From November 3rd to 7th, Takanawa Gateway Fest 2021 was held around the Takanawa Gateway Station.

Following last year’s festival of the same name, this year’s event, under the theme of ”connecting with the local community and discovering the area”, featured the “Takanawa Hop Fest”, which showcased beer brewed from hops grown in Takanawa with the local residents; “the Partner Base Takanawa Gateway Station (currently closed to the public)”, where you get to interact with in-station robots along with their visuals and models; the ”Partner Base Takanawa Tour: Learning the Present and the Future of the City”, where Minato Ward volunteer tourists show you around some of the famous local spots. In addition to these exhibitions and tours, the “The Never Wither Flower Vase and Sustainable Tree“, ”Takanawa Gateway Station Marché”, ”Station Piano” and ”Walk Around Takanawa Gateway Station”, which were all also featured during the ”Playable Week” event in March, were carried out as well.

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With last year's ”5 Days CITY” event, held as a part of Takanawa Gateway Fest, and the ”Playable Week” event held in March, we succeeded in sharing our ongoing efforts of ”experiments” and ”collaborative creation” alongside our fellow partner companies.

At the same time, it has been a major challenge for us to create opportunities for local residents to participate in the city planning and to build sustainable relationships with the community in a multifaceted manner. And now that the construction work for the opening of the new city in 2024 has finally begun, we are gradually beginning to see changes as we make various contacts with the local residents.

This year's Takanawa Gateway Fest focused on the ”local community” to share some of the changes that we have begun to see through the participation of local residents, and to further expand the circle of people involved in the city rather than unilaterally sharing JR East's efforts. In order to achieve this goal, we hope to make Takanawa Gateway Fest an opportunity where local people can “take on challenges” and make it an event for the community as a whole.

In this issue of “note”, Kazuki Kuwahara, a member of the JR East Shinagawa Development Project, will report on the Takanawa Gateway Fest along with the voices of the JR employees in charge of each event.

Kazuki Kuwabara
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit (Planning), New Business Creation Division, Business Creation Headquarters, East Japan Railway Company.
Kuwahara is in charge of branding and promotional operation for the city at TokyoYard PROJECT, as well as interacting and planning events with the local residents to serve as a contact point between JR and the community.

Takanawa Hop Fest

The “Takanawa Hop Fest” introduced beers brewed from hops grown by businesses, schools, and local residents from the Takanawa Gateway Station area.

The ”TokyoYard PROJECT”, a part of the ”Shinagawa Development Project” conducted by JR East around Takanawa Gateway Station, started cultivating hops since last year mainly in the TokyoYard Building (hereinafter referred to as ”TY Bldg.”) which operates as a hub for city planning. The idea came from Toho Leo Co. which is involved in the development of urban infrastructure and the creation of liveliness through green infrastructure technology. We collected waste soil from the construction work, tested its quality, planted seedlings, and grew hops in various locations with the cooperation of local businesses and schools. We have ultimately harvested about 2.8 kg of hops, enough for brewing 600 bottles of beer. And this is how “TAKANAWA HOP WAY”, a beer made with 100% pure hops from Takanawa, was born. At the event, we held a ”TAKANAWA HOP WAY” beer tasting session with the local residents and people who were involved in the cultivation.

The ”TAKANAWA HOP WAY” etiquette decided through voting at the station

The first phase of the project started with an approach to people in the Takanawa area, with whom we had established a relationship. And for the second phase to start in the next fiscal year, we would like to reach out to people in the Konan area as well. In addition to offers from us, we would also like to welcome the local people who are willing to try making hops with us. Through such endeavors, we would like to connect the east and the west side of the station, and nurture the culture of the entire area.

Kentaro Higuchi
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit (Planning), New Business Creation Division, Business Creation Headquarters, East Japan Railway Company.
Higuchi is in charge of planning and managing events which promote the appeals of the area, as well as aligning with neighboring schools.

Since JR East is a newcomer to the Takanawa area, we must move closer to the community and build relationships with the people. With this in mind, we started gathering peers for hop-growing.

The TY Bldg., which operates as a hub for hop cultivation, is not well known to most of the people in the neighborhood. Not only through these events, but also through these continuous efforts, we would like to make the TY Bldg. a place where local residents can feel free to visit and relax, for example, using it for seasonal events in the community. At the same time, we would also like to actively participate in events organized by the local residents.

Ideally, we would like to be able to sell these beers we have made at restaurants in the city as a specialty of Takanawa. Furthermore, by working even more closely with the community, we would like to create a cycle of hop-growing system which completes itself in Takanawa alone, from the soil and water used, the cultivation, the brewing, the sales, and to the reuse of bottles.

Takanawa Gateway Station Marché

The ”Takanawa Gateway Station Marché” is an ongoing event held at the station with the cooperation of various food-related businesses, which aims to provide opportunities for “taking on challenges” to people who provide wonderful food from all over Japan including the Takanawa area.

