Twenty Years of Kamiyama, Tokushima — Reading Rural Social Innovation through the Six-Field Integration Model

This note is a case note in the Social Design Foundations Lab (ISVD-LAB-003). It examines how the six-field integration model organized in the foundations phase actually operates in a concrete Japanese site, using twenty years of practice in Kamiyama, Tokushima as material.

Kamiyama, in Myōzai District of Tokushima Prefecture, is a mountain village of 4,597 people (as of January 2025) covering 173 square kilometers. It sits deep in the Shikoku mountains, and roughly 80% of the town area is forest. The population of 4,597 as of January 1, 2025 represents a 22.5% decline from 2015, a loss of 1,334 people over ten years. Statistically, the town falls into the category of "municipalities at risk of disappearance."

Even so, Kamiyama is known nationwide for its catchphrase "creative depopulation" and for twenty years of sustained practice. In 2023, Kamiyama Marugoto College — a private institution and the 58th college of technology (kosen) in Japan, the first new kosen established domestically in nineteen years — opened its doors with a scholarship endowment of roughly 10 billion yen from eleven companies. Ten companies each contributed 1 billion yen, and Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting committed 50 million yen per year for ten years, an unusual funding structure.

The main milestones of the twenty years look like this.

• Early 1990s: Shinya Ominami and colleagues formed the "Kamiyama International Exchange Association" and began local activity through the "Blue-Eyed Doll Homecoming Project"
• 2004: NPO Green Valley founded, Kamiyama Artist in Residence (KAIR) launched
• 2010: Sansan opened its Kamiyama Lab, the town's first satellite office
• 2010-2011: Kamiyama Juku began, fiber-optic network completed
• 2011 onward: Plat-Ease and others followed, forming a cluster of satellite offices
• 2018: Preparatory committee for Kamiyama Marugoto College launched
• April 2023: Kamiyama Marugoto College opened (private, five-year integrated program, all-boarding, capacity 40 students)

In 2023, in-migration reached 164 people, up 46.4% year on year, according to available reports. Kamiyama recorded its first-ever net social gain in 2011, and has continued to post net in-migration in several subsequent years. The population dynamics reported on the town's official statistics page show a level exceptional among mountain-village municipalities in Japan.

What has actually accumulated over these twenty years? We read it through the six-field integration model.

Which Fields of the Six Does It Sit In

The six-field integration model of social design brings together six fields — social policy, agnotology, epistemology, participatory design, EBPM, and civil society theory — around the nature of wicked problems. Kamiyama's practice explicitly includes four of these six fields and implicitly includes the remaining two.

The social policy side. Kamiyama's core issue is the structural problem shared by Japanese mountainous areas: depopulation and aging. Japan's central government has promoted KPI-driven town planning under its "regional revitalization" policy. Kamiyama's practice raises the counter-concept of "creative depopulation" against that