This week, it’s Haiphong again. This week feels dryer than usual, but I promise the content is interesting, especially because the contours of lessons we can learn from the organization of Seattle and Haiphong’s governments are starting to take shape. Over my time in Vietnam, I have been astounded by the rapid change everyone has gone through for the past 30 years - operationally, it’s a marvel. Likewise, Seattle has become a place of safety and innovation, and when I think about the lessons that can be shared across the Pacific Ocean, it’s hard not to get excited!

Weekly Roundup

If you’re interested in travel pics and a few lines of narrative, feel free to check out the Instagram - for now you need to request access, but I’ll admit anyone, so don’t be shy!

https://www.instagram.com/thelanyardboard/

New Favorite Sources

None this week! I’ll be including lots of sources next week for the research I’ve been doing (links to the laws and so forth).

New Resources

This section will provide links to resources such as infographics that have been produced in the past week that are useful for understanding, mapping or working with City of Seattle stuff, broadly.

Changes to the blog! If you go to the homepage (https://www.thelanyardboard.com), you’ll be able to find tabs for resource infographics & weekly editions.

Organization Structure - Haiphong Part II

With the end of my first period of being in-country for Vietnam, I wanted to provide a clear breakdown of the structure of Haiphong’s Municipal Government.

For the time being, my analysis will have a few notable exclusions, which will be layered in over time as the analysis develops (if only for establishing good controls). I’d like to name them at the top, because I also think that independent research by the reader could be interesting. The main factors excluded from the analysis (for now) are;

• The MTTQ, or the Vietnam Fatherland Front. This is a structural element of Vietnamese Society that is public in nature but not government - there’s nothing that maps cleanly onto it functionally or structurally that I have identified in American socio-political life. Analysis of its role will be easier when the role of the municipal government is well-characterized.

• The governing political parties in the US and Vietnam. While they do structurally influence the shape and direction of policy and governance, and there are fascinating structural realities behind how the party is organized in Vietnam when compared to American party governance, it’s similar to the MTTQ in that it’s difficult to analyze without risking making apples to oranges comparisons.

• The Judicial bodies in the US and Vietnam. This is just a structural reality both countries contend with - the courts are on separate parallel tracks in many ways to the governance of cities. Sometimes court rulings will create changes that influence policy in cities, but it’s marginal enough that it makes sense to focus in on the legislative and executive apparatuses of the two cities in question.

• Relationships between local agencies and higher tier agencies of the same type. This will be necessary to look at by the end of this research project, but the heterogeneity makes this a monumental task that should be taken systematically after mapping out the structures of the municipalities. For example, mapping relationships between ‘Seattle Department of Education and Early Learning’ with WA State’s “Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction” and with the USA’s “Department of Education”. This will be necessary because one of the key differences of Vietnam’s Municipal Government is that its department-level agencies have direct relationships and lines up to the national ministry-level agencies, and receive guidance, directives, rules, etc. from them, making the work of City Governance intrinsically linked to larger systems. This is true in the USA too - many of the funds the City uses are federal or state funds that come in the form of strict grant-reporting relationships that create similar ties that take different forms. I’ll look at these, but only after the skeleton has been constructed.

With these caveats in place, it’s a good idea to dive into what Vietnamese cities are made of, using the example of the Haiphong department of construction.

Form of Government & “Branches”

Vietnamese cities, at first blush, take a very recognizable form when comparing them to American cities. At the top, there’s a People’s Council (Hội đồng nhân dân (HĐND)), comprised of elected representatives from all over the city. The People’s Council is tasked with legislating, as well as oversight of the executive departments. The People’s Council also elects the head of the executive ‘branch’ of the city, known as the People’s Committee (Ủy ban nhân dân (UBND)).

This feels awfully similar to the role of City Councils in America that employ a council-manager form, especially when thinking about oversight systems like what we know from the City of Seattle (where city councilmembers have a caseload of departments underneath the mayor that they have oversight of).

It’s tempting to just call it there. It’s like a mayor-council format, with legislative and executive bodies that keep most of the administrative power in the hands of the executive, but absolute oversight and appointment power in the hands of the democratically elected legislative.

Where this becomes problematized is that in Vietnam, being a People’s Council-member is a part time job.

This means that farmers, teachers, doctors, low, middle and high-ranking members of the executive government - they are all able to become council-members through the elections, and in each election and council you see a great diversity of backgrounds. Unlike in a place like Seattle where council-members often do have a background in diverse fields (possibly biasing towards those with public service experience already), people do not renounce their former title and job when they become council-members. They live their lives as normal, and attend regular meetings of the council, but at a much lower frequency than what we see in the City of Seattle.

This also means that the act of being in the executive government and a councilor blurs the lines of a simple ‘balance of power’. If you ask a citizen of Vietnam about the local government, they will almost certainly imagine and be talking about the UBND (People’s Committee) rather than the People’s Council (HDND), because it’s this executive and administrative body that performs the work of governance. A great example of how this differs is that there is an executive department in Haiphong that is dedicated to researching, writing, and proposing legislation. This means that even though the People’s Council has legislative power, the People’s Committee is able and well-resourced enough to define its own evolving machinery, where the City of Seattle’s Executive Departments have historically often relied on acts of Council to establish them and make large structural changes.

One plausible interpretation, besides the People’s Committee having more power in a ‘balance of powers’ framework would be that there’s just not much intended tension between the People’s Council and People’s Committee. In Seattle, we talk about Council and the Mayor’s Office as having separate priorities that overlap or exist in tension, and the resulting “City Government” being a series of compromises and joint projects. In contrast, the Haiphong City Government, and cities in Vietnam, may be intended to prioritize quick, decisive action in return for less of a rich top-level split of powers and responsibilities than what we see in Seattle (where the top-level split between its 4 ‘branches’ represent multiple reporting lines of paid full time staff). Much of what we would ascribe to our Legislative or Law Departments in Seattle (like writing laws) are sublimated under the executive.

Departments

This is probably the clearest commonality between Seattle and Haiphong’s Municipal Government. Within the Executive Branch, there are departments that split up the fundamental subjects that are administered by the City. Simple, right?

Yes and no. Departments (Sở) may operate in a similar way to how ours are in Seattle - a Chairperson (director) who is appointed, some deputy chairs, divisions within it - but the subjects that are covered tend to be very different. In fact, they are very different even when compared to Haiphong’s Government pre-2025 reforms. During the reforms, the Departments of the city merged until there were only 13 executive departments (including the office of the People’s Committee, the analogue to our Mayor’s Office).

Before the merger, certain topics were not grouped together. There was a department of Transportation, and a Department of Construction - now, those are both within the remit of the Department of Construction. Information Technology was separate from Science, but now both are handled by the Department of Science and Technology.

This speaks to the magnitude of the reforms in 2025, and as I get deeper into this structure, it’s apparent that the changes have impacted far more than just ‘where people’s local offices are’ - the way city employees do their work is fundamentally different, and the way certain fields of service delivery are grouped together is incredibly different. For the research, this creates some complications. On one hand, there is a clear before and after period of the intervention that can be analyzed to understand richly what the effects of changing department structures can be. On the other, it makes it impossible to compare current data to historical trends when talking about Seattle and Haiphong, because any pre-2025 data is going to be referring to a different system. None of this, however, is a major obstruction to the research, just something that needs consideration.

Underneath the departments, you actually have a few categories of subdivision that have notable similarities and differences with Seattle. The table above lists all of these categories, and the number of these categories under each department.

Division level

Underneath the department level is what we might call the division level. Divisions (Phòng) are the typical ways each department structures itself, very similar to the model of Seattle’s executive departments. The average for Haiphong’s departments is 7 divisions per department, but there are other types of organizational entities that report directly to departments, placing them at the same administrative level to divisions.

At this level, we have;

• Divisions (Phòng), the ordinary structure for city staff working in the executive for programs and service delivery

• Sub-departments (Chi cục), special bodies that have a lot more autonomy and are likely to have special functions that mean they need to be legislated separately

• Administrative Organization (TCHC), similar to sub-departments, these just sometimes are given different names in the organizing legislation, but fundamentally are just bodies that report to the department that have specialization and autonomy

• Public Service Delivery Unit (Đơn vị sự nghiệp công lập (Đơn vị SN)), these are (usually physical) facilities and organizations that are directly run at a site or programmatic level - like schools and clinics/hospitals

There’s a massive diversity of how each department is organized based on scope. Departments that do a lot of direct community service (like running hospitals and schools) have more Public Service Delivery Units, as a recognizable trend. There are also early signs that different departments have different strategies for their mergers - in some cases, the divisions are separated in such away that the joining department isn’t disrupted, while in other cases, some of the operations seem to have blended between previously unrelated departments.

Department-Level, Track #2

While we’re looking at the executive government of the City of Haiphong, one tricky structural fact looms large. Reporting directly to the People’s Committee of the City of Haiphong are… 114 People’s Committees of the local commune-level governments that are comprised of wards, communes and special zones. These People’s Committees have their own staff (and budget assigned to them by the regular budget), and underneath these are commune-level departments. Under those departments, further sub-divisions.

We’ll look at this in a separate article, and then come back to create a model that recognizes the City-level administrative departments, the lower-tier units and their administrations, and then other bodies that report directly to the City-level People’s Committee (such as Haiphong University, or the Haiphong Economic Zone Authority). The exact reporting structures of ‘commune government’ to ‘city government’ are still a bit opaque to me, but I should be able to find a source or otherwise characterize it in a way that makes sense.