At this year’s marché, we sold bundles of ”Gunma Meigetsu” and ”Oshu Roman” apples grown at the Sendai Agricultural Gardening Center and JR Fruit Park Sendai Arahama. The apples are both praised as mythical apples due to their small quantity productions.

We have also sold Shokupan (Japanese milk bread) in cooperation with Tezukayama Panshirō, a bakery famous for its high quality product, with Takanawa Gateway Station's exclusive branding.

Both defined by their high sugar content and rarity, fully ripe apples were transported to Takanawa Gateway Station via the Shinkansen bullet train.

The event's exclusively branded Shokupan sold out both in pre-order and on the day of the event.

This year’s marché had two concepts: ”Delivering to the community” and ”Delivering from the community”. Specifically, as with the apples at this year’s marché, the idea was to provide rich food from all over the country to the people living in the Takanawa area. At the same time, we also wanted to introduce the taste of a long-established bakery with a history of 40 years, to people visiting the Takanawa area. Through the sales of rich food from all over the country at the station, we believe we have succeeded in conveying the appeal of different regions through the power of food.

In the course of communicating with the local residents, we found out that since there are few supermarkets in the Takanawa area, people tend to go shopping in Meguro, Ebisu, and Shinagawa areas, which are steps away from where they live. I believe that the reason why ”Pan Shirō” is loved by the Takanawa residents despite its location in Hiroo, Shibuya Ward, is because of such conditions and customers' need to buy better products. For this reason, we will need to consider ”where the new city starts and ends” and approach it from the perspective of the already existing livelihood in the area and the ”needs” of consumers, rather than simply dividing the areas geographically. With this in mind, we invited a bakery in Hiroo to take part in the marché.

We would like to continue to expand the wave of exchange step by step, listening to the voices of producers across the country, people involved in the food and beverage industry, and people living in the community.

Yusuke Yamagata
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit (Planning), New Business Creation Division, Business Creation Headquarters, East Japan Railway Company.
Yamagata is in charge of creating new services with the opening of the city in mind, interacting with and planning events for the community, as well as mobility services.

The future challenge for us is to connect the Shirokane-Takanawa area’s heritage, the relatively new condominiums and the growing number of residents in the Konan area, and the rest of Japan with the “food” as a key factor.

Leveraging my experience of being exposed to wide variety of ingredients and cultures from all over Japan as a food buyer for a department store, as well as utilizing our greatest asset of network with the region and know-how of train cargo transportation, we would like to work on the concept of ”Delivering to/from the community”. And through these efforts, we would like to realize the happiness of customers who come in contact with the new city.

Partner Base Takanawa Tour: Learning the Present and the Future of the City / Takanawa Gateway Station Neighborhood-scape

For making Takanawa a place where people in the community can come together and ”take on challenges”, we felt the necessity of having to let people know more about the new city.

“Partner Base Takanawa Tour: Learning the Present and the Future of the City (hereafter referred to as Partner Base Takanawa Tour)” combined the viewing of a model and video clips of the city of the future, robot operation experience, and a tour of famous spots in the city to learn about the attractions of the surrounding area. The location of the tour, “Partner Base Takanawa Gateway Station (hereafter Partner Base)”, is a restricted area of the station that has been opened only to partner companies until now, and this was the first time it was opened to the public.

LUUP test ride *No license plate numbers or mirrors are attached to the LUUP as it runs in a private property limited to tour participants.

Smart robot ”temi”

Collaborative transport robot ”THOUZER”

Complex service robot (autonomous mobile type)

In the first part of the tour, we had participants experience the electric kickboard sharing service ”LUUP”, which is currently being tested at the station, the autonomous smart robot ”temi”, which can be operated remotely and has AI assistant functions, and the collaborative transportation robot ”THOUZER”. Then we presented the participants with a model and video of the city of the future at ”Gate01,” which aims to convey the outline and concept of the new city and JR East's passion on city planning. Finally, with the cooperation of the Minato City Tourism Volunteer Association, we introduced them with the different routes of a city tour around the Takanawa district, including its history, culture, and untold stories, so that visitors could learn more about the current state of the city.

The volunteer tourist guides have a repertoire of about 20 different routes for the city tour. They also supervise the city tour courses which utilize the contactless mobile stamp rally.

While imagining the city of the future based on the experience at Gate01 and interaction with the newest robots, we also wanted people to rediscover the history and culture of the area and learn about its present and past. With this intent in mind, the event ended on a high note, reaching its reservation limit in advance. We would like to continue working with local residents to connect the past and future of the area.

In the ”Takanawa Gateway Station Neighborhood-scape” project, illustrations of famous spots in the Takanawa area were posted on the temporary enclosures in front of the station. The starting point of this project was to encourage people to give more than a passing thought to the local scenery when they pass by the still bleak development sites and inorganic enclosures. The illustrations were provided with the help of the Tamachi Shirokane Machi-ing* Committee (Ricoh Japan Co., Ltd.), which resides in Shibaura, Minato-ku, and is engaged in activities to revitalize the city by using illustrated sketches of the local scenery.

