Yuriko Koike (©JAPAN Forward)
Metropolitan Tokyo is a key player on the global stage, and Governor Yuriko Koike is determined to keep it that way. In a sit‑down with JAPAN Forward shortly after her high‑profile swing through Washington, DC, and New York, Koike outlined how city‑to‑city cooperation, urban resilience, and startup‑driven innovation can help the world's largest metropolitan economy navigate an age of overlapping crises. She also reflected on women's leadership in public life and the mindset she believes leaders need when shocks hit.
City Diplomacy on the Global Stage
Koike's recent United States trip was designed to advance what she calls "multi‑city lateralism" — practical cooperation among global hubs that face similar problems regardless of national politics.
In Washington, she delivered remarks at the Hudson Institute and Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and met with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. She also spoke at the United Nations, joining a panel of the Economic and Social Council, and conferred with Secretary‑General Antonio Guterres.
The message she carried was straightforward: cities cannot wait for geopolitics to resolve itself. "Even while discussions are taking place, floods, wildfires, and other disasters are already happening," Koike said. Municipal leaders, she argued, are on the front lines of events that escalate in hours, not diplomatic cycles measured in years. Her prescription is a "multi‑city‑lateral" network through which mayors and governors share data, technologies, and operating playbooks, from disaster response to climate adaptation and public health.
Beyond networking, Koike is also positioning Tokyo as a natural home for international organizations. She said she urged Guterres to consider placing UN offices in Tokyo at a time when the organization is diversifying beyond its New York headquarters.
According to Koike, the Secretary‑General praised Tokyo as the world's safest city with top‑tier digital and physical infrastructure and deep pools of talent. "Tokyo is more than capable of hosting these international organizations," Koike said, adding that she has communicated the metropolitan government's support to the national government.
Building and Sharing Resilience
If multi‑city lateralism is the strategy, resilience is the operating doctrine. "Natural disasters are happening all over the world right now," Koike noted. Over the past decade, Tokyo has invested heavily to keep extreme weather from turning into a catastrophe.
The city has constructed a network of massive underground flood control reservoirs and tunnels that temporarily store cloudburst‑level rainfall and release it gradually, reducing the chance that rivers overflow into neighborhoods. It has reinforced water and sewer pipelines with flexible joints to maintain service after earthquakes. Furthermore, it has upgraded firefighting capabilities and backup power for critical facilities. These layers, Koike said, amount to a metropolitan safety net — "Tokyo's resilience" — that is already reducing risk even as rainfall events grow more intense.
Resilience, in her telling, is also a regional export. Tokyo works closely with major ASEAN capitals such as Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok, advising on flood control engineering, crisis management, and infrastructure hardening. Koike describes this as multi‑city‑lateralism in action: "We are working together on management practices to ensure safety in all our cities." By exchanging technical knowledge and management experience, the network raises the baseline of urban safety across Asia. It functions as a rising tide that reduces losses when disasters strike and accelerates recovery afterward.
Innovation as a Civic Strategy
Koike's second pillar is innovation — not as a buzzword, but as a civic strategy to solve problems and keep Tokyo competitive. Her flagship is Sustainable High City‑Tech Tokyo, better known as SusHi Tech Tokyo, an annual summit that she says has quickly become one of Asia's largest startup gatherings. Its aim is twofold: to connect entrepreneurs and investors at scale, and to channel that energy toward urban challenges from decarbonization to mobility and aging.
"It has only been three years since it started, but it has already become one of Asia's largest platforms," Koike said. SusHi Tech Tokyo provides the venue where startups it connects refine their ideas and create new businesses. Meanwhile, city officials compare notes on what actually works.
It also doubles as a platform for local leaders. During the summit, Tokyo invites mayors and governors from around the world to hold frank discussions on climate adaptation, smart‑city design, and digital transformation as part of the same multi‑city network Koike is building.