In future weeks, we’ll also look at some specific examples of these departments at the division level, and begin mapping the division level in the City of Seattle as well to get a better sense of structurally what is considered a top-level department distinction and what is a sublimated division distinction, as I suspect that will be fertile ground for identifying key comparisons.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

This week, it’s mostly about Seattle! We’re going back to articles that are more heavy with data and graphs that can be useful to City of Seattle stakeholders. The topic of this week is also timely, as it coincides with the final week of the Get Engaged program application cycle, which places youth up to 29 on a Board or Commission like the ones I’m looking at here. If you are one of the youngsters who are subscribed to TLB, please give it a look!

Weekly Roundup

If you’re interested in travel pics and a few lines of narrative, feel free to check out the Instagram - for now you need to request access, but I’ll admit anyone, so don’t be shy!

https://www.instagram.com/thelanyardboard/

New Favorite Sources

https://seattle.granicus.com/boards/w/2bd7623f61defffb/boards/7677 - The ‘canonical’ public list that contains all of the appointment information for each Board and Commission, including who specifically holds which seats, their terms, and seat numbers.

https://www.seattleymca.org/social-impact-center/youth-young-adults/employment-education/get-engaged-boards-commissions - Information about the Boards and Commissions supported by the YMCA’s “Get Engaged” program.

New Resources

This section will provide links to resources such as infographics that have been produced in the past week that are useful for understanding, mapping or working with City of Seattle stuff, broadly.

Organization Structure - Seattle Part II

Last time, I talked about the way the City of Seattle works as an employer and as a public organization that hires civil servants to carry out functions that are needed to accomplish ‘municipal governance’ in all of its forms.

The City of Seattle hires more than 10,000 people across its 4 branches and 42-ish offices and departments. Offices and departments are great tools for administration, because they can organize projects and workflows that manage and deliver resources and programs to the people who live in Seattle. They are also OK tools for gathering public input and feedback, as many employees and departments are trained to collect feedback actively through the individual programs that they administer.

There’s somewhat of an open question though, if feedback is collected at the point of service delivery - what happens when there’s a service people need that doesn’t currently exist? What do you do when social problems emerge that aren’t already preempted by the current programs and services of the City of Seattle?

There are a lot of ways to answer that question, and many Offices and Departments take this problem very seriously. The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, Office of Emergency Management, Seattle Parks and Recreation and Seattle Department of Transportation, among some, have community outreach teams that collect program-specific and general-issue feedback from Seattle residents.

Direct action also has a large part to do with what rises to the level of administrator awareness. Protests and demonstrations that are well-attended and have high visibility sometimes skip all of the normative exploratory steps and reach the Mayor’s Office or City Council in a way that creates immediate policy or programmatic change.

Somewhere between direct community action and institutional problem-exploration is where Seattle’s Boards and Commissions sit. Many Boards and Commissions are established as a reaction to community action, to give an institutionally “legitimate” pathway to raise issues relevant to a specific community or subject to the level of policymakers and administrators. At its most suspicious form, it co-opts grassroots energy and constrains it by putting it into a Roberts-rules-of-order box. At its most useful form, it creates a vessel that allows communities to amplify their voices in a form that is tempered by genuine subject matter expertise and institutional buy-in.

Boards and Commissions

If it was difficult to taxonomize Seattle’s Branches, Departments, Offices, Divisions, etc., then it’s down-right impossible to do that for Seattle’s Boards and Commissions. Their unifying theme (which is true for all but two, but more on that later) is that all of them are overseen by and their appointments confirmed by the City of Seattle City Council. Some are over a century old, some are only a year old, and they are all established by legislation that looks slightly different.

Some of them have quasi-judicial powers that allow them to make legally binding decisions, some of them are narrowly-tailored to oversee levies, and most are advisory in nature (which runs the gambit from ‘we’ll take that into consideration’ to ‘you’re the experts, you tell us what to do.’ in how they operate).

Some of them are called boards, some of them are called commissions, some are committees, some are councils - the actual name of each does not necessarily give the reader any insight as to what they entail.

All of them are staffed with lovely people. Sometimes there are requirements (such as expertise in a field) to be a member of a Board or Commission, but the most common requirement is living or working in Seattle. When I say they are ‘staffed’ with lovely people, I don’t mean to confuse the reader - in the vast majority of cases, the people who serve on Boards and Commissions are doing so on a volunteer basis and aren’t compensated directly for the labor they put into the work. This often means that the people who serve are doing so out of a sense of civic duty, but also means that capacity can vary wildly from commissioner-to-commissioner.

Types of Boards and Commissions

The following is, for the sake of our analysis, the model for categorizing boards and commissions. Take it with a grain of salt, because there are edge cases that stretch the boundary, especially with Advisory and Quasi-Judicial bodies.

Advisory Boards and Commissions

A good example of these would be those that are supported by Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights - the Seattle Disability Commission, Human Rights Commission, LGBTQ Commission and Women’s Commission. These are commissions that serve to advise the Mayor’s Office and City Council on specific subject matter related to issues of Civil Rights, and create city-wide ‘connective tissue’ related to their subjects (e.g. Disability Commission being able to connect with ADA coordinators from multiple Seattle Departments).

Advisory Boards and Commissions are the most common, accounting for 36 out of 71 active Boards and Commissions, and 44/71 when accounting for Historic Preservation Boards and Joint-Administered Boards and Commissions.

Historic Preservation Boards are a specific form of Advisory Boards and Commissions which get their own category because they share a lot more in common with one another than they do with the rest of the corpus of Advisory Boards and Commissions.

Joint-Administered Boards and Commissions include two edge cases that are administered partially by the City of Seattle, and partially by an external organization, giving them different characteristics from other Advisory Boards and Commissions.

Levy Oversight Committees

Seattle has a few massive levies that fund education, housing and transportation in addition to the Seattle general fund. These levies, in large part because they are voted on by the public, often have mechanisms baked in for oversight by Seattle residents to ensure that the funds are being spent responsibly and in-line with what voters agreed upon.

There are only three currently - the Families, Education Preschool and Promise Levy Oversight Committee, the Housing Levy Oversight Committee and the Levy to Move Seattle Oversight Committee.

Quasi-Judicial Boards and Commissions

These are probably the Boards and Commissions vested with the most power to govern. They are defined by their ability to exercise some quasi-judicial function that is baked into the ordinance that created them.

There are eight Boards and Commissions that are categorized as Quasi-Judicial, and many of them have staff assigned to them specifically by the City of Seattle. The Civil Service Commissions, the Community Police Commission and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission have department/office-level entities established purely to support the commissioners that serve on them, creating some confusion when mentioning the name of the commission. Saying “Civil Service Commissions” could refer to the department that is staffed by City of Seattle employees to support the commission, or it could refer to the commission itself. That is, unfortunately, just the way that things are, and I will try to be explicit when talking about either of them.

External Agency Boards and Commissions

There are nine non-PDA External Agency Boards and Commissions, and nine PDA (Preservation and Development Authority) Boards and Commissions in the City of Seattle. The City of Seattle has a good number of Boards and Commissions that liaise with the City of Seattle’s department staff, but which are functionally external organizations whose leadership or management boards are confirmed by Seattle City Council.

One interesting feature of External Agency Boards and Commissions is that the appointment authority for most seats in this category is either the Mayor or some special mechanism (not Mayor/Council/Commission appointed).

Preservation and Development Authorities are public corporations that are established to oversee, preserve and develop specific (often historically significant) development projects throughout Seattle. Being public corporations, they have a lot of similarities that make it convenient to have a sub-category dedicated to them.

Boards and Commissions Appointing Authorities

Each person who sits on a Board or Commission had to have been appointed to become a member. When a Board or Commission is established by ordinance, the ordinance lays out what the criteria are for appointing members.

Some ‘seats’ on the Boards and Commissions are pre-determined, and are ‘ex-officio’. Sometimes, members of City Council, directors of departments or other officials will automatically have a seat on the Board or Commission that they automatically fill or send a delegate to fill.

Other seats are appointed by boutique mechanisms that just heavily depend on the type of Board or Commission. One example is that the Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority has one seat appointed by the King County Executive, and 4 by the PHPDA Council.

Most seats, however, fall under three categories, and in many of the Advisory Boards and Commissions, there is a roughly even balance of these three:

• Mayor-appointed (Mayor’s Office nominates a member)

• Council-appointed (City Council nominates a member)

• Board/Commission-appointed (The Board or Commission votes to nominate a member)

This can serve as a ‘checks-and-balances’ system within the City of Seattle government, whereby the only voices heard from aren’t strictly in-line with the Mayor’s priorities or City Council’s priorities, but more closely resemble the organic priorities of the communities that members come from.

Boards and Commissions Support Departments

One linguistic tick that can be hard to get rid of when talking about Seattle Boards and Commissions is to say that a given body is “within” a department of the City. It is easy to say that the Seattle Disability Commission is in OCR, but that wouldn’t be accurate, and runs the risk of confusing the mission of the Commission.

Boards and Commissions are intended to be independent bodies, so while they often have close connections to their support department, it’s more of a liaison relationship than a command relationship. More than 20 Seattle Offices and Departments support Boards and Commissions, with an uneven distribution of both total number of seats and total number of Boards and Commissions across these departments.

Boards and Commissions Council Committees

Like Departments and Offices, Boards and Commissions are each assigned to be overseen by, and have appointments confirmed by, a standing committee at Seattle City Council. We already have talked about what the 2026 slate of Committees and their presiding CMs are, but I haven’t received data yet on which Boards and Commissions appoint to each.

