Making ambitious ideas for social innovation work in the real world.
Good ideas are only the beginning. Making them work in the real world takes partnerships, infrastructure, experimentation and sustained effort.
We bring those pieces together to turn ambitious social and environmental ideas into platforms, initiatives and models that work in practice.
BUILD
mymizu
Making refilling the easy choice.
Avoiding single-use plastic should not be difficult.
In 2019, SIJ launched mymizu, a free platform that helps people find places to refill their bottle and brings businesses, municipalities and communities into the same movement.
What began as a simple idea has grown into a platform used by hundreds of thousands of people.
800,000+ users
15,000+ refill spots in Japan
207,000+ refill spots connected worldwide
12 city & prefectural governments in the mymizu alliance
Beyond the app itself, mymizu works with companies, communities and local governments to make everyday action visible, social and easier to sustain.
Michinoku Coastal Trail
Helping more people discover Japan’s 1,000+ km trail in the lesser-known Tohoku region
The Michinoku Coastal Trail is a 1,000+ km walking route along the Pacific coast of Tohoku. We built what has become the #1 English-language guide to the trail, helping thousands of people discover it and plan their journeys.
Featured by BBC, CNN, Lonely Planet and others, the project connects international travellers with the landscapes, communities and stories of a region still rebuilding and revitalising after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
By making the trail easier to discover and explore, we are helping bring visitors and spending to smaller communities outside Japan’s major tourism hotspots. Hikers stay in local accommodation, eat locally and spend days travelling through places that many international visitors would otherwise never reach.
We also work with local governments, tourism organisations and travel companies to help them better understand international visitors and develop more effective promotion strategies, content and experiences for overseas audiences.
The project is about more than promoting a hiking trail. It is about supporting a slower, more locally rooted form of tourism that strengthens regional economies and communities, creates meaningful connections between visitors and local people, and helps spread tourism beyond Japan’s increasingly crowded destinations.
Built from practice.
Building our own initiatives means we understand what sits between a good idea and something that actually works: understanding people, testing assumptions, bringing partners together, building trust, communicating clearly and adapting as reality changes.
We bring that experience into the programs, partnerships and advisory work we design with others.
Have an idea or challenge you want to build around?
Tell us what you are working on. We can explore whether our experience could be useful.