*Machi-ing (Machi meaning “city” in Japanese) is a play on words with the word “marching” and also pronounced as such.

These activities are being carried out nationwide as the ”Machi-ing Committee”, and they are working to revitalize the area by creating printed materials using the cityscape illustrations and ordering them from local printing companies. Their aspiration to enliven the entire area coincided with ours to bring the project to life.

In addition to the locations featured in this project, we also collected ”favorite landscapes” through the station poster polls and social media, and we plan to create new illustrations for them in the future.

Yuko Atsumi
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit (Planning), New Business Creation Division, Business Creation Headquarters, East Japan Railway Company.
Atsumi is in charge of operations for branding and promotion for the city at TokyoYard PROJECT.

At last year's ”5 Days CITY” event, we gave local residents a chance to experience the atmosphere of the city that we aim to realize through video contents and experiments. This time, we held the ”Partner Base Takanawa Tour” and the ”Takanawa Gateway Station Neighborhood-scape” to give people a chance to learn about the future, present and past of the city in a more realistic manner.

Minato Ward is often perceived as urban and a bit inorganic, but it is also a place with a rich historical background where long-standing stores and culture still remain. We believe that the ”Partner Base Takanawa Tour” became a great opportunity for people to discover new things about the area by learning routes and history that even the locals are not aware of.

At the same time, it provided us with the opportunity of new discoveries as well, as we learned new things from the locals. What’s more, there were some children in the tour participants who knew so much about the local history that even the volunteers were surprised. We hope to continue providing opportunities for these communications so that we can pass on the culture of the region to future generations.

Never Wither Flower Vase and Sustainable Tree

We also exhibited the ”Never Wither Flower Vase and Sustainable Tree,” ”Takanawa Gateway Station Marché”, and ”Station Piano”, which were all hosted in the last event as well, and made them even more accessible for the local community.

For the ”Never Wither Flower Vase and Sustainable Tree” exhibition, students from nearby elementary schools helped us in collecting vases for the distribution. We also had them write down “what they would like to do in the city in the future and what they want the city to be like” and displayed them on a specially set up board at the station. The Sustainable Tree was decorated with pictures and messages written by local kindergarteners. On the day of the event, the children came to the station to look for the cards they had made, and we believe that this became an opportunity for them to feel closer to Takanawa Gateway Station. At the same time, it offered us a valuable opportunity to remind ourselves that we must make Takanawa a city where these wishes can really come true.

Mari Oikawa
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit ((Next Generation City Development), New Business Creation Division, Business Creation Headquarters, East Japan Railway Company.
Oikawa is in charge of operating branding and promotion of the city at TokyoYard PROJECT.

I get an impression that the circle of people who participate in the Takanawa Gateway Station project is gradually getting wider, thanks to the connections that we have built with elementary and middle schools through different events and community activities, and the newly established connections with the local kindergartens.

On the other hand, due to the nature of a long-term project, it is a sad fact that the people in charge of each contact have often been replaced due to personnel shifts. Since our mission is to value the ties with the local community, I feel that we need to devise ways to ensure that even if the person in charge of the project is replaced, the new person in charge will inherit the idea and engage with the community with the same enthusiasm. This is so that the ties that have been deepened with the community will not be severed for company’s convenience.

By doing so, we would like to create a sustainable relationship with the community where people from all walks of life keep connecting. We would like to see a future in which an initiative like the “Sustainable Tree” becomes a symbol of such community.

The ”Station Piano,” which had only been on display last time, was open for performances (10:00-17:00)

Making opportunities for the community to “take on challenges“

In addition to these events, we also hold hop growing activities throughout the year, interact with neighborhood associations and chambers of commerce, transport foodstuffs by Shinkansen outside of the Takanawa Gateway Station Marché, and collaborate with schools from kindergartens to universities, as well as hosting their visits to embankments and extracurricular classes. We believe that we have been able to increase our contact with the local community step by step through continuous communication.

As we continue to build on these connections, we hope that the “Takanawa Gateway Fest” will become more than just an opportunity to present our efforts, but also an occasion where local people can “take on challenges” in practice. And furthermore, we want for it to become more than a mere festival for the station, but an annual event for the entire city.

Rather than just building a large facility, inviting shops and tenants, and saying ”we’re done”, we want to create countless points of contact between the city and the community, and for the station and the area to continue working together as one. This is what JR East pictures the Takanawa area as in the future, ”a city where you can take on challenges”. In the handout for the Takanawa Gateway Fest, we have included a list of people who have contributed to the event. We believe that the increasing number of names of local companies and residents on the handouts will be more than enough proof that we are getting closer to realizing a new kind of city.

Interview and Edit by Takuya Wada
Photograph by Yutaro Yamaguchi
Translation by Keitaro Takama
Content Direction by blkswn publishers Inc.

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