In 2025, the spread looked like this:

There are a number of instances in the past iteration of Council’s standing committees where a department will support multiple boards or commissions that report to different standing committees. This means it’s not always the case that a board or commission will report to the same standing committee their support department does.

I will create a new resource page with the updated distribution once I have it, but there are likely to be a few pretty interesting changes.

What good is any of this?

Seattle Boards and Commissions are interesting bodies within the city. To go back to a point earlier about the blurry boundaries between Advisory and Quasi-Judicial Boards and Commissions, there are some Advisory commissions that adopt or evolve quasi-judicial functions.

A good example of this would be the Human Rights Commission, which has power vested in it by the Office for Civil Rights which allows it to conduct appeals hearings for discrimination in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations. Another example is that the Seattle Renters’ Commission is the appointing authority for most of the seats of the Seattle Social Housing Preservation and Development Authority’s board.

In some cases, the work being done by Boards and Commissions creates the groundwork or the demand for new City of Seattle Departments and Offices. In these cases, functions are passed back-and-forth as part of Department reorganizations, as was the case with the Seattle Planning Commission.

The conclusion I have come to is that Seattle’s Boards and Commissions, apart from being good ways for individuals to become civically engaged and gain greater context about the city they live in, are vessels. They are bodies which can hold governance functions without necessarily being limited or governed in the same way that city departments and staff are.

I have a long way to go before I have fleshed out exactly how these bodies operate in the ecosystem of Seattle’s governance, but I’ve identified a few of the mechanisms and have a good basis for exploring edge cases and identifying broad trends. As I get further into the study of Haiphong, our sister city in Vietnam, I hope to feel similarly comfortable with identifying the role of analogous civic organs (if they exist as such).

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

Board/Commission Types

Table Format

Diagram Format

This week, we’re bringing some of our subjects together! This article goes into the “lead-up” to direct comparison by setting the analogous terms for governmental units and concepts within both Haiphong and with Seattle. We will establish a glossary of terms to go along with this, which will be included in next week’s “New Resources” Section.

Weekly Roundup

If you’re interested in travel pics and a few lines of narrative, feel free to check out the Instagram posts on the Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/thelanyardboard/

If you are curious as to the progress of the “Seattle❤️Haiphong” project, you can check it out here:

In addition, a few pieces have been published regarding my travels (in terms of Disability work and Parks and Recreation work looking into Festivals) here:

Finally, if you haven’t gotten the chance, please check out OCR’s yearly presentation about its four supported commissions at Seattle City Council on the Seattle Channel here: The presentation begins at 46:43:00!

New Favorite Sources

https://mrsc.org/getmedia/1c25ae05-968c-4edd-8039-af0cf958baa7/Closest-Governments-To-The-People.pdf?ext=.pdf While this is not technically a “New” Favorite Source, as I have linked to it in the first article written on the Lanyard Board, I want to give some space for this document. It’s called The Closest Government To The People, and it is a behemoth-sized 1,244 page PDF by Steve Lundin and edited by the Division of Governmental Studies and Services at WSU which has primer or in-depth level information about ALL of the local governments in Washington State. If you are curious about how any of the overlapping government boundaries work, or what the heck a charter city is, I can recommend no greater a resource.

New Resources

This section will provide links to resources such as infographics that have been produced in the past week that are useful for understanding, mapping or working with City of Seattle or Comparative Analysis stuff, broadly.

Introduction to Org Structure: Comparison, Part I

In past articles, we have gone over the general structure of the City of Seattle. There are Branches, Departments, Offices, Divisions and Units that make up the organizational structure of the City of Seattle, and there are overlapping districts and jurisdictions that allow other bodies to “share space” with the City of Seattle.

In Vietnam, and in Haiphong, this is also the case, but the tier of government that Haiphong represents is a step higher than what we think about when we think of Seattle. Underneath “The City of Haiphong” are 114 Wards, Communes and Special Zones that each have their own legislative and executive apparatuses.

There are significant challenges with comparing Seattle and Haiphong, as a result - in some ways, it would be better to compare Haiphong to an entire state in the United States, or to compare Seattle to a ward in Haiphong. Where these approaches may struggle, however, is that the “City” level in both “The City of Haiphong” and “The City of Seattle” create a functional and identity-based grouping that ties individuals who work and live in an urban environment together.

To some extent, there is also an evolutionary trajectory that should be tracked as municipal bodies that grow beyond a certain point. Even the City of Seattle has changed its form of government over time, having changed to a model of having legislative districts in 2013, and having had multiple Charters over the course of its history.

Vietnam takes a very structured approach to organizing governmental units based on their population characteristics, explicitly designating the qualities that differentiate a “Province” from a “Centrally Governed City”, and a “Commune” from a “Ward” in the law. In these same laws, there are provisions for the reclassification of geographic areas based on the changing characteristics of the population - as cities grow, for example, they may reach the point where more of their sub-units are “Wards”.

Some of the structures that Vietnamese cities take on can be analyzed to understand how service delivery and analogous functions are accomplished through the mechanism of “regionalizing” functions and their governance and oversight. What are the benefits or disadvantages to approaching service delivery in “smaller chunks”? What are the characteristics of budget, legislation and staffing that flow from the distinction between ‘central governance’ and ‘regional governance nodes’?

To get at some of these questions, we’ll be looking to compare the structures of the Cities of Haiphong and Seattle. There are many factors which influence service outcomes and municipal governance, not the least of which relating to other government bodies that have legal primacy, such as the Federal government in the US or the National government of Vietnam. My analysis does not draw confounding conclusions, but instead invites further experimentation and research to identify which factors that lead to proper service delivery are attributable to internal structure, and which are attributable to external factors.

Legislative Composition:

One of the categories I will be looking at when comparing Haiphong and Seattle will be the Legislative Composition of both cities. Both cities have separate administrative/executive and legislative bodies, and both cities pass ordinances as conditions change that require new or updated laws.

The purpose of looking at these compositions will be to determine the broad patterns of what subject areas are changed and legislated more often, and when these changes occur.

For Seattle, the major source that will be consulted is the Seattle Municipal Code: https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code

The Seattle Municipal Code can be exported into an Excel Table format, and instances of changes made to the code can be identified through ordinances cited. As a result, the secondary source will be the Ordinances themselves: http://clerk.seattle.gov/search/ordinances/

For Haiphong, the major primary source will be the Haiphong Website’s document database for legal documents: https://haiphong.gov.vn/?pageid=27205&p_cate=41838

The secondary source, which I will use the above primary source to check against will be a more thoroughly systematized database for legal documents (Nation-wide) which includes documents promulgated by the City of Haiphong: https://thuvienphapluat.vn/en/index.aspx

Neighborhoods:

To understand the characteristics of neighborhoods, or of lower-tier units in the Cities of Haiphong and Seattle, I will be looking at the municipal bodies that exist at the lower-tier in Haiphong. For Seattle, I will be looking at how the City of Seattle defines its populations by Neighborhood and Community, and then looking at civic organs that attach themselves to Neighborhoods.

For Seattle, I will use the Seattle Community Reporting Areas data to analyze geographically bounded areas: https://data-seattlecitygis.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/SeattleCityGIS::community-reporting-areas-3/about

I will also reference City of Seattle planning documents regarding Urban Centers and Villages: https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=61fbadcc0b5247ec8b5c2fad0fe329e1

For Civic Organs, I have identified a non-exhaustive list of organizations that act in a capacity that provides democratic input to matters of planning or community organization:

• Advisory Councils (Handled by Seattle ARC)

• Community Councils

For Haiphong, I will be relying largely on the map of Haiphong which contains information updated by the City of Haiphong, which can be found here: https://bandoso.haiphong.gov.vn/daibieuqh/

I will also rely on the planning documents found on the City of Haiphong’s website, as well as information from all 114 websites dedicated to the Communes, Wards and Special Zones of the City of Haiphong.

Service Delivery Metrics:

Service Delivery metrics will be developed and analyzed as I gain more context, and include metrics around road infrastructure, electricity and public utilities.

Much of this data will come from Seattle through its Open Data Portal: https://data.seattle.gov/

Much of this data will come from Haiphong through its Open Data Portal: http://data.haiphong.gov.vn/

Structural Mapping:

Some structural maps of how the Cities of Seattle and Haiphong are put together can be synthesized through legal documents, which will come from the above sources. There are, however, many variations on structure that are caused by discretion - they aren’t laid out in the law, but are instead determined by budget line-items and discretionary decisions of leadership in a given city office.

For Seattle, in addition to what has been identified above for its laws, there is an Open Budget portal which contains budgetary information that can be drilled down for structural information to synthesize into charts: https://openbudget.seattle.gov/

For Haiphong, budgetary information is still being identified, with this being where authoritative information is published: https://sotc.haiphong.gov.vn/category/tiep-can-thong-tin/cong-khai-ngan-sach/

Surveys will also be introduced at a later stage in the project, with more on that later.

Conclusion

The current methodology is showing promise as far as systematically identifying like information between both cities that can be meaningfully analyzed. By identifying legislative, material and organizational similarities and the outcomes for public service, the project is likely to uncover some patterns that could lead to improving public service outcomes.

The next steps will involve a lot more tables, charts and diagrams synthesized from the data sources I’ve referenced above!

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

After the Re-organization:

This week, it’s mostly about Haiphong! After having learned more about the restructuring of local government, I’m ready to share a ‘primer’ on what major changes our Sister City has gone through. It’s a bit shorter than usual - but next week I’ll make up for it by including some sweet, sweet diagrams.

