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On 2nd August, SEEDS Asia’s Technical Advisor Ms. Ranko Kishida (former principal of Kyoto Municipal Takakura Elementary School and current specially appointed professor of Shiga University) and Executive Director Ms. Mitsuko Otsuyama were invited as lecturers for a teachers’ training at the Toba Elementary School run by the Toba municipality.

Toba Elementary School in Mie Prefecture and SEEDS Asia started their collaboration in disaster risk reduction education under the overall theme of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in 2018. The school participated in the AXA UNESCO Association’s Disaster Mitigation Education Program in which SEEDS Asia’s board member, Dr. Yukihiko Oikawa (principal researcher at the Center for Ocean Literacy and Education, University of Tokyo) is a lecturer and the program’s coordinator. Toba City, despite being located in an earthquake- and tsunami-risk area subject to Nankai Megathrust Earthquakes, has rich cultural and natural assets, and is keenly aware that its educational programs should not only protect lives from disasters, but should also foster future leaders who will ensure that their community will thrive sustainably.

Since 2019, several programs and training activities have been organized to enhance the school’s teaching unit on “integrated studies” as an opportunity to provide information and skills to protect lives, combined with the challenge of fostering future leaders for a sustainable society. We concluded that the key to ESD-based disaster education system requires a sustainable whole-school approach that cuts across all subjects, through appropriate curriculum management. This is the reason why Ms. Kishida was invited as a leading practitioner/researcher of curriculum management with years of experience as well as partnership with SEEDS Asia in other projects.

We strongly believe that the future of schools is inseparable from that of the community. In Japan, communities are rapidly shrinking for various reasons, including for the purposes of efficient government operations and disaster risk reduction (such as transferring an entire community to higher ground to avoid tsunami risks). Toba City is no exception to this, and its long-term development depends on how the local citizens can utilize community resources such as its culture, history and landscapes for the purpose. The city’s plans address the Toba Elementary School district as a prominent area, which makes the school’s capacity to raise future leaders quite significant. In the training, Ms. Otsuyama discussed “The Pearl Curriculum:* Creating the Future of Toba”, and Ms. Kishida on “To Boost Curriculum Management”, where the previous training was reviewed and a workshop was organized to polish the outputs from the previous sessions. This motivated the teachers to be well prepared for the second semester after the summer break.

*Toba city was in fact the first place in the world to develop cultured-pearls, which was successfully carried out by Mr. Kokichi MIKIMOTO in 1893.

This program has inspired us to continue to assist the city to raise “Toba children” so that lives and community will be nurtured into the future by the children.

[Declaration: All deployment of experts/staff is carried out with preventive measures fully in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic.]