Joining 380 Cosplayers, Others to Launch “UMIGOMI Zero Week 2025”
Published on July 23, 2025
On May 31, I participated in an event to kick off “UMIGOMI (ocean waste) Zero Week 2025,” a nationwide cleanup campaign that focuses on reducing the amount of plastic and other debris in the ocean, a growing problem around the world.
Titled “UMIGOMI Zero Week Kickoff Event–-Let’s Make the Ocean Beautiful! SPOGOMI in Ariake,” the event in Ariake on Tokyo Bay was joined by 380 participants, including Vice Environment Minister Hiroshi Nakada, officers of the Japan Coast Guard, employees of McDonald’s Japan and the Japan Soft Drink Association, and parents with their children.
Also participating were cosplayers dressing as their favorite characters from anime films, manga comics and video games. Many of them have large numbers of social media followers and regularly pick up trash in areas where they film and photograph.
Jointly sponsored by The Nippon Foundation and the Environment Ministry, the UMIGOMI Zero Week cleanup campaign that ran until World Ocean Day on June 8 was designed to raise public awareness of the issue of ocean debris with a view to contributing to a reduction in trash inflows into the ocean.
The kickoff ceremony was linked online with cleanup rallies held in six other prefectures across the nation－Aomori, Ishikawa, Aichi, Shimane, Hiroshima and Kagoshima.
The event featured “SpoGomi” (a combination of “sport” and “gomi”－Japanese for trash), a competition launched in Japan in 2008 to encourage people to clean up public spaces.
A variety of other events were held during the day, including a quiz and an original kabuki production themed on ocean environmental issues.
Vice Environment Minister Nakada told the participants that some experts are forecasting that, at the present rate, the total volume of plastic waste in the world’s oceans could exceed the volume of fish by 2050. “We have to arrest this trend by tackling plastic debris,” he said.
In my speech, I stated: “Humankind cannot survive without a healthy ocean. Let’s make it a rule not to dump trash and collect it if we find it.”
At the Tokyo event, the 380 participants braved occasional rain and collected 98.1 kilograms of trash.
Launched in 2019, The UMIGOMI Zero Week campaign is held once a year, except in 2020 and 2023 when it took place twice. For this year’s rallies, more than 320,000 people from across Japan registered to participate.
I sincerely hope the nationwide campaign, joined by influential cosplayers and others, will help spread the word to a wide audience, including young people, that an estimated 80% of ocean debris that flows into the ocean originates from cities and towns. This means that reducing litter on land is essential to preventing debris from accumulating in the ocean.