Weekly Roundup

If you’re interested in travel pics and a few lines of narrative, feel free to check out the Instagram posts on the Instagram. I am working to get these uploaded to The Lanyard Board site (Still. It’s… just so much work, you know?). If you cannot access the Instagram, follow request for access!

https://www.instagram.com/thelanyardboard/

New Favorite Sources

https://thuvienphapluat.vn/en/index.aspx - Third party repository for different types of legal documents issued by the Vietnamese Government, with English translations for important business-related laws.

New Resources

This section will provide links to resources such as infographics that have been produced in the past week that are useful for understanding, mapping or working with City of Seattle stuff, broadly.

None this week - check back later for some diagrams being published on the form of local government in Vietnam!

Introduction to Org Structure: Haiphong, Part I

Seattle and Haiphong have enjoyed their Sister City status for 30 years starting this year, having formed in 1996. Haiphong in 1996, however, is a very different place from what it is in 2026, both in terms of the massive development and expansion of the middle class that Vietnam as a whole has seen over the past three decades, and due to a major series of reforms of the local government in Vietnam that went into effect in July of 2025.

Mergers All Around

One element of this change is that the number of “Province”-level governments were cut down from 63 to 34, with the land mass and population of provinces (and the largest cities of Vietnam, which share the same “level” of government as a province) were merged. This change, for Haiphong, meant the merging of the nearby province of Hai Duong into Haiphong - meaning that Haiphong effectively gained ~1,668.28 Square Kilometers of land and ~2,196,095 people.

One way to think about this, from the context of Seattle, is if King County became Seattle - with the government of the City of Seattle absorbing the tax base, voting base and administrative responsibilities of the additional land and individuals that became a part of it.

The actual law that spells out the rearrangement is DECISION NO. 759/QD-TTG from April of 2025 ON APPROVAL OF THE SCHEME ON REARRANGEMENT OF ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS AT ALL LEVELS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE TWO-TIER LOCAL GOVERNMENT MODEL.

That is a mouth-full, but the actual legal component that deals with Haiphong reads as follows:

“Merge Hai Duong province and Hai Phong city into a new centrally-affiliated city named Hai Phong, with the administrative-political center located in Thuy Nguyen city, current Hai Phong city (reducing by 01 province), with a natural area of 3,194.7 km² and a population of 4,102,700.“

This effectively doubles the size, population and land-area-wise of Seattle’s Sister City in Vietnam, and is all the more reason to undertake this process of getting to know them as they exist now.

From Three Tiers to Two Tiers

The other major element in the restructuring is the removal of district-level governments. In the past, Haiphong (and indeed, all centrally governed Cities and Provinces) had three tiers of local government. Next week, I will be releasing Part 2 of this look at Haiphong’s local government structure, and in it, I will produce some diagrams that help spell out the accurate general structure of both the 3-tier and 2-tier government models.

For the time being, just know that Vietnam, prior to 2025, operated with a 3-tier local government model that included “province level”, “district level” and “commune level”. In the restructuring, Vietnam now operates on a 2-tier local government model that only includes “province level” and “commune level”.

To imagine this from the Seattle context (sorry King County for using you again as an example), but this would be as if all “Counties” in Washington were dissolved, and all you had left were the “State” level governments and the “City” level governments. In such a rearrangement, as with what happened in Vietnam, you’ll get some of the functions of the ‘middle’ level that was dissolved being evolved up to the higher tier, and some being devolved down to the lower tier.

The prior law cited is what establishes the top-tier of government of Haiphong as a City which is now comprised of its old boundaries + those of Hai Duong. The law which establishes the new boundaries of the lower-tier (commune tier, made up of ‘wards’, ‘communes’ and ‘special zones’) is RESOLUTION NO. 1669/NQ-UBTVQH15 from June of 2025 ON ARRANGEMENT OF COMMUNE-LEVEL ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS OF HAI PHONG CITY IN 2025.

Front-to-back, this resolution goes through each of the new commune-level units (n=114) for the newly constituted Haiphong, and gives the legal description of the required boundaries for these new units relative to the prior configuration.

What This Means

• Haiphong is considerably larger in area and population than before. (Roughly Doubled, now sitting at a natural area of 3,194.7 km² and a population of 4,102,700.)

• Functions (including economic development, licensing functions) have been transferred from the depreciated “District” level government to the City and to the Communes/Wards/Special Zones.

• There has been a massive shuffling of public servants around different levels, offices and an overall massive reduction in the total size of the bureaucracy.

• Haiphong has had about a halving of administrative units in total, having had more than 200 “Commune-level” units prior to the administrative reform.

Next Steps

The next steps for this project include the furthering of context-building conversations with the City of Haiphong itself, and ascertaining the redistribution of municipal functions that occurred during the restructuring. The end result of clarifying this could be useful information for The City of Seattle in how it can more deftly interact with the City of Haiphong, as well as be useful for anyone who has an interest in understanding the business and development environment Haiphong now inhabits.

As I continue to visit all of the commune-level units within Haiphong, I hope to gain a further appreciation for the entire shape of the city in its current form. You can find photos and write-ups of these little visits on the Greater Seattle Vietnam Association Facebook page!

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

This week, it’s mostly about Seattle! Learning more about our sister city is in a great place though, recently having met with the government of Haiphong to discuss our two great cities.

Weekly Roundup

If you’re interested in travel pics and a few lines of narrative, feel free to check out the Instagram posts on the Instagram. I am working to get these uploaded to The Lanyard Board site. If you cannot access the Instagram, follow request for access!

https://www.instagram.com/thelanyardboard/

New Favorite Sources

https://data-seattlecitygis.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/SeattleCityGIS::ucuv-development-capacity-reports/about - Urban Center / Urban village development capacity reports from 2016. This provides a great look at the way urban units are subdivided in Seattle, which plays well with the CRAs.

https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/population-and-demographics/zoned-development-capacity - The explanation for data and modeling for the aforementioned capacity reports, tied to the Seattle 2035 project.

https://maps.seattle.gov/2010-2020-Census-Viewer - Tool which shows side-by-side population and density for Census Blocks in 2010 vs 2020.

New Resources

This section will provide links to resources such as infographics that have been produced in the past week that are useful for understanding, mapping or working with City of Seattle stuff, broadly.

Organization Structure - Seattle Part I

At the risk of being an extremely annoying type of person, I have to ask: What is The City of Seattle?

It’s a plot of land expropriated from indigenous groups starting roughly 200-150 years ago. It’s a tax base of individuals and corporations operating within a specific geographic area. It’s a collection of people who consider themselves a part of a broader, city-based identity. It’s the winners of the 2026 Superbowl™.

It is also a sprawling administrative apparatus that is established by a constitution-like charter that manages and provides a substrate for all of these other definitions to exist upon.

Organizational Structure

Organizations, even those within the United States operate under different structures and rules. This is true for public, non-profit, for-profit and academic organizations. Probably the most frequent dynamic people colloquially hear about when they are chatting idly about organization structure (it does happen) is if or how ‘hierarchical’ an organization is.

By hierarchical, people usually refer to a (usually loose) power analysis of the relationships between roles in an organization. The more power is shared by people, and the fewer ‘direct report’ relationships there are, the less hierarchical the organization is considered to be.

Think about a friend group pitching money in together to furnish a co-op gym space. In this case, there’s sort of an organization of people and resources that has some loose social expectation binding it together, but it’s very unlikely to be hierarchical beyond dynamics caused by the person who had the idea’s smug demeanor.

On the other hand, military structures tend to be very hierarchical. There is an expectation and legal requirements for individuals to report to and follow the orders of those who are in a position of power over them. It’s in this space you will hear more words like “obedience” and “command”, but also often find a greater degree of clarity with regards to rules.

In the example about furnishing a co-op gym space, you might run into issues like “should the person who is doing the labor of remembering to pay the rent each month have to pay less than the others?” or “how do we deal with adding new members to the group if we find someone we think is cool?” that can cause conversations and entire projects to end with a shrug. In the military structure example, there are entire divisions of lawyers that can litigate and refer to volumes of regulations and case law that can guide decisionmakers to clarified answers.

This is a simplification based on a couple of extremes. In most cases, you will not actually have an entire organization operate under hierarchical or non-hierarchical conditions. Formal organizations that have been incorporated are usually hierarchical in their base form, having a CEO, Owner, Manager or other responsible person who has hiring/firing powers and directorial control over their corporation. Even in the public sector working for administrative departments for The City of Seattle, we have a boss - the Mayor. Still, the further you get down the chain-of-command, the closer you get to a non-hierarchical space in which the distinctions between individuals aren’t based on explicit power dynamics, but based on role and specialization.

The City of Seattle, Inc.

The current charter, which establishes the corporation of The City of Seattle (the “The” is capitalized. Even I mess this up frequently.) was adopted in 1946. This lays out the basic legally-mandated structure of the City of Seattle, and (sort of. More on this later.) creates four distinct “branches”, which are the top-level organizational distinctions we colloquially make.

Branches

As a body politic, what sets this apart from a private organization is that the leadership for all of these separate ‘branches’ are elected by residents of the City of Seattle, meaning they are the point of democratic input that makes “the people” the true bosses of The City of Seattle.

