Event Report: Peace as ‘Our Own Matter’ – A Community Discussion from Suginami (August 24, 2025, Ogikubo)

On August 24, 2025, Forum2050, with support from Suginami Ward’s NPO grant program, held a workshop on thinking about peace as our own personal matter, taking a valuable first step in the local Suginami community. On this Sunday when temperatures exceeded 37°C, diverse generations gathered in a meeting room in Ogikubo—from elementary, middle, and high school students to university students and senior citizens—to discuss what each of us should think, consider, and how we should act in order to make peace a personal matter, particularly for young people who will carry the future. The event was entirely facilitated and moderated by the organization’s young members (elementary school to university students).

In the first half, Igor, a Ukrainian resident of the ward and Vice President of the Japan-Ukraine Association KRAIANY, participated and spoke movingly about the importance of protecting peace and the difficulty of recovering lost peace. People from various backgrounds actively contributed, including those engaged in international cooperation, community development activists, a Canadian of Chinese heritage, teachers, and families with children.

The workshop was participatory, with all participants sharing what sparked their interest in thinking about peace more personally, or conversely, reasons why it’s difficult to make peace a personal matter. Based on these discussions, we explored how we—including young people—can come to view peace as our own responsibility and take action accordingly.

With two sessions of just over two hours each, we couldn’t delve deeply into this major theme, but we were able to confirm the importance of imagining and empathizing with various people’s positions and situations across time and space, and the importance of truly listening to different people’s stories as a catalyst for this understanding. Most importantly, many participants noted how deeply impressive it was to have such frank intergenerational dialogue about this weighty issue—not just among adults, not just among children, but across generations.

While the event was relatively small with nearly 50 participants, we received tremendous support from Suginami Ward, Suginami Collaboration Plaza, Suginami International Exchange Association, and other local stakeholders in organizing this event, helping us increase the number of people who understand our organization’s activities and goals.

Notably, Suginami Ward was one of the bases from which the anti-nuclear movement that began following the 1954 Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb incident spread throughout Japan and the world. Building upon this tradition of over 80 years, we were able to take a very modest but important first step in Suginami.