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Suginami, one of Tokyo’s 23 special wards and home to around 586,000 people, offers an example of what this can look like in practice. Over the past four years, the ward government has sought to improve the conditions of people providing public services, develop new forms of resident participation, strengthen the provision of care, and respond to the climate crisis.
The approach appears to have resonated. In her June 2026 re-election, Mayor Satoko Kishimoto expanded her support, while voter turnout also rose. She did so while declining endorsements from political parties and running no online advertising at all.
In this interview, Kishimoto explains how these different areas of municipal policy are connected and why she believes the everyday work of local government can become a starting point for repairing democracy.
Satoko, what do you see as the most important tasks for local government today?
We are living in an extremely unstable social and economic situation, so the first responsibility of local government is to protect people’s daily lives quickly and effectively — especially when they are struggling with rising costs or feeling insecure about their future. That includes economic support. We have made school lunches and teaching materials free, for example, because school-related expenses can become a considerable burden for families. I would like to further subsidize public transport for older residents, so they can get around and participate in everyday life.
But the anxiety people feel today is not only economic. There is also a broader sense of unease about society, and I think this is especially pronounced among young people. So it is important not only to respond to immediate difficulties, but to create a society in which people can feel hope and security. The city is — before it is a place where money is made — a place where we live our lives. That is essentially how I think about local government.
When you first ran for mayor in 2022, one of your central ideas was the “revitalization of the public sphere”. What did you mean by that — and what has changed since then?
For many years, we had been seeing what I would call a dismantling of the public sphere. Suginami had reduced the number of municipal employees, was increasingly reliant on irregular employment, and had outsourced public services, while also reorganizing public facilities. I wanted to turn things around. One of the basic positions I put forward was that municipal facilities and municipal employees are not costs but assets belonging to Suginami. If we want good public services, we also have to protect and value the people who provide those services.
This has taken time, because the idea that the public sector should constantly reduce staff and outsource as much as possible had become deeply embedded in the administration itself. But we have made concrete changes. For example, fiscal-year appointed employees — non-regular municipal workers hired under a system originally designed for temporary or short-term employment — could previously be reappointed for a maximum of five years in Suginami. We abolished that limit. What matters to me is that these workers are no longer treated as if they were only temporary. They have become essential to the public services that communities depend on. We also brought in paid menstrual leave for these employees, and the number of workers actually taking menstrual leave subsequently increased fourfold.
Public procurement is part of the same issue. Local governments spend enormous amounts of public money on services provided by outside organizations. We have therefore started to look more closely at the conditions under which that work is done — including working conditions, stable employment, gender equality, and social and environmental criteria. At the same time, supporting the local economy cannot simply mean selecting someone because they are local or part of the community. Public procurement still has to be fair, efficient, and competitive.
Before becoming mayor, you spent almost two decades researching public services internationally. How has that work shaped what you are doing in Suginami today?
My approach predates entering local government. At the Transnational Institute, particularly through its Public Alternatives programme, I worked for many years with trade unions, researchers, progressive organizations, elected officials, and local governments. We documented how public services that had been privatized or outsourced could be brought back in-house and under public control — not only water, but also waste, childcare, elderly care, energy, telecommunications, libraries, and public transport.
After the financial crisis and the austerity programmes that followed, many movements began to focus more strongly on the local level. From around 2014, I worked closely with people involved in what we later called municipalism, particularly in Europe. The idea was to recover democracy at the local level, gain power in city councils, bring representatives from social movements into local government, and remain connected to those movements after entering office. Without this knowledge, these working relationships, and this perspective, I would never have run for mayor in Japan.
What does revitalizing the public sphere mean beyond improving public services and working conditions?
There are many residents who are facing difficulties or experiencing some degree of loneliness. And there are also people who, for various reasons, are not reached by administrative support. Public facilities can play an important role here, and I want them to be places that everyone can rely on. But residents themselves are also creating many small community spaces throughout Suginami. I would like to build on what is already there: to support these small places and connect them more closely with one another and with public facilities, so that there is a network of places where people can feel that they belong. For me, this is also part of revitalizing the public sphere.
We have already begun to change how we think about public facilities. Instead of the administration deciding how facilities should be reorganized and then informing residents, we have introduced processes in which residents discuss their future together with the administration. In one former school, for example, this process resulted in a plan for a place combining disaster preparedness, childcare, and opportunities for people to meet.
Children and young people are particularly important. When we developed Suginami’s Child Rights Ordinance, children participated in the process themselves. We have also adopted the goal that children should have a safe place they can reach within about a fifteen-minute walk. Vacant shops and empty houses could also provide spaces that young people can really make their own — for cultural activities, art, entrepreneurship, and other activities.
You are describing both municipal support and relationships within the community. Is that also how you think about care?
Yes. In our policies, we speak about further developing community-based mutual care, but local government also needs to make sure that people can reach professional support when they need it. Public health nurses, for example, work directly with pregnant women and mothers after childbirth. As nuclear families have become the norm and community ties have weakened, some people simply have no one nearby whom they can ask for advice.
We have also developed a free and anonymous service where women can consult nurses, psychologists, and dietitians about their mental and physical health at different stages of their lives. For me, this shows how important it is to have someone who listens and can provide professional support.