For Seattle, our four branches are:

1. Executive, headed by the Mayor

2. Legislative, headed by 9 Seattle City Councilmembers

3. Judicial, headed by 7 Municipal Judges

4. Law Department, headed by the City Attorney

The fourth branch, the City Attorney’s Office is noted in Seattle’s charter as a “Department”, but for the sake of this analysis and taxonomy, we are going to refer to it as a “Branch”, because it remains independent, organizationally separated and its leadership is elected by the People of Seattle. From here on out, we are going to be referring to a fiction, rather than a legal reality. I am not a lawyer, nor am I a serving in the capacity of a representative of Seattle right now, so please take my words here with a grain of salt.

Departments and Offices

The next Tier of organization we care about is comprised of “Departments and Offices”. I have discussed Departments and Offices in the past when talking about some of the internal mechanisms The City of Seattle use for categorizing them.

Some of these are called for directly in the City Charter (...More on this later.), but many are established by ordinance to meet a specific need. The leadership of each “branch” usually appoints the leadership of each “department and office”. Offices tend to be smaller than departments, but this is not required to be the case.

Most of the non-executive branches of The City of Seattle contain the singular department that comprises the people that work for that branch. The Legislative Branch has a few ‘offices’ nested within it that are based on officials that head up bodies of work that are appointed by the City Council, namely the City Auditor, Inspector General and the Hearing Examiner. Allow me to ignore the situation with the Office of Revenue Forecasts, for the time being.

The Executive Branch, on the other hand, has north of 25 departments and offices nested within it. The heads of these departments and offices are appointed by the Mayor (most of the time, more on that later), and can be either immediately removable by the Mayor, or have a set term limit after which the Mayor can approve of reappointment or decide to appoint someone else. The heads of these departments or offices can be “Directors”, “CEOs”, or “Superintendents” to name a few titles. Many of the department or office heads are also subject to confirmation by City Council. They are usually joined by a second-in-command that serves as a deputy, though larger departments can have multiple people sharing that tier of leadership.

Some departments and offices are direct-service, meaning that the work they are tasked with interfaces with the public of Seattle (Fire Department, Human Services Department, Parks and Recreation, etc.). Others are split up by function and have to do with administrative or support functions for The City of Seattle as an organization - such as Seattle Department of IT, Seattle Department of HR and Seattle’s Finance and Administrative Services Department.

The providence of each department and office can be very different from one another and is established by different legal mechanisms, but generally speaking the structure from this point down the hierarchy are not legally mandated outside of yearly budget allocations. Department and office leadership can determine how they will organize themselves to meet the legal requirements that do exist around staffing, labor practice and to accomplish the work they are charged with doing.

This means that you will start to see greater diversity of structure, more edge cases and a higher rate of change that means that specific information in this article could grow woefully out of date at the drop of a hat. Still, I believe it’s instructive to go over the basic model that is adopted for the sub-organization of departments and offices, and I am in the process of gathering specific information about the next ‘tier’ of organization for our departments.

For distinctions underneath the Department and Office, I will use a variety of charts produced by Seattle Department of Transportation that’s published on Yumpu, which can be found here.

Divisions

Within each department or office, the next level of distinction made is by division. These are organizational units usually headed up by a director-level position that often carries the title of “Division Director”. From here, the size of Divisions vary greatly, and there’s no apparent uniformity across the different departments and offices in The City of Seattle on how this distinction level is defined.

There are, however, some basic patterns that can be observed. Often times, leadership can be designated as its own division, separate from any specific body of work that is being done by the department or office. Additionally, support functions such as ‘finance’, ‘information technology’ and ‘human resources’ are often formed into their own divisions, if a department or office is large enough to benefit from this.

Mirroring the higher tier distinction, ‘service type’ or ‘subject’ is another quality that separates divisions. In Human Services Department, for example, there are Divisions dedicated to Aging & Disability Services (ADS), Youth and Family Services (YFE) and Safe and Thriving Communities (STC). These all have a division director at the head, and are in charge of broad subject areas or types of service that are conducted by Human Services Department.

Now is a good time to mention that the current slate of Departments, Offices and Divisions have not always been what they are. There are cases where divisions have been spun out in an executive restructuring into their own offices or departments, or moved from one division to another. There are also cases where an office can become a part of or change into a department. Departments and their subdivisions can and have dissolved in Seattle’s history, but it is exceedingly rare for an entire body of work being done by The City of Seattle to just stop in its tracks, meaning that this organizational shuffling at the division level is a mechanism for absorbing and distributing changes caused by top-level management decisions. This dynamic is mirrored more commonly by some of the lower-tier distinctions.

From here, the taxonomy breaks down significantly, and no longer represents necessary mutual exclusivity (though it often still does). Regions, Sites and Units or teams are much more tailored to the function of each division that houses them.

Regions

For the largest departments of The City of Seattle, and for some offices and departments that deal with different populations or areas, there is often a regional distinction made. This is usually lead by a manager, but for large departments can be a senior manager. Titles at this point break down entirely, and there’s a lot more diversity in what people of a similar title across different departments may be tasked with.

Regional distinctions can be made like having “zones” or “districts” that are unified by leadership at the region-level. Departments that do this often have fleets that require physically traveling to different regions of Seattle, but not exclusively - a good example would be in the Department of Neighborhoods, there are coordinators that are tasked with regional work that don’t have entire teams of people reporting to them.

Sites

Sites are distinctions based on the physical location of work. The City of Seattle owns and operates more than 100 buildings that are staffed with individuals that are organized by work function as well as by the physical building they are assigned to.

This is a meaningful distinction because represents a common budgetary and cultural distinction. A site can have a budget, including for staffing, that is separately defined from its region or division, and staff within the site (even if in separate divisions, which occasionally will happen) will have a sense of unity or cohesion that is important organizationally. The reporting structure mostly follows a model where there is a person in charge of the site, often at the coordinator or manager level.

Units and Teams

Below the division, and often below sites are specific units or teams. This refers to staff in an arrangement towards a specific body of work or project. The head of a unit or team can be a supervisor, manager or coordinator - there are many different titles that can lead a team or a unit.

There’s often a high degree of fluidity between units or teams, with staff swapping out, staff assigned to multiple and temporary expansion or contraction happening commonly. These can be created ad-hoc, as permanent projects or fields of work, or can form out of the merging and dissolution of units throughout the department or office. The task of mapping out all of the units of The City of Seattle would be nearly impossible with the rate of change and the lack of unified reporting structure for announcing these changes outside of each department or office, but is an interesting and useful distinction for analyzing organizational dynamics.

Pockets, Roles, Classes and Titles

Below the Unit, you have pockets, Roles, Classes and Titles. These are used interchangeably sometimes to refer to the actual budgeted roles that people fill when they are hired by The City of Seattle. These may be subject to Human Resource review, but are the most fluid type of distinction in the City of Seattle, able to be established overnight by decisions made often at a far lower level than executive leadership.

Pockets evolve, change, rearrange, and are eliminated often, and from a birds-eye view, unpredictably. They are the basic unit that are used to budget out and envision staffing needs. Pockets are often “1 Pocket” = “1 FTE” (Full Time Equivalent - a full time job), but on occasion are comprised of partial FTEs, meaning that the pocket is filled by either a part time worker, or one full time worker across multiple pockets.

Individuals

This final level of distinction, dear reader, is “you” and “me”. The City of Seattle employs more than 10,000 individual people to accomplish its work. People slot into pockets, which are parts of units, that can be a part of a site that’s within a region, that is part of a division of a department or office that is within a branch of The City of Seattle.

At this level, there is infinite potential for organization. People’s attitudes and minds change every day. The way they relate to their colleagues and the system is always in flux. The degree of responsibility and power any individual feels waxes and wanes, and their engagement with the city is based on a mix of mercenary fulfillment, circumstance and a spirit of public service.

Conclusion

Teasing out the dynamics that form, reform and create changes in a system like this is the ultimate goal of “The Lanyard Board” as a project, and my personal interest in researching comparisons between The City of Seattle and other cities’ structures. Further editions of The Lanyard Board will look at some of the historical cases, edge cases, and report on data collected that clarify the different organizational dynamics and tiers of The City of Seattle.

By understanding these distinctions and tiers, I believe we can make better informed decisions about how we organize materials and resources to an efficient end. I also believe it’s important to highlight the democratic inputs and the outputs of the city I live in, such that people can participate more fluidly and receive resources that they may not be aware of. If there are any such resources or democratic inputs you care about, please reach out!

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

The format will continue as it has, but because I’ve been taking time to get settled, there’s been a minor disruption. Back to normal in no time, I assure you.

Weekly Roundup

If you’re interested in travel pics and a few lines of narrative, feel free to check out the Instagram posts from this past week, but I’ll be returning to adapting them to full posts here on The Lanyard Board:

Day 1 in Haiphong

Day 2 in Haiphong

Day 3 in Haiphong

Day 4-5 in Haiphong

Day 1 in Hanoi

New Favorite Sources

Appropriately, today I’d like to highlight a couple of sources that will provide very clear lines for the comparative analysis - literally.

https://gis.vn/don-vi-hanh-chinh-viet-nam Is a gis repository/viewer that contains data for all of the boundaries of the geopolitical sub-units of Vietnam prior to the 2025 changes and after the 2025 changes. It’s invaluable for getting a sense of how things have changed, and also for me when plotting out where I’m visiting!

https://data.seattle.gov/dataset/Neighborhood-Map-Atlas-Neighborhoods/w3qt-9btr/about_data Is a gis repository/viewer that contains data for all of the Neighborhood boundaries found from the City Clerk’s atlas in the City of Seattle. This has been largely supplanted functionally by the CRAs, which is another good data source, but these two datasets combined give a great idea of how people self-recognize, and how the city recognizes, sub-municipal communities of people.

