field. And after that, of course it will be still a little bit transactional via emails and whatever, telephones and so on. But this brief, one or two hours, of essentially a townhall in the local people's terms, I believe is key to build this idea of permanence, of you can contact them at any given time. You can always visit the social innovation lab. We have a duplicate lab in Gather town so you can actually log in to Gather town at any given time and still enjoy the conviviality. And so if you called the Gather town, the social innovation lab and so on as infrastructure, I believe that there will be confusion. I agree with you. So maybe you can call it commons or a community infrastructure, like try to prefix something like commons or community to it. I believe both Japan and Taiwan have a strong history of community building in the regional revitalizing sense. So just to think of community digitally, I think it's easier than seeing roads and bridges digitally which is a harder sell. I agree with you.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you. Now are there any additional questions from the members? Please indicate by using the raise hand button. Kuma-san?

KUMA Kengo (Experts)

I'm from an architectural background. In the beginning of the 21st century, we built skyscrapers. And in Taiwan, there are a number of skyscrapers, as you are aware. And in the digital era, I imagine that there will be no more skyscrapers built. Existing skyscrapers cannot be broken down immediately, so when there is no effective purpose of using a skyscraper, how would you use it?

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

That 3D model of our presidential office in the digital commons as part of my slides. We have also a point cloud photogrammetry built model of the Taipei 101, the skyscraper. I've seen it used in video games, I've seen it used in immersive reality shows and sometimes, when I want to look at the entirety of the northern Taiwan, I put on my VR glass and visit the tip of 101 within virtual reality to get this overview effect of seeing past the clouds and so on, so that I can get into the mood of seeing the entire planet really as a whole. So I've tried this same meditation on international space station, the Matterhorn mountain from Switzerland, and in my personal experience, the tip of 101 works as good as the Matterhorn mountain.

KUMA Kengo (Experts)

I'm very inspired, thank you very much for your response. That's very interesting. That was very inspiring, thank you.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Kitano-san please, and then Kawaguchi-san to follow.

KITANO Hiroaki (Experts)

Background is now Taiwan 101 building. Now, when we spoke last, we discussed a gov tech in COVID apps as well as mask visualization, was developed as prototype very quickly. That was very impressive. And Minister Tang, your director and reporting engineers and architects are about two hundred to three hundred people and therefor agile development has been enabled and I think it's the right approach that you're taking in Taiwan. In the sustainable development, the order will be made to private sector, the transfer will be made. How can you collect these people? What are their positions? And how are they maintained in terms of resources? In Japan, digital agency has been established and on the part of Tokyo Metropolitan Government, for ESG and your development and digitalization will be promoted increasingly going forward. We need to have an agile team well-versed in technology. It's very important to have these resources. How can you recruit such people in the public sector and manage these highly-qualified personnel?

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Tang-san, please.

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

That it's the first time I've seen the Korean city, but I visited MIT media lab as a robot, as a tele-presence robot a few years back and visited the Cityscope team, but it reminds me strongly of this Cityscope project of MIT. I believe they are in a very similar participatory design and training. And just like participatory design, I believe it's not about recruiting anyone who has gone to your participation workshop. I don't think you run participation workshops to recruit the primary scholars or middle scholars to sign your future contract, to work as employees, no. What we're doing is essentially amplifying the cognitive surplus. People have two minutes of kindness, twenty minutes of kindness. If they are passionate about sustainability, maybe two hours of kindness. And two hours of kindness put together this way, just like the polis conversation, we talked about Uber and many other things, is I believe a stronger connective intelligence than just a few of these people recruited full-time. Because I don't think it's in any particular person's intelligence that enabled this kind of breakthrough and innovative thinking when it comes to solving the wicked problems, the dilemmas. Rather, always the intelligence is within the distributed brain, the planetary brain of people with a little bit of cognitive surplus. So even if you get the top five suggestions, and recruit those contributors and make them work full-time in the public realm, in the public sector, I do not think that would make much sense if they lose the contact to the original collective intelligence, the civil society where they came from.

So my answer to your question is that we need to see ourselves as space makers, as bridges, as catalysts, and not only any particular talent pool. We need people actually specializing, not in digital side of IT technology, but in the digital side of social technology. My co-founder in my office were from the IDO, a design firm, before that another co-founder, the design leader was from RCA, or from the Copenhagen CIID and so on. So we always have had a very strong sense of the public service needs to work on the participatory design and speak in design terminology so that people in the civil society and private sector working with IT technologies connecting machines, can work on the norm that we discover using the digital equivalent of open space technology, non-violent communication, dynamic facilitation, and things like that. So, focus on design, not particular IT talent in the public sector as full-timers. It has been my kind of recipe for success. And I see of course, private sector is very strong, and all they need is a common standard, pre-agreed by the societal norms so they can work towards it.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you. Now, Kawaguchi-san please.

KAWAGUCHI Mariko (Experts)

Yes, thank you. So there were a lot of tough questions and I'm impressed by how you've been addressing them perfectly. I think we're cultivating the potential of humans in urban cities using digital technology. I think that's what you are doing and that leads to quality enhancements and affluence for our lives. Having said that, we have very low self-sufficiency rate of food in Tokyo and also in Taiwan, we do not have a high food self-sufficiency rate. A nature-based solution is often suggested, or also by the UN. Seeking solutions using nature and being symbiotic with the nature are using blessings from the nature. Well, we need food, we need to eat in order to live. So how can we use digital technology to improve the self-sufficiency rate of food in a city?

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Now Minister Tang.