But bolstering care also raises the question of the conditions under which that care is provided.
Exactly. Caring for the carers is a very important issue. We have to think about the mental well-being of the people whose work is to listen to and support others, but also about their working conditions more generally. I think Japanese society has placed far too little value on the resources and expertise involved in care.
This is closely connected to what I mean by revitalizing the public sphere. We cannot say that care is important while treating the people who provide it as a cost to be reduced. Unless we value care work more highly and invest in the people who provide it, it will be very difficult to create a society in which people feel secure about having children, raising families, growing older, or asking for help when they need it.
You have already talked a lot about residents having a say in decisions. How do you organize that in practice?
We call this “governing through dialogue”. It is rooted in the idea of local self-government: residents themselves should take responsibility for deciding matters concerning their community, and the role of local government is to create the conditions for this to happen. Before, there was a strong assumption that a professional administration should find the most efficient solution and then implement it according to plan. But municipal employees also had so little time and so few resources that they rarely had the opportunity to go out into the community. We have tried to change that by improving working conditions within the administration, giving employees more room to go out into the community and engage with residents. They now increasingly meet residents, the people providing services, and those directly affected by public policy, whose experiences are all important sources of information for policymaking. In these conversations, employees often discover that someone they may previously have seen simply as complaining about a service is also thinking about the future of Suginami — about children, older people, or people with disabilities. They find a lot of common ground.
So dialogue doesn’t only change a particular policy. It can change the relationship between residents and the administration, and gradually build trust.
How does this approach translate into a policy field like climate change?
Climate change is connected with almost every aspect of daily life — how we live, move around, use energy, and consume. That is why I think we have to address it, beginning with the places where people actually live.
Greenery and green infrastructure can help us respond both to extreme heat and to heavy rainfall, which are already directly affecting people’s lives. Practical measures also make a difference: more shade, places to sit, and access to water can make public spaces safer during extreme heat and more inviting in everyday life. Better insulation reduces energy use while making schools and homes more comfortable, and public transport can reduce dependence on cars while helping older people remain active and connected to their community.
Climate policy is also a democratic question. In 2024, we established a Citizens’ Climate Assembly. Seventy-seven randomly selected residents discussed climate, energy, green spaces, and transport, then developed 33 proposals. The municipality considered all of them, and some have already been turned into concrete policies. This is important because administrations sometimes assume that they need to educate residents about environmental issues. But many residents — particularly younger people — are already very aware of the climate crisis. Sometimes politics and administration are the ones that need to catch up.
You have described quite a lot of the things that local government can do. Where do you encounter its limits?
Local governments do not decide everything themselves. Many policies are determined at the national level (for example, social security and the care system) and by the Tokyo metropolitan government (urban infrastructure and city planning), with municipalities expected to implement them. But I think local governments need to be more conscious of their own right to self-government. We have to fulfil our legal responsibilities, but we must not lose our capacity for critical thinking.
At the same time, being close to people gives the local government a particular perspective. The national government may, for example, primarily discuss foreign nationals as “workers”. For us, they are people living their lives here — they are residents of our community. This is particularly important when discrimination and calls for exclusion become more visible. Suginami has adopted a Basic Policy on Multicultural Coexistence, which clearly states that we want to build a community in which every person is respected. For people who are targets of discrimination, knowing that their municipality takes this position can provide real reassurance and support.
Your work in Suginami begins with people’s everyday lives. How do international networks and experiences continue to inform this local approach? And how do you see Suginami in relation to similar experiences elsewhere?
The COVID-19 pandemic was an important moment for international exchange. We could no longer travel, but many organizations held online discussions, and this brought us into contact with realities and movements with which we had previously been less closely connected. I had worked extensively with public-service workers through Public Services International, but these were mostly workers in formal employment. During the pandemic, the situation for workers in the informal sector, especially care workers in the Global South, became impossible to overlook.
Feminist organizations and feminist economists were particularly important in bringing together questions of public health, labour, care, and the economy. The pandemic also exposed the conditions in elderly care in many European countries, where migrant workers often worked without adequate protections. It became clear that elderly care had not only been privatized but, in many cases, financialized, with facilities owned by private equity funds. This showed me that any analysis of public services needed to incorporate informal work and care much more strongly.
There is not yet a clear municipalist network in Japan, and we do not really use municipalism as a term. But I have tried to introduce the idea behind it into Japanese society and politics. Since returning to Japan, I have continued to write and speak about this political philosophy. I think it has given some people hope and a new perspective in a situation where national politics feels very dark. Municipalism has, of course, been strongly inspired by experiences in Latin America and Europe. At the same time, I also draw inspiration from South Korea and Taiwan, where local or national governments have developed progressive practices. These experiences are particularly relevant to me today because they are geographically closer to Japan.
What would you like to build on over the next four years?
We are still in the middle of this process, and I want to deepen what we have already started: strengthening the public sphere, valuing the people who provide public services and care, creating places where people can remain connected, and developing an administration that listens and works together with residents.
What matters first is that we do good work in Suginami. And when I say “we”, I do not mean only the employees of the ward. I mean everyone in the local community. For me, repairing democracy from the local level is an everyday practice. If what we do here can reach other municipalities and contribute to shared learning, hope, and empowerment, I would be very happy.