New Resources

This section will provide links to resources such as infographics that have been produced in the past week that are useful for understanding, mapping or working with City of Seattle stuff, broadly.

None are provided this time - but check back next week!

Seattle, Haiphong and Policy Mobility

The City of Seattle is, by most standards, not a particularly large city, both on the national level and certainly on the global level. It represents, however, one of the largest and most dense urban areas in the region, being larger than its larges Northern Neighbor (Vancouver, ~660k, 143 miles) and its Southern Neighbor (Portland, ~640k, 174 miles).

In contrast, Philadelphia (~1.6m) is less than 100 miles from New York City (~8.3m), with large or mid-size cities like Baltimore and Washington DC within a few hours’ drive to the South. The East coast - and especially the mid-Atlantic region has many municipalities that inform the growth of each other, creating competing patterns of traffic infrastructure, commute, job development and homeownership that are fundamentally dissimilar to what you see out here in the sleepy Pacific Northwest.

Without large neighbors, it is a place which can takes its cues - learn from the struggles and successes of others - from anywhere. One source of inspiration I’m keen to analyze is in how its Neighbor across the Pacific Ocean in Vietnam (Read: https://www.thelanyardboard.com/p/the-lanyard-board-0-intro-to-thec) continues to develop rapidly while administering much the same resources that any city in the United States would.

Over the last few weeks, I have been getting settled in Vietnam, and have spent the lion’s share of my time in our Sister City, Haiphong. While there, I have visited around 10 of the cities 114 “phường, xã and đặc khu”, or their “wards, communes and special zones”. In this context a ward is as you might know it in the US - a sub-unit of a city that is urban with its own legislative and executive branches. Communes are the same as wards, but rural, and special zones are the same as wards but tend to be reserved for administrative anomalies such as coastlines, wetlands or islands that have their own governmental apparatus.

I have two parallel projects - one which is going ahead on behalf of the Greater Seattle Vietnam Association, and one which is tied to my Graduate studies but is in a grey-zone-limbo until I have connected with the government of Haiphong on some specifics. The latter is the Comparative Analysis I’ve written about before, but the former is a social media project to personally visit and do something fun in all 114 of the phường, xã and đặc khu. Ideally, part of what I will be learning during my time in Haiphong and over the next few months are how the workload is split between the central city municipal government and the ward governments, and how processes are handled centrally or diffused.

In the City of Seattle, we have a lot of analogues that sort of gel into an amalgam that has similarities to a formal ward structure. We have districts - legislative districts. We have planning and design zones. We have police and fire precincts. We have community centers, pools and their zones. We have Neighborhoods (Community Reporting Areas), and we have Libraries. There are lots of lines in the sand that designate certain administrative centers of mass for the City of Seattle to administer services and resources. There are strategies that are taken by department staff such as Department of Neighborhood staff to create greater cross-departmental cohesion within the neighborhoods that people live in, and there’s an invisible pressure that’s placed on all City action within a Legislative District that is at the very least considered whenever programs are being administered from that District.

Knowing how to answer the question “Is it better for services to be administered from the top down, as opposed to localized organs closer to the grass roots?” is not something I’m going to be capable of. What I hope to tease out, through both research and this project to visit the whole of our Sister City, is where both strategies shine and have strong impact.

Policy Mobility is the phenomenon by which a set of policies is adopted outside of the place that those policies originated. It happens all the time, everywhere. This is blindingly obvious but painfully under-remarked; Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. But rather than designing the wheel from first principles, or taking a design that works given specific road infrastructure somewhere else, I think Seattle has the unique ability to imagine a better world and work towards it through learning principles of design and organization that can originate from anywhere.

Seattle ❤ Haiphong

Which brings me to the heart-emoji of this week’s issue. Over the next few months, I will continue visiting the various phường, xã and đặc khu of Haiphong with an aim towards spotlighting the fun and the interesting while also getting a feel for the city itself. It has been amazing to see Haiphong so far, and I can see why it was chosen as Seattle’s Sister City in Vietnam - the port city “vibe” is immaculate.

In each of these areas, I’ll be taking a photo (like below) where I am holding a whiteboard that states Seattle’s ❤of the ward/commune/special zone I’m in, and Seattle’s overall ❤ of Haiphong. Think about it like visiting all of the Neighborhoods of the City of Seattle and taking a similar picture (Seattle ❤ Beacon Hill, Seattle ❤.... Seattle?).

I’ll be posting these, and a brief reflection on what I’ve learned about the ward/commune/special zone from official sources on the GSVA Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GSVA2017 Please be patient with me, as once I start, I’ll likely keep it up as a daily ritual, so I’m trying to space out when I know I’ll have the photographs and posts ready.

Final Notes

Haiphong has been great to me so far and I continue to look forward to seeing more of it. Please feel free to reach out to me at Scot.Nelson@Thelanyardboard.com if you have any questions or would like to chat - it gets a bit lonely abroad, yeah?

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

The format remains the same from last week. There may be some interruption in the next week, but I will make a special announcement if-so. This coming issue is almost entirely a blend of slice-of-life and qualitative data gathering on events in Hokkaido, Japan, so be sure to check back in future weeks for the regular fare of numbers and charts.

Weekly Roundup

This section is a collation of links to the newest blog posts about smaller topics and daily events.

New Favorite Sources

This section will provide links to sources I think are interesting for the purpose of understanding cities, Seattle and otherwise.

None are provided this time - but check back next week!

New Resources

This section will provide links to resources such as infographics that have been produced in the past week that are useful for understanding, mapping or working with City of Seattle stuff, broadly.

None are provided this time - but check back next week!

Weekly Story - Event Overview, Tokachigawa SAIRINKA festival, Hokkaido, Japan

When thinking about the events hosted in the City of Seattle, a few will come to mind for those who chronically seek out fun, food and festivity - Events such as The Bite of Seattle, Big Day of Play, Seafair, Bumbershoot and the Capitol Hill Block Party draw sometimes tens of thousands of people from both the local area and from abroad to visit and spend their time and resources on coming together with bits and pieces of Seattle’s locality

Click here to read more about the event, and about the region - much of the figures for this article are pulled from here.

Part of the goal of my travels has been to take what I’m learning about event-running here in the sometimes-harsh environments of Hokkaido back to Seattle, and I think the event I’ll be talking about today is illustrative of a kind of ingenuity that imbues events like these with local character.

In Tokachi, the region known as a sort of Bread Basket of Hokkaido, there are a few festivals that take place within arm’s reach of Obihiro - one of which I have already written more thoroughly about in last week’s piece about the Lake Shikaribetsu ice village. This week, we’re going to take a look at an event that takes place just to the Southeast of Lake Shikaribetsu in Otofuke - a winter festival dubbed “SAIRINKA”.

SAIRINKA is a blended event - it feels in some parts like a rave, with a set and lights set out within geometric shapes across a snowy white hill that change colors to the beat of the music. Along with this were elements that I’ve seen in other festival locations such as snow-rafts being pulled by snowmobiles, tunnels of light and a warm food hall that helps keep the balance for families feeling a bit too frosty.

Maybe appropriately for this blended style of event is the music set - a mix of current trends and oldies, and even a mix of American English songs and Japanese songs. I nearly lost my gourd when Katy Perry’s Fight Song started playing alongside the pulsating lit objects. From the observation deck, people watched the light show on high, but there were a great number of children and families out amongst the lights dancing and having a fantastic time.

I got the chance to speak to one of the organizers of the event to learn more about how the event came about and how it’s enjoyed each year. Starting 35 years ago, this event now pulls nearly 50,000 people during the month-long period of the event. There have been a lot of iterations of the event, and there’s been a lot of trial and error as to how exactly the event goes, but the current state of it is sustainable, meaningful and beneficial to the local economy.

Sustainability

The region SAIRINKA takes place in is the Tokachigawa Onsen, on the outskirts of Otofuke. The weather patterns in the dead of winter are different from many parts of Hokkaido, even slightly further south in Obihiro. As opposed to being below freezing all of the time, it gets extremely cold at night and gets enough direct sunlight during the day that temperatures in some areas rise above the freezing temperature. This prevents residents and onsens of Tokachigawa from holding the type of winter festival that relies on structures or sculptures made of ice and snow.

Instead, Tokachigawa makes use of objects lit up by LED. When I say objects, I’m more-or-less directly translating the way the event organizers talk about them - over the years, they have looked different at different times, but the current sustainable iteration is somewhat tetrahedral, with some LEDs propped up on poles scattered throughout the object field. These objects are made using agricultural canvas, which is a specialty of the region due to the heavy agriculture industry, which provides a use for this canvas outside of the growing season and imbues SAIRINKA with a character that honors and celebrates the work of the region’s agricultural workers during the harsh Winters.

This, paired with both the reusable nature of the LEDs (as opposed to Fireworks) and the use of the natural features of the park’s snowy white canvas makes the event very sustainable, and reduces environmental impact. There’s a double meaning here when considering what is being celebrated by the event, and how the organizers understand their goals and vision.

Meaning

SAIRINKA is, in its stated aims, a celebration of the more than 1,000 swans that migrate to the region each Winter. Like in broadly Western culture, swans are seen as elegant and graceful animals that are delightful and calming to witness, and naturally take a place in the overall tourism strategy for Tokachigawa. The overall festival itself that SAIRINKA is considered a component of is called the “Hakucho Matsuri” (Swan Festival), and throughout the day (as opposed to this night-time event), there are smaller venues where one can watch Swans flying overhead to overwinter.

