No. 46 Nanzan Elementary School opening commemorative lecture

(Published in the September 15, 2015 issue of Public Relations Inagi)

Nanzan Elementary School is the 12th new school in the city and opened on April 1st of this year. It was newly constructed within the area of ​​the Nanzan Eastern Land Readjustment Project, which is promoting good urban development in a section of Tama Hills that crosses the central part of the city from east to west, and was designed with three basic principles in mind: We proceeded.
The first goal is to create an environment-friendly school that coexists with greenery, making use of the rich natural environment of the hills.The second goal is to create a school that collaborates with the local community in line with new urban development. The concept is a ``disaster-resistant school'' that takes advantage of the earthquake-resistant ground.
We hope that the newly born Minamiyama Elementary School will make the most of its naturally rich hills and location and become a ``satoyama school'' that will be enjoyed by the local community. With this in mind, we have chosen the bronze statue of Kinjiro Ninomiya as our school's monument.
This bronze statue was once installed at many schools, but it is rare for it to be installed at a new school, and there are cases where it has been removed at existing schools. Kinjiro Ninomiya has been conducting rural management consulting throughout the Tohoku region, and has successfully restructured the management of more than 600 villages. Unfortunately, however, in recent years his achievements have been forgotten, and the significance of the statue has been misunderstood.
Therefore, this time, we have invited Professor Mariko Nakagiri, who is Kinjiro's 7th generation descendant and holds a doctorate in education from Kyoto University, as our lecturer. Although the time was limited, I believe that the lecture titled ``Creating Rich People: Learning from Kinjiro Ninomiya'' was a fruitful lecture, and that more people were able to understand the philosophy of ``Hotoku.''
The idea of ​​``Hotoku,'' which is necessary to put into practice the ``Watermill Idea'' of half obeying (knowing, observing, accepting) and half disobeying (taking countermeasures and devising), is that ``Creating a prosperous person is the beginning of everything.'' I am convinced that this will lead to the "satoyama education" that our school aims for.
We would like to once again thank Professor Nakagiri for taking time out of his precious schedule to give a lecture, and we would also like to thank the many citizens who visited the venue on the day.