TOKYO — A few years ago, a colorful new accessory began popping up on the collars of dark-suited office workers across Japan: a small badge shaped like a roulette wheel, divided into 17 rainbow-colored sections. increase.
Soon, the logo seemed ubiquitous, displayed proudly in fashionable boutiques, children’s playgrounds, and Buddhist temple websites.
The subject of that zeal? A United Nations framework of 17 goals known as the Sustainable Development Goals.
Called the SDGs, the goals are uncontroversial goals such as ending poverty, improving education and reducing inequality, helping every country on the planet to be a better place.
But perhaps no country has embraced this campaign more visibly than Japan. Japan is a country where image-conscious companies have jumped on the bandwagon with both feet, providing an opportunity to demonstrate the country’s superior status as a global citizen.
Today, Japan has the SDGs board game. SDGs cartoon. Children can play in her SDG playground and travel agencies offer her SDG trips for travelers to learn how Japan is working towards achieving the goals.animation music video Public broadcaster NHK’s SDGs have been viewed more than 930,000 times on YouTube.
In the United States, when people have heard of development goals, it is often due to right-wing media portraying them as part of policy. radical socialist conspiracyA less polarized, more community-oriented (and perhaps less cynical) Japan has coalesced as a pleasing, theoretically good-doing effort to achieve its goals.
The goal became official national policy in 2016 when the government set up a task force under the prime minister. However, they began appearing on suit jackets across the country until the following year when Keidanren, Japan’s largest economic organization, added them to its charter.
In the past year or two, the term SDGs (as it is called in Japan with English letters) has “really become part of everyday conversation,” said Rie Takeshima, who heads a division at marketing giant Dentsu with 320 employees. . About companies embedding their goals into their business.
“There is no industry or company without SDGs,” she said. Nearly 40% of Japanese companies are working towards her 2021 goals, according to a survey. Investigation Credit research company Teikoku Databank.
The Sustainable Development Goals, a comprehensive vision to improve the lives of the world’s people by 2030, were agreed seven years ago by the Member States of the United Nations.
Goals are ambitious but not clearly defined.In Japan the government drawn Both poverty alleviation efforts and the highly controversial whaling program are examples of the United Nations’ pursuit of its objectives.
Whales consume vast amounts of fish, and controlling whale populations is critical to maintaining ocean diversity.online video Industry groups recommend eating mammals to “protect the balance of the marine ecosystem and contribute to the SDGs of the ocean”!
Three years ago few people in Japan had heard of the Development Goals, but today such messages are ubiquitous. A Dentsu poll found that nearly 90% of Japanese are now aware of his goal. However, only about a third of them could be explained.
Polls have shown that children are about twice as likely to understand concepts as their elders. The Department of Education encourages schools to incorporate goals into their lesson plans, and many parents have faithfully added this subject to their extracurricular activities list.
On a recent rainy afternoon, a group of children gathered in the atrium of a luxury Tokyo skyscraper for a series of talks and games to understand goals and how the country is working to reach them. rice field.
Although it was a holiday that day, 20 elementary school students, watched by their parents, answered trivia questions about the lives of children in disadvantaged countries in a game, and then played an SDGs-themed board game reminiscent of the Game of Life. I played. Investments in programs such as wind farms have moved the player to his one of 17 rainbow-colored tracks. Events such as recessions and pandemics set players back.
Kotaro, 11, was learning about goals in social studies class, said Mayuko Yamane, a mother who brought her two sons from nearby Chiba Prefecture.
“He knows more than I do,” she said, adding that her children had begun to haunt her with concerns about sustainability and gender equality.
“I was a little surprised that they were learning this stuff. Thirty years ago we weren’t doing that,” said Yamane, 41.
It is not clear how much that enthusiasm translated into direct action.
In 2015, Japan was ranked 13th in terms of development goals in the annual report compiled by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a non-profit organization affiliated with the United Nations. Like many wealthy countries, it scored highly in areas such as education and hunger alleviation.
Since then, Japan Dropped It came in 19th place, overtaking countries like Poland and Latvia, which made steady progress, while Japan remained stagnant. (Finland is her No. 1 and the US is her No. 41.)
2021 report The Japanese government told the United Nations that although Japan had succeeded in raising awareness of the targets, it was still “lagging” in formulating “objective” and “science-based” targets for the programme.
The United Nations recognizes Japan’s progress in areas such as education and infrastructure, but other issues seem out of control. One obvious area is gender equality. After years of giving lip service to women’s advancement in the workplace and politics, Japan ranked 116th out of 146 countries in her 2022 Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum. rice field.
There were also concerns that companies and government agencies were publicly endorsing the goals as a way to improve their image rather than bring about real change. This phenomenon is called “SDGs washing”.
Noriko Hama, a professor at Doshisha University’s Graduate School of Business, is pleased that the boom around development goals has brought much-needed attention to issues such as climate change and sustainable production methods.
But when Japanese businessmen began wearing the now ubiquitous badge, she became suspicious.
“There was something strange about people showing off flashy accessories that they usually don’t like,” she said.
To earn PR points for their active participation, companies and government agencies retroactively label projects as suitable for development goals, or blame initiatives that are loosely connected to goals. increase.
Even religious groups participate in this act. A Buddhist temple in Kyoto has announced that a program aimed at reducing maintenance costs and freeing up space in its cemetery is part of a push towards its development goals.
According to a Teikoku Databank survey, the largest percentage of companies (32%) make the SDGs goal of “decent work and economic growth” a priority. Support for goals such as “no poverty”, “no hunger”, “clean water and sanitation”, “life under water” and “life on land” and protecting diversity was less than 7%.
Keidanren members are aware of the skepticism, said Emiko Nagasawa, who heads the Development Goals programme, adding that the group needs to do more to “assess progress and publish results”. .
After a children’s event in Tokyo, Masaru Ihara, manager of travel agency Club Tourism International, said that many companies wear development goal badges not out of alignment with goals, but out of obligation. He said it was because of his feelings.
“People don’t wear them because they understand the SDGs, they wear them as a symbolic gesture,” he said.
Similarly, many of the small restaurants and hotels Ihara works with are feeling social pressure to align their business practices with their goals, even if they don’t yet know why or how. .
But as more people learn about development goals, he believes the pin will move from a passing fad to a true symbol of change. “It creates an atmosphere where people feel they have to do something,” he said.