A common theme of the Winter festivals in Hokkaido is beauty amidst harsh conditions, and SAIRINKA does a great job of putting this on display. There is a raft ride pulled by a snowmobile that whips the rider around the outskirts of a dark, silent forest to one side, and the bright, concert-like atmosphere of the field of lit objects. In this is both a respect for, and a refusal to submit to the forces of nature. The way SAIRINKA makes this argument is through a subtle beauty that is not as grand as towering pillars or sculptures of ice and snow, but instead is graceful and quiet, spreading warmth throughout your body.

Economic Development

The last thing the organizer of the event talked about with me was the main drive behind why people felt the need for an event in the first place. Onsen, or hot springs, arise from the natural hotspring waters of the volcanic mountains throughout Japan. In Eastern Hokkaido, far from the bustling metropolis of Sapporo (pop. >2,000,000), there are many small onsen towns that help to supplement local economic regions during non-growing or harvesting seasons. Tokachigawa is one such onsen town, boasting a rare type of hotspring water which is plant-derived, called a moor hotspring (which is said to be very good for moisturizing!).

Hot springs during the winter are in a tricky place. On one hand, travelers who arrive have a place to warm themselves thoroughly, and it can be a major draw, especially locally. On the other hand, hot springs are limited by how people can actually get there - and to travel to Eastern Hokkaido in the dead of winter one has to pass through a mountain range through sub-zero, sometimes dangerous conditions. No matter how good it feels to feel both the cold air and hot water at the same time, it is difficult to convince travelers who could contribute to the local economy to make the trip east when they could stay at an easier-to-access Western Hokkaido onsen. Like we saw at lake Shikaribetsu, onsen and festivals are great complements to one another in that they drive both local and distant demand for regional economic activity.

The event organizer told me that SAIRINKA started in part to address this problem. Onsen were having to close during the winter-time because they weren’t able to sustain their staff, which has a knock-on effect for the whole regional economy. 34 Years ago, in 1992, the event started small, as a way to publicize and spread awareness of the onsen, swan migrations and other attractions, but over the years has successfully created an engine for bringing people both from abroad and from other parts of Japan to see the lights, nature and enjoy the onsen. Come for the festivities - stay for the people, the warm waters and the splendor of the Tokachi Plains.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

From the first moment I touched down in Japan and got picked up by a camera crew, through all of the festivals I attended, to each and every public servant I sat down and talked with about the way they support their disabled residents, I have had nonstop, time-after-time fun and deep learning. The conclusions still need to be drawn - but I’m excited to think more about what I’ve learned over the coming weeks and share them with you all.

One thing I can say for sure is that what I have witnessed has not been some aberration or impossible standard, but can be achieved through effort and care. The people here in Hokkaido put together these festivals as a testament to their strengths, yes, but as an exercise of those strengths as well. The processes by which people in Hokkaido have created and implemented programs like what I’ve described these past few weeks are processes we can undertake in our humble city of Seattle, and I’m super, duper, duper excited to think about where those lessons can apply at Garfield Community Center.

To that end, I want to thank everyone who supports and subscribes to my newsletter, The Lanyard Board (www.thelanyardboard.com), and I will continue to produce more as the weeks go on. Tomorrow? Tokyo Day 1.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

Today I moved from Otaru through Sapporo to Asahikawa. While in Sapporo, I stopped by Hokkaido University and got to see the beautiful campus in the snow and stop by the University Museum! After this, I headed out to Asahikawa where their 67th Winter Festival is being held.

To end the trip with the same place I started - and to visit the Asahikawa festival as my last Hokkaido festival has been a very meaningful experience for me. Instead of slipping and sliding around the streets, amazed by the sights, sounds and smells of the city, I confidently paced through semi-familiar scenes to arrive at a moment of coalescence for the people of Asahikawa, their winter festival. It is not as big or crowded as the Sapporo festival - nor does it seem to have all of the same sponsorship mechanisms or large sponsored displays on the level Sapporo did. There are far fewer people from abroad at the Asahikawa festival than in the Sapporo festival. But even so - or because of the relative “local” feel, it has a warmth and beauty to it that’s difficult to put into words. It’s a boost that this festival was partially Pokemon themed - which brings me a nostalgia even in the dead of Winter.

Another very interesting aspect of this event is that it had a fully-programmed stage that had constant activity from local idols, rappers and other musicians. It was a delight to listen to and watch such performances atop a stage in the snow, with the lit backdrop of a gigantic Pokemon snow sculpture. I do wonder how the logistics of this event compare to the other events which didn’t have so much of a “run-of-show” vibe to them. The festival food here too was top-notch, with everything you’d expect and then some!

I love Asahikawa, and I’ll miss it - but I’ll be back some day, for sure.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

2026 Snow Miku is all about sweets - Hokkaido itself is the agricultural cornerstone of many of the ingredients for sweets, from sugar beets to wheat to milk, and as a result, many of the bakeries here have extremely fresh and local ingredients to use. The exhibit was fun, and it was really great to see so many people coming together around a common interest. Even after leaving the venue, in the town I would find many people wearing merchandise based around Hatsune Miku - and many of the local businesses have tie-in events or sport the likeness of the Snow Miku character.

Later in the day I headed down to the canal for the festival of lights, wherein Otaru over a very large area is lit up with candles in the snow. People will make snowmen and tiny sculptures that accompany the candles, and some lights are brought out over the waters of the canal. The result is dazzling. Logistically I couldn’t quite get a handle on it - there were a tremendous amount of people, and not as much centralization as many of the festivals I have attended so far - I am going to have to do a bit of internet sleuthing to find the chief organizers of the event to ask a few questions about how the whole thing comes together.

Tomorrow I am taking a surprise trip back up to Asahikawa - I have an awkward day before heading back to Tokyo, and wanted to revisit Asahikawa now that the festival is going on to see it with fresh eyes. More on that later.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

While at New Chitose airport, we found that some of the routes back to the train station on the bottom floor were blocked off by staff who advised alternative routes. It wasn’t until we arrived at the station to see that there were cancellations of some of the trains heading out of New Chitose, which made me realize that there is expert traffic control at play. At many places along the route within the station, there are chokepoints that are intentionally designed to be able to be tightened or relieved by staff, finely controlling the number of people through the gates and who get to the platform. Why? Because the worst thing you can get is too many people on the platform itself - the trains run very regularly, and it’s dangerous if there are too many people for people to safely disembark the trains, which isn’t even to mention the inherent danger of being pushed around on a train platform.

The point of stopping at New Chitose, however, was to see the mall that is on top of it - which has a special shop set up for Snow Miku. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Snow Miku (the Snow-version of Hatsune Miku) is absolutely everywhere in Western Hokkaido. Wherever we go, we see cafes that have tie-ins, posters on trains, at stations, in malls - Snow Miku is a force of nature not unlike the snow itself.

After this, we made our way out to Otaru where we are now in a hotel on a mountain during a bit of a snowstorm. The vibes of this Western-style hotel are... Murder-Mystery-Esque, so I’m hoping for the best for the next couple of days! Given that we arrived pretty late in Otaru, I’m not quite sure how to characterize the town, except that it’s colder than it was in Sapporo, and given that it’s a coastal city, there are canals and waterways that sort of remind me of home - except that instead of the Puget Sound, you’re left looking out over an endless expanse of Ocean.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

I also got the fantastic opportunity to connect briefly with Tetote (Hand and Hand), an organization in Sapporo that is supporting the event to provide accessibility options for Disabled visitors to the venue as well as provide tie-ins with other programs that they do which support Disabled people in the region. You can find more information about them as an organization here: tetote.org I plan to connect with them soon to share information about what the Seattle Disability Commission does and learn more about their support systems. Also briefly, I got to talk to some of the ice sculptors with the Portland-Sapporo Sister City association and give them a couple of lanyards as a gesture of neighborly spirit.

The thing about the festival which stands out to me are the blended modes of sponsorship that they have - and the sheer size. Given Sapporo’s size, I suppose it’s not surprising that this would be the biggest Winter Festival in Hokkaido, but the scale certainly feels like something else.

One last note - There’s a bust made of snow of a man that has statues peppered throughout Sapporo, William S. Clark, the vice president of Hokkaido University and an agricultural advisor who came to Hokkaido from America to provide technical support on developing Hokkaido’s agricultural capacity 150 years ago (He was also a colonel who served the Union during the American Civil War.) I may write a piece about him at some point, because the story - and the modern legend - is amazing.

Tomorrow I’m headed off from Sapporo towards Otaru, where we’ve got another festival to attend!

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

Odori park is an eleven-city-block majesty, which during this festival is thoroughly packed with large (and some enormous!) statues made of snow and peppered with additional activities and food vendors. The interesting thing about this festival compared to the other ones I’ve attended is the sponsorship mechanism - or rather, the many separate sponsorship mechanisms. At the Sapporo snow festival, everything from anime-style statues featuring characters from phone games, through videos playing advertisements, through an entire pavilion being sponsored by Shin Ramen (with a massive Coca-Cola building), there is an extensive network of braided sponsorship mechanisms that I assume is what funds the creation of multi-story snow lifts.

The public art aspect is intense and memorable, the fundraising mechanism is pretty incredible and I’m really excited to check out the festival again tomorrow more thoroughly. I’m also hoping to connect with some of the organizers to ask some historical questions about the Snow Festival - and check out some of this festival’s accessibility features.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

Day 11 in Hokkaido is coming to a close.