A Global Mindset
Complementing the summit is the Tokyo Innovation Base (TIB) in Marunouchi, a co‑working, incubation, and deal‑making hub that links founders with corporate partners, mentors, and investors. "I hope young people will bring fresh ideas and boldly take on the world from the start," Koike said. "This is what we call the 'born global' mindset."
The goal is to ensure that promising teams can test and scale solutions with Tokyo as a launchpad rather than a cul‑de‑sac. She points to a young Japanese entrepreneur she visited on her US trip, who built a thriving high‑tech strawberry farm in the New York area before launching in Japan. This, she explained, is an example of the outward‑looking ambition Tokyo wants to nurture.
Koike argues that a "born‑global" mindset benefits not only founders but the metropolis itself. By attracting overseas startups and giving regional Japanese innovators a stage in Tokyo, the city expands its problem‑solving capacity and diversifies its economy. SusHi Tech and TIB, she said, are designed to make those collaborations routine, and to keep Tokyo on the short list of places where global talent comes to build.
Women in Leadership
As Japan's most prominent female politician, Koike has long championed women's leadership in government and public service. She broke barriers as Japan's first female defense minister and later as Tokyo's first woman governor. Yet progress remains uneven. In the most recent national elections, women accounted for less than 30% of candidates. Even so, she sees the trajectory bending in the right direction.
"I think [the number of women leaders] is gradually increasing," Koike said, pointing to her counterpart, the governor of Yamagata, and a growing cohort of women mayors, town, and village heads. Those leaders have formed a network of women executives at the local level to exchange information and collaborate on economic ideas, including promoting each other's regional products.
The visibility of that network, she believes, matters as much as the policies it produces. "Having such role models encourages the next generation of women to take on new challenges," Koike said. Diversity in decision‑making, she added, isn't simply about equity. It improves outcomes by widening the range of ideas on the table.
Governing Through Crisis
Koike's tenure has been defined by an abnormal run of shocks, including the COVID‑19 pandemic. Those experiences have reinforced a simple premise. "I think the key is what you do during a crisis and how you prepare for it," she said.
For Tokyo's 14 million residents, her mission is clear: "to protect lives, their health, and their livelihoods." That translated during the pandemic into urgent actions to shore up the medical system and support businesses, coupled with sustained public communication to keep residents safe.
Koike condenses her leadership philosophy into a memorable metaphor: leaders need three kinds of vision. A bird's-eye view offers a strategic perspective to focus on long-term direction. The next is a bug's-eye view, the discipline to see details on the ground and how policies meet daily realities. Finally, a fish-eye view, which she defines as sensing the trend lines flowing beneath the surface, technological shifts, demographic changes, or behavioral patterns that will shape choices a few years ahead.
"We need to clearly identify our priorities and then put them into action," she said.
That triad, she argued, is how Tokyo will stay energetic and globally competitive as it contends with peer cities like London and New York, not as rivals to beat, but as benchmarks to learn from and partner with in the same multi‑city network. The formula is iterative: invest in resilience to manage risks, use innovation to turn constraints into opportunities, and keep the city plugged into international circuits where ideas and talent move fastest.
The Road Ahead
With the pandemic now in the past, Koike's plan blends immediate safeguards with long‑term investments. She aims to strengthen the city's infrastructure while fostering startups, researchers, and civic partners — linking cities to multiply the impact.
Her approach is rooted in the daily realities of city governance: storms that don't wait for parliaments, supply shocks that disrupt lives, and health crises that collide with heat waves. The answer, she says, is to share what works, track results, and maintain open channels with peers worldwide.
By sharing technology and know‑how with cities around the world, "Tokyo can fulfill a leadership role," Koike said. The principle remains: lead by connecting.
If Tokyo succeeds, she suggests, it will be due less to one flagship project than to countless small, repeatable practices — from river‑monitoring sensors to procurement rules enabling innovation. For Koike, this management model and vision of multilateralism are her bet that global cities can learn faster together than apart.
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Author: Daniel Manning
