A town planning workshop held by Oshu City was held in the auditorium of Mizusawa Minami Community Center on July 5th. Thirty residents from those in their 20s to the more experienced crowd gathered together to give their opinions about issues like promoting industry and living with international residents. The city will reflect the opinions of young and old, man and women into its comprehensive strategy, the ILC city planning vision, giving shape to a future vision of Oshu.

The workshop is a part in the process for “all citizen participation” type of plan formulation. The participants got into groups and summarized their opinions on four themes: ▽Living with international residents ▽How to get people from outside the city to come to Oshu ▽How to make Oshu easy to live in for women and younger people and ▽Promoting industry taking advantage of Oshu`s distinctiveness.

The participants moved beyond age and nationality to give their thoughts on city planning: “We need to unearth technologies that we can proudly show to the world,” “Aging of workers in various fields is getting worse, and we need to train their successors as soon as possible,” “We need to create an environment where people raising children can balance that with a job” “We aren`t making full use of our tourism resources.”

Tatsuya Mizushima, a company worker from Isawa ward (30) said that “Young people also have things to say about city planning. The city needs to devise a plan to get opinions from people in their 20s to their 40s who didn’t participate in the workshop. I hope that the city will arrange more chances for residents to give their opinions.”

Oshu aims to jointly formulate the ILC planning vision based on the recommendations from the workshop with the cooperation of related groups by December.