Today I spent time in both Sapporo and at lake Shikotsu in the Chitose area. Lake Shikotsu is currently hosting its winter festival, so I was able to attend and see how it feels when compared to festivals I have recently attended. This festival is sort of comparable to the Sounkyo festival for obvious reasons - it includes these massive structures formed around birch trees made of ice that is lit up. This was the case back at Sounkyo- this one had many, many more people though.

One of the interesting structural things that I noticed while going through the event at lake Shikotsu is that much of the ice had a ‘scaly’ textured pattern that seemed to be because of fishnet that “contained” much of the ice, and was likely sprayed down to hide it in most places (except few spots where it melted). This reminds me of the Otofuke festival, SAIRINKA, where the light displays were made out of agricultural canvas that was not being used due to the end of the growing season - given that the area seemed to have quite active fishing, I wonder if there’re any interesting parallels with this kind of specific influence of local industry on the shape of some of these festivals.

It really is amazing what people manage to do in such harsh climates. I’m so glad to be able to see it.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

The format is settling in - but this time, the big change is less regarding format, and more about the content type. Instead of a heady, data-driven article about City of Seattle municipilania, the main story is a more focused study done during my travels about one of the festivals I visited and interviewed.

Weekly Roundup

This section is a collation of links to the newest blog posts about smaller topics and daily events.

New Favorite Sources

This section will provide links to sources I think are interesting for the purpose of understanding cities, Seattle and otherwise.

None are provided this time - but check back next week!

New Resources

This section will provide links to resources such as infographics that have been produced in the past week that are useful for understanding, mapping or working with City of Seattle stuff, broadly.

Weekly Story - Event Overview, Lake Shikaribetsu Ice Festival, Hokkaido, Japan

January 31, 2026 I visited Lake Shikaribetsu in Hokkaido, Japan. There, I visited a snow igloo village. All of the buildings that I went and saw were made out of ice and snow - including a fully functional bar made entirely out of ice, where drinks are served in glasses made of ice! It’s an event that attracts about 30,000 people every year, and which started nearly 45 years ago.

History

The foundational myth of this event has it that lake Shikaribetsu has long been a place where people come to play in the snow. More than 45 years ago, people started building things on the ice in an almost playground-like fashion, nearby the Onsen. One of the event managers told me that the people at Lake Shikaribetsu started this tradition not because they were wanting to necessarily create a commercial success, but because it was simply fun.

The fun then turned into more people wanting to join in, and a series of iterations on how that went, until eventually it reached its current iteration. In 2013, the area that surrounds Lake Shikaribetsu, Tokachi Shikaoi, became a Geopark with special protected status along with a focus on environmental research and preservation. For the people who were already playing in the snow and putting together buildings of ice in the winter time, I imagine they already knew that there was something unique or special about the ice that they were using, but after its designation, the world became more aware of these special features. Each year, more than 30,000 people visit lake Shikaribetsu according to the manager I spoke to. They started the tradition 45 years ago just by seeing what they could build - because they found that they could build anything out of snow. Over time, they found that other people wanted to join in on building things out of snow, and eventually they made it into a commercial event in-tandem with the nature center for the Geopark that it would become.

The charm of lake Shikaribetsu is not limited to what volunteers from all over the globe have done with the igloos. The lake itself has been designated as a Geopark, which is a programmatic designation that designates important academic and ecological areas for preservation and study. This is partially because of its unique natural environment, being the highest lake in terms of elevation in all of Hokkaido (~.9 KM elevation). Because of this, the lake freezes in a unique way, and because of the elevation, they have winter for 6 months out of the year, with much of the lake being frozen for the entire duration.

Geopark

Because of its natural surroundings, and the fact that the lake is known for the rare species of fish that evolved specifically in the lake (Miyabe Charr), the site around lake Shikaribetsu was designated a special protected ecological zone known in Japan as a Geopark. With that status, they have been educating people about the academically valuable aspects of lake Shikaribetsu that make it an important spot that is worth preserving.

Of course, this hasn’t been limited just to the normal year-round operations of the nature/visitor center, but has been incorporated into the event I visited at the end of January. One of the igloos even had some displays that showcased some of the natural properties of the lake, including that the hotspring waters emanating from the mountains around lake Shikaribetsu are released at the bottom of the lake, instead of feeding through the top - what this does is create a layer of thick ice at the top when it freezes in the winter-time, but above-freezing temperatures at the bottom of the lake where the hotspring water is feeding in.

One byproduct of the hotspring waters coming into the lake is that there are gasses that are released from the bottom of the lake that end up bubbling up to the top, leading to ice that has these extremely interesting stridation patterns. As the bubbles get trapped in the ice as the gas rises they get caught under the layer of ice that is frozen from the top. This not only gives the ice some of its character (which was shown to me through some big ice slabs that have these interesting patterns), but also contributes to the natural ecosystem of the lake.

Another thing in this “Science Igloo” I got to see was a display about the fish that has evolved only within lake Shikaribetsu, the Miyabe Charr. The Miyabe Charr is only found in the waters surrounding and within lake Shikaribetsu, and thrive in nutrient-poor environments. The hotspring waters that I experienced at the lake were high in iron and sulfides, so I imagine an environment that is more dense in these create interesting selection pressures for the fish that I’m excited to read more about as further research is conducted.

Onsen Waters

I mentioned earlier that there are hotsprings that naturally emanate from the volcanic mountains surrounding lake Shikaribetsu. In Japan, it is very common for these hotsprings to have infrastructure built around them that we know as “Onsen”, or bathhouses. Often times, onsen serve as engines for economic development in rural, mountainous areas of Japan, as they increase domestic and foreign tourism - if you have never been to an onsen, I would strongly recommend it. These hotspring baths are affordable, relaxing and are seen to promote good health as well as having social benefits.

One of the draws of the lake Shikaribetsu ice festival is that it has an onsen… ON the lake. As in, they set up a huge tub of water that is fed by the hotsprings and then hosed back out from on top of the lake, and they set it up entirely within a building that is made of ice and snow, and they let visitors to the lake come and enjoy a relaxing bath in an open-air hotspring on top of a frozen lake. I am not sure anywhere else in the world actually does this - but when I took a dip, I ended up feeling refreshed and energized in a way I never have before. The warmth of the bath combined with the cold air was enchanting.

Thoughtful Design

The design of the festival was something that I was very interested in asking about. Much of the areas that are “off-limits” (NG) are protected by chest-high snow walls that make the message clear - DO NOT ENTER. Perhaps at a normal festival, you might have a small fence, or some stanchions, or even just some rope that prevents people from easily crossing into a section of the land they aren’t supposed to be on, but it was amazing to see that the walls were made of the same kinds of ice and snow bricks as everything else, making it feel like even though it’s a functional element that they need to keep for the smooth running of their event, it can also feel like a seamless part of the event.

This makes me think about events that I have contributed to in the past, like Big Day of Play, because at BDOP, we sort of went back and forth about the idea of ticketing off the event or roping off the event - and decided ultimately that we shouldn’t do that for reasons of safety, logistics and accessibility. One of the reasons why I think it’s difficult to do things like rope off the event space is that it creates this feeling of “imposition”. We are “imposing” rules on the people who are coming into the space. I think that something like the snow wall, where it serves a cautionary function, but ultimately doesn’t feel unnatural, is a great lesson to bring back with me.

Lessons Learned

Ultimately, I can bring a lot back to the City of Seattle, Seattle Parks and Recreation and Garfield Community Center that would make event-hosting easier, more unique and more impactful. Each year, Garfield Community Center hosts multiple holiday events - a creepy carnival, a holiday party and an egg hunt being some of the yearly events, but turnout can be varied, and some of what I learned today could certainly go some ways towards learning how to make our events more attractive than ever.

There’s evidence here that further tie-in with naturalists could be beneficial in the same way that educational elements were worked into this festival, and what I’ve taken away from the functional + event-natural bits leads me to have some ideas for later this year - how to design events so that they use natural and man-made features towards the end of keeping order and making people feel included. Ultimately, I am very grateful for the kind folks at Lake Shikaribetsu for allowing me to ask them some questions, and for the amazing event they throw every year! If you are interested in learning more about the Tokachi Shikaoi Geopark, visit its website here: https://www.shikaoi-story.jp/en/

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

Changes (Each Standing Committee):

District 1:

District 2:

District 3:

District 4:

District 5:

District 6:

District 7:

Position 8:

Position 9:

Day 10 (2/2/2026) in Hokkaido is winding down, and I have had a lot to reflect on today. Another weekly edition of The Lanyard Board will be coming out shortly, so I’ve been working on that while on the trains heading to Sapporo.

I arrived in Sapporo to see snow buried up to my chest in most places, and over my head in some. The streets are muffled, the light and shadows play tricks on you as you peek from behind snowbanks, and the prospect of driving in such a place seems nightmarish.

It’s historically deep snow - not just my own unfamiliarity. Despite this, daily life for a Monday seems to be progressing as normal - the trains are packed, if off-schedule in a rare turn, and people are returning home from work and school as if they aren’t buried under a mountain of fluffy white ice.

Now that filming is over and I’m enjoying some time to actually explore my surroundings, I think the muting effect of the snow is impactful for me. I’ll sit with that.

The best way to keep up with further conversations is to be a subscriber to The Lanyard Board, and to check out The Lanyard Board on social media.

Follow on Socials

The Lanyard Board is supported by readers like yourself. If you can, please support the project on Ko-Fi and tip the suggested amount of $2 for every month you feel a spark of enjoyment, insight or curiosity from The Lanyard Board.

Support TLB on Ko-Fi

Thanks for reading The Lanyard Board! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now