The Chief Resilience Officer of Kyoto on translating resilience, embedding it across government and connecting a thousand years of history to the city’s future.
When Hiroyuki Fujita became Chief Resilience Officer of Kyoto City in April 2017, he faced a curious challenge: how do you explain a concept to a city that has lived it for over a thousand years?
The problem was, he had to understand it first.
“Honestly speaking,” he says through his interpreter, “I didn’t know the word resilience before participating in the initiative.”
At the time, Fujita had spent three decades in public service, working across education, disaster prevention and community revitalisation, eventually rising to Vice Mayor.
The first real test came in Singapore, at the global CRO orientation. Fujita sat in a room full of peers debating resilience in fluent English, following as best he could.
“I had a hard time,” he recalls. “I clearly noticed there were a lot of things I should learn.”
It was not only new to him. It was new to almost everyone in Japan. The term resilience did not even exist.
There was also no clear way to translate it.
In Japanese, resilience is usually written レジリエンス in Katakana, a borrowed word from English. It is understood as the ability to recover, a “supple strength.” In practice, it leans closer to robustness against shocks, most often used in disaster prevention.
For Fujita, that definition was too narrow.
Kyoto, located in central Japan with a population of 1.4 million, is famed for its temples and cultural heritage. Beyond that image lies the city where Fujita sees the value of resilience: a city grappling with rapid ageing, declining birth rates, overtourism, and mounting climate impacts – heat waves, flooding and heavy rains testing an infrastructure that was built across centuries.
His insight was elegant: Kyoto didn’t need to learn resilience – it was already living it.
The lifestyle and way of thinking of Japanese people is quite comparable to resilience,” he says. “We just didn’t know the word.”
Instead of introducing a new concept, Fujita’s motivation became connecting resilience to what already existed: the city’s traditions, its relationship with nature and the way communities support each other, so the city can withstand challenges and thrive for the next millennium.
Kyoto, with more than a thousand years of history, has repeatedly faced and overcome disasters, wars and social change. For Fujita, the task was not to teach resilience, but to make visible what had long been practised.
“I believe the history of Kyoto itself expresses resilience,” he says. “The challenges Kyoto City had and will have is how to balance between protecting their traditional lifestyle and way of thinking and the resilience and prosperity of the city in the future.”
That balance has not been easy to hold. Modernization and rapid urbanization brought new lifestyles with less connection to the resilient practices Kyoto had long embodied. Fujita’s task was not just to name resilience — it was to use it as the key to protecting what makes a city worth preserving against the forces quietly eroding it.
He has done this, in part, by speaking. More than 200 times, across Kyoto, Tokyo, Osaka and beyond — sharing resilience practices and the argument that Japan’s cities hold traditional assets worth protecting, assets they may not even recognise as such.
Every year for eight years, Fujita has delivered the onboarding lecture for every new Kyoto City employee. That means every person who has joined the city government in nearly a decade has heard, on their first day, why resilience matters.
This is how resilience has gradually taken root within the organization.
“I want to share how important resilience is to protect traditional Japanese culture and heritage,” he says, “which Kyoto is trying very hard to carry into the future.”
The results are visible. Kyoto’s Resilience Strategy, developed in 2019, was integrated into the city’s SDGs Future City Strategy in 2021. The approach now shapes disaster prevention plans and has been applied to challenges from overtourism to COVID-19.
“We used resilience thinking to understand how to respond,” he remembers.
The strategy also allowed the city to address challenges that are less visible than disasters, but just as critical. Kyoto is facing a rapidly ageing population and declining birth rates, putting pressure on the systems that sustain its cultural and social fabric.
“If we cannot maintain the population, it becomes difficult to protect what makes Kyoto Kyoto,” he says.
Fujita also brought this thinking to a wider audience, publishing the book “Resilience Kyoto” in Japanese that makes a simple argument: culture is what allows a city to endure.
Understanding resilience was one thing. Embedding it across a city government was another.
“One of the hardest things is how to cooperate with a wide variety of sectors,” Fujita explains. “We had to break down silos.”
Even after years of work, he does not describe it as complete.
“I think I am still halfway,” he says.
The role itself has also evolved.
Before the strategy was completed, Fujita’s work was more central within the city government. Today, much of his influence sits outside it, through speaking engagements and exchanges with other cities.
“Now I have a bigger role outside the city than inside,” he says.
Looking back, Fujita sees resilience less as a technical framework.
“With a resilience way of thinking, we can obtain a new point of view,” he says. “It helps us face difficult situations.”
For Fujita, who arrived in the role having barely heard the word resilience, the journey has been one of continuous translation. Resilience into Japanese. History into framework. Individual conviction into institutional practice — built through years of steady awareness-raising, one conversation at a time.
As of March 31st, 2026, Fujita steps down as Chief Resilience Officer after nine years. Resilience, he says, remains his lifework.