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

Yes, and this is even more important now because transportation costs have been soaring across different nations and the carbon emissions and other greenhouse emissions is a result of those transportation. It used to be okay but now it's more and more not okay, when the global consensus about transportation grows. Myself, I'm a vegan and I occasionally eat some free-range eggs and so on. But I love the texture of meat, it's in my childhood memory, I can't do anything about it, which is why I've taken to basically only eat synthetic meat. But it used to be that synthetic meat tasted nothing like real meat. But in the past few years, it seems it has made a tremendous improvement. I can't tell the difference now. And it's locally procured right, it may be from algae, it may be from soy beans, it may be from, I don't know, many other materials, but in the end I get to cook using the recipe that I have learnt as a child, at the end we have conviviality because the family enjoys the same taste as we enjoyed when I was a child. But we do not actually squander the earth's resources and, also, we make sure it's always sourced locally and so on with a full QR code that you can scan to get the entire footprint and not just about carbon but about the use of agricultural chemicals, ingredients, sprays, and things like that. So I believe the QR code, again, a Japanese invention, is already part of many families' tables where they check the ingredients. And nowadays we need to again, look past the tradeoff between very tasty and familiar from memory foods on one side and very environmental and higher food self-sufficiency and better environmental protection on the other side. We need to innovate not just on the future of meat, but future of fish, and the future of many other ingredients in our recipes in order to make sure that people don't see it as a tradeoff and then we will have a real uptake.

KAWAGUCHI Mariko (Experts)

Thank you very much. I happen to work for Fuji Oil Group, which is one of the major producers of soy meat. And now we're producing urgently and now we're going to squid, and not just meat, so that maybe you'll like, Minister Tang. Thank you.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you very much. We had a very lively discussion and Minister Tang, thank you very much for responding to these questions in an understanding manner. But we're now approaching the closing, so I'd like to ask Tang-san for your last remarks. Minister Tang?

Audrey TANG (Digital Minister of Taiwan)

I really enjoyed this conversation. It shows conviviality is possible through the digital communication. I also look forward to visiting you in person I think as soon as early next year when I got my third shot again, AstraZeneca like my second shot from Japan, so thank you very much for the generous nation that allowed my international travel. As you know that I was planning to go to the Tokyo Olympics. I care very much about this event, and of course because of pandemic restrictions I didn't really travel, but I learnt something from the sports community in the Tokyo Olympics because previously the motto of the Olympics was 'Higher, Stronger, and Faster', but now for the Tokyo Olympics, as during the pandemic, just like digital innovation, was all about unicorns; high tech, strong tech, fast tech. But now the motto is now 'Faster, Stronger, Higher Together', which means conviviality in a community-based rethinking of the importance of not just a few athletes, but the entire sports-loving community. And I think we need to bring the same sense of camaraderie and conviviality to the field of digital and sustainable development. Thank you very much, and I look forward to meeting you in person. It's not unnecessary, it's necessary travel to me. Thank you. Until then, live long and prosper.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you Minister Tang. Now I'd like to ask the Governor for her comment.

(4) Greetings from the Governor

KOIKE Yuriko (Governor of Tokyo)

With Audrey Tang, we have held this Tokyo Bay eSG board. I believe we were inspired by each other. As it was mentioned earlier, at tremendous speed, Minister Tang had developed Mask Map and also I believe you were faster than other countries in addressing COVID situation by double digits compared to other countries. I once taught climate security in a graduate school and in this eSG project we looked ahead at fifty and one hundred years from now, but we have 4.6-billion year history of the Earth, and at the Nile River and Tigris-Euphrates civilization. Now, what was the difference? The Tigris-Euphrates developed a dam in the Nile River, they utilized flood, so they had different development of civilization. But when you stop the water flow by dam, they can experience salt damage and that was one of the reasons that ended the civilization.

On the other hand, in Nile, they effectively used the water flow and flood and they prospered for long. But because it was too long, they didn't have many enemies. They were so peaceful, they lacked awareness of danger, and later in the history, there's the era of Islam. So how we live with the nature can also be learned from past history and literature. In 1999, on the 21st of September, there was a great earthquake in Taiwan. I visited Taiwan back then in order to supply temporary houses and the former president of Taiwan was very fast in taking actions, in building temporary shelters and making administrative decisions. They were so quick. And the position of Taiwan in this global community and also awareness for crisis and risks could be observed as a background. And in this COVID pandemic and climate change, we need to take ownership while wearing face masks is an effective way to prevent infectious disease. So each one of ourselves need to be conscious that we are the owners of these issues and we also need to have trust. I believe that enabled Taiwan to be successful in their crisis management, so we have a lot to learn. I'd like to once again thank you for very insightful opinions, and also for the Japanese experts. From your questions, there were a lot of hints and inspirations, too. So in order to make this Tokyo Bay eSG project fruitful, we would like to think about what is important and what we should prioritize. So commons, community, these terms seem to be important according to today's discussion. So they shall be used as the foundation to think about sustainable recovery for fifty and one hundred years from now. I hope to see Minister Tang again and exchange our opinions. I really look forward to that day. And thank you once again for the attending experts.

MIYASAKA Manabu (Vice Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you. Oh I see emoji. I think today's session was in a very fun atmosphere. I enjoyed it very much personally. I hope we can repeat these kind of fun sessions in order to contribute to a city development. With this, we would like to conclude today's session. Thank you very much for your attendance once again.

KOIKE Yuriko (Governor of Tokyo)

Thank you.


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※For readability, duplicate wording, obvious rewording, etc. are sorted out and supplementary explanations are provided.