While working on projects like Cut Venus Show, Nin-Nin, and 041, I also came face to face with the hunger, worries, and conflicts of the creators involved in them.
And I thought this:
Before using our ideas to build a better world, we first have to build a better way of working in order to put those ideas out into the world.
Looking back on my own time, life, and experience, I asked myself once again whether there was any problem with the way I was using my talent.
So I took the time to narrow down the direction I should pursue in my work to three things.
1) Use the abilities I developed in advertising, my main profession, outside the advertising industry as well.
2) Work not for the masses, not for "someone," but for one person, for "you."
3) Pursue sustainable ideas, not fast ideas that get used up and thrown away.
Everything I do now follows these three directions. Put differently, I refuse the work that falls outside them.
In my twenties, I was afraid to refuse work. I worried people might dislike me, think I was arrogant, or that opportunities would dry up.
Even so, I refuse it.
If you do not edit your own work yourself, you cannot focus your abilities. That is why I gathered the courage to set these three directions.
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The goal is to diversify the ways of winning
If you ask people to imagine a sport that both the strong and the weak can enjoy together, many will propose rules like this: "If a woman scores, count it double."
But Yuru Sports does not "favor" people with disabilities or people who are physically weak. It always designs rules that are fair to everyone. That way, winning feels even more joyful.
Until now, the environment of sports allowed only the very strongest to survive. To put it metaphorically, it was like "a sea where only sharks survived." But can such a sea really be called abundant?
In the sea there are mackerel, saury, shrimp, octopus, plankton, and coral. A rich natural world is a place where such diverse creatures coexist in environments that suit each of them.
The same is true if we apply that not to sea life but to humans. A truly rich society is a place where everyone coexists in their own way.
The idea of "creating a handicap in order to favor someone" is only the perspective of a majority society.
What if, instead, we changed the very way of winning?
In conventional sports, those who are strong, fast, or tall sit at the top of the pyramid. But we could also create ways of winning that take into account the diversity of people who are physically weaker, such as "having maternal instincts" or "being good at crawling." Once you create new rules and overturn the assumptions, invalidating the old formulas for victory, sports immediately fall into chaos.
In other words, we took the stick called Yuru Sports and plunged it into the tank of society, where countless biases and fixed ideas had settled to the bottom, and began stirring everything together.
Coming up with ideas means drawing a new starting line
As I kept thinking about Yuru Sports, one question began to emerge.
"What exactly is the boundary between disabled and non-disabled people?" Yuru Sports uses the medium of sports to raise that question again about the wall between them.
If you reset the presence or absence of disability and remove the hierarchy, barrier-free can be realized.
Then, in one sense, disabled and non-disabled people who had been separated into the "Olympics" and the "Paralympics" can naturally interact with one another. Rather than appealing through posters that say things like "Barrier-free in your heart!" having everyone play caterpillar rugby together for three minutes can make disabled and non-disabled people far closer.
Up to now, sports evolved with the physically strong as the starting point, so only a small number of people could shine. The valley between the strong and the weak kept growing wider and deeper.
But when you create new assumptions, even people who could not show their abilities under the old rules gain the possibility of becoming the protagonist. Realizing this made me recognize the role of the "creator" in a new way.
To bring new ideas into society and draw a new starting line. I came to understand that this is precisely the work of those of us called "creators."
And it is not only about disabled people.
Today, not a few people feel powerless, saying things like, "I can't do anything," "I can't use my abilities," or "things never go the way I want." According to the results of the 2019 Survey of 18-Year-Olds conducted by The Nippon Foundation, only 18.3 percent of young people answered that they could change the nation and society.
Because today feels like an era at the peak of emptiness, we need to draw starting lines in many more places so that anyone can run their own race. We need to make a completely new start together.
Marketing is not research. It is the making of the market itself.
Minority design becomes necessary precisely when you cannot find the right problem.
The original job of a marketer is not data analysis or research.
It is to create a market that did not exist before.
There are still many minorities who have not yet come into view. People who are weak at singing and therefore avoid karaoke, people who cannot eat seafood, perhaps even people who somehow feel uncomfortable in an SUV. If you listen to their voices, one problem after another begins to emerge. These are stories you rarely hear through ordinary marketing research.
No matter how much a company's top product or service dominates the market, there are always minorities on the other side of it. When you come down from the high-rise building to ground level and have an honest conversation with them, or with your own weaknesses, jewel-like hints keep appearing.
Some people may say this: "But minorities are literally small in number, so isn't the market too small to matter?" The answer is no.
Yuru Sports was born from me myself, from one person who is not good at exercise. And yet it has still managed to take root as it has today.
