Transcriber: Ayana Ishiyama Reviewer: Son Huy Vu
[Learning Activist, Vision Navigator, TEDxTokyo Founder]
(Applause)
How great is that?
I didn't have to say anything.
It's such an honor and pleasure to be here.
I am so excited to be in what I call "God's Country."
I am a snowboarder and I love powder.
And there is no place better than right here, in Hokkaido.
TED.
A lot of different meanings for TED.
Originally "Technology, Entertainment, Design."
I think that E has shifted more toward Education.
Or Dilip would say,
"It's talking, eating, and drinking."
(Laughter)
I like all three versions of it.
What does TED mean in Japan?
What does the TEDx movement mean to Japan?
And how is it evolved?
Japan, is probably the most creative, intelligent country in the world.
If you look that this definition that is up here.
When confronted by a challenge that is nearly but not entirely novel,
Japan is amazing at taking something and making it better.
I don't think anybody in the world would debate that.
The world looks at Japan as being highly creative.
But Japan's creative confidence is quite low.
So one of the things that TED and the TEDx movement has been doing,
has been developing Japan's creative confidence
through TED's main slogan,
which is "Ideas worth spreading."
A lot of people think about TED as talks, talking heads, people on stage.
Yes, that's part of it.
But really, I think more than anything,
it's about connecting our two spiritual needs:
learning and sharing.
TED very much is about learning and sharing,
and bringing people together to learn and share.
I remember the first time I went to TED in Monterrey,
and there were 500 of us in this room.
And I get chilled actually every time I think about this
because this is the first session, first talk.
How many of you have seen this video? Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.
How many of you have seen this?
Well, you haven't,
over 10 million people have viewed this video.
It's one of the most popular talks online. It's absolutely phenomenal.
So to be in a room at TED or even TEDx experience live
actually is quite different than just seeing the talks online.
What you don't see is all the things that happen outside of the talks.
The space is out there created for people to relax, engage, or just sit and relax,
and watch the talks live,
or people lying on beds, watching TED in bed,
or getting a massage.
You need a head massage after five days of TED.
It's for sure.
Or the parties that take place on the beach before and after.
When people really are getting together and developing a sense of community,
or the little side shows that are taking on.
I mean, TED is really about
bringing about all kinds of different people together.
I mean,
what does Queen Noor have to do with the Sergey, the co-founder of Google.
And guess what happened? They had a problem with the technology.
And some heckler from the top came down and started heckling TED
because it's technology.
That heckler was Robin Williams.
(Laughter)
What do Robin Williams, Sergey, and Queen Noor have in common?
TED.
It's really about bringing people together.
Can you imagine having an after party in an aquarium?
And somebody slicing up sirloin beef,
and behind you, is a tank of Jellyfish?
Now that's an idea worth spreading.
Or you see the entertainment there,
and this little Japanese American guy, named Jake Shimabukuro, said,
"You know, what I love about the Ukulele is people have low expectations of it.
And it's just jamming."
But not only that.
What you don't see is you don't see the after party at midnight
when he is playing in synch with all the other artists
after the TED sessions.
So it's not just talks online.
It's really about ideas worth spreading in every possible way.
But I think if you go deeper and deeper into what TED means,
it's about creating those aha moments.
How do you create an aha moment?
Aha moments are when you have all these different things
that are disconnected.
Like Queen Noor, Sergey, and Robert Williams,
you have brought them all together,
and your minds going nuts, it's trying to figure out
to make sense of all these different things
that are coming out of it.
And then, "Ah, aha."
Something new comes.
New idea comes and sparks.
That's what I think really TED is about.
It's also about dreaming.
I know every single year I go to TED,
I come back with a bigger dream and a bigger vision.
And I'm inspired to make that dream come true
because the people that are in the room and around me
are not only dreamers,
but they make those dreams come true.
What's wrong with this picture you see here?
Do you think Bill Gates is dreaming about the apple that he has in his hands?
(Laughter)
And you talk about dreams.
Japan is my home,
and I think Japan will be my home for the rest of my life.
One of the dreams that I had
and the co-founder of TEDxTokyo, Todd Porter,
and many really important people in the Japanese community
was to bring TED to Japan.
To really ignite Japan through sharing ideas,
through developing a community,
Todd Porter had Salons going on.
In the beginning, you couldn't have live speakers.
You could only show the videos,
and people could get together and could talk about it.
And we took it to the next level.
We asked TED if we could have the live stream in.
It was a small apartment in Jiyugaoka.
And they said, "Yes."
We said, "this is great,
but we actually want to have our own speakers.
We believe in Japan there are Japanese people
that have ideas worth spreading around the world,
and we want them to share."
And TED said, "Guess what?
You guys are in luck,
because we are creating something new,
because every city in the world would love to have TED.
But we can't be everywhere."
So the first TEDx event in the world took place in California.
The second TEDx event took place in Japan.
Quite a responsibility, with no partners
and very few people had really tasted the TED sauce.
But we gave it a try, and we put together an event.
A few months later,
we were so ecstatic when we saw Lara Stein, the director of TEDx,
standing on our stage talking about one of the premiere events in the world.
The event we started in Japan just really ignited the community
and made people really want to do more.
But it's not just about a conference or a day.
Our dream was really to create a platform,
a platform for innovation.
Creativity in Japan brings all the different groups together
because Japan has this group, this group, and this group.
Why don't we bring them all together?
And create innovation platform and use TED,
so the community is just as important as the success of the event.
And we started developing the community,
and then we started finding some of our speakers and entertainers.
Next thing you know, they ended up on the main TED stage.
The very first Japanese speaker was on the stage last year,
Kenichiro Mogi.
And BLACK,
the two-time world champion, yo-yo world champion,
will be on the main stage of TED this year.
So we feel like there are ideas worth spreading,
and we are getting closer and closer.
But it's not necessarily about sharing ideas on the TED stage,
because we have our own platforms here.
One of the things we evolved at the time as well
has been having talks in Japanese.
I checked the other day,
there was one thousand and ten talks subtitled in Japanese.
Now initially, for a lot of Japanese people,
they think it's about presentation or about learning English.
But as Kondo-San shared earlier,
it's also that there are a lot of really key ideas and messages
that are embedded within the talks
that I think are really powerful and inspiring as well.
And that's probably what brings you here today.
Just like TED, we wanted to have our ideas worth spreading,
and we wanted to think outside the box.
So this year, we had this really silly idea.
"Why don't we have our after party in a shrine?"
And the Japanese people with us were like,
"You can't have a party in a shrine."
(Laughter)
"Why not?"
"You just can't do that!"
"Who's the God? If I remember correctly there was a mirror you look at it,
you are kind of God that is a reflection of yourself, so..."
"But you just can't do that!
You can't have a party in a shrine."
So we went to the shrine and asked them,
"Hey, can't we have a party here?"
And a nephew of the owner said,
"Are you talking about TED?
You want to bring TED to our shrine?"
"Yay!"
So, thinking outside the box, ideas worth spreading are continuing
to shift the ideas worth spreading in different ways.
There was 920-year-old shrine, this year, with live music,
if only you can imagine it.
That was absolutely extraordinary.
But another idea of ideas worth spreading is moving things forward.
I am an educator. My official title was learning activist.
I think we all should be actively learning around the world.
There's nobody I know that wants the E in TED to be education
as much as it is entertainment.
And a group of us got together and launched what was TEDxYouthDay.
That movement was launched in Japan.
Last year, during the middle of November,
during the United Nation's Children's Rights day,
over a hundred TEDxYouth events
with middle-school and high-school kids around the world
organized their own TEDx events,
which is absolutely extraordinary.
So it's been interesting to see as the TEDx movement has grown,
the different kinds of TEDx events there are.
About two months after the March 11th [earthquake] hit Tohoku,
we had a TEDx event.
Many people said, "you are going to cancel, right?
You can't do the TEDx."
We said, "Absolutely not, we're the opposite.
We are more motivated than ever to do an event."
This inspired a group of university students in Tohoku University. They said,
"We want to make a difference.
We know we are still in college
but we want to start making a difference in Tohoku."
So they started their TEDxTohokuUniversity event,
which has also been quite a movement
throughout Japan, of many different universities.
[TEDxTokyo yz] started for young adults who not quite hit the tipping point.
They are there, they're thinkers they're doers, and they're change makers,
but they haven't quite gotten there yet,
and most of it is due to the amount of experience and time that they have.
Gatherings in the evenings of people getting together and talking about
how we can connect the dots, what we can do for Japan,
and how we can move it forward
has been taking place throughout Japan through the TEDx platform.
TED realized we needed more people to come and taste the sauce,
so they create an opportunity for TEDx organizers
to go to TEDActive and get a sense of what TED is.
Because if you haven't experienced it,
it's really hard to create an environment that's very TED-like.
The TEDxTeachers movement was also launched in Japan,
which is starting to become a global movement.
And not long ago in Sendai, the World Bank, with IMF,
wanted to have their own TEDx event in Japan.
So many of TEDx organizers got together and collaborated with the World Bank
to actually put on the TEDx event to showcase to the world again
what Japan has to share with the rest of the world.
There are TEDx events from Sapporo, all the way down, to Okinawa.
There are over twenty TEDx organizers and licenses throughout Japan,
and this number is growing rapidly.
TED decided Japan was a place they wanted to go,
and they did the global talent search
to see if they could find some people to go on the main stage of TED from Japan.
TEDx organizers around the world are starting to collaborate.
There's been collaboration with so many different countries in Asia,
including Taipei and Shanghai.
Since we launched the global movement in Japan,
there's an extraordinary amount of events of TEDx taking place.
This is the data from about, I think, two months ago.
There's an average of five TEDx events taking place around the world.
The amazing part: it's a hundred percent volunteer.
All the people working here today to provide this environment for you
are volunteers.
Where are we today?
I'll give you a taste of a TEDx
through the eyes of a camera that I was holding
as I was walking around to give you a sense
of how things have continued to evolve here in Japan.
(Music)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
(Music)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
Again, a hundred percent volunteers,
I think it is absolutely extraordinary.
The social media has really picked up on the TEDx movement in Japan,
like you wouldn't believe.
NHK decided that it was so valuable
that they wanted to have a TV show every Sunday night.
They just renewed it, they'll have another year of "Super Presentation."
The first time ever in Shibuya Crossing, there was an event shown live.
It wasn't the whole event but parts of it.
So, I think the TEDx movement has definitely arrived in Japan.
There's no question about it.
There have been people who have gone through their own self-discovery,
have started their businesses,
and have joined companies of people they met in the TEDx community.
They have like minds.
People are getting together that may have never gotten together
with the big picture in mind and hope and the wish for change.
Partners have decided
they wanted to have a little bit more of TED sauce themselves
within their organization, or how they can work and collaborate
with other partners and organizations throughout Japan.
Some of the top entrepreneurs after 3.11 came to the TEDx community
and asked the top people of alternative energy
what are the alternative energy resources that we can use
instead of nuclear energy.
The platform has been created.
It's here. It's living. It's alive.
People are having a great time and being part of it,
because the passion, hope, inspiration,
and the spirit of coming together,
I don't know anything more powerful than that.
People are coming to Japan that maybe wouldn't have come to Japan
to join and learn more about the ideas Japan has that are worth spreading.
And there's no question in my mind, the creative intelligence is there.
Let's take that and combine that,
and have the creative confidence that Japan needs to move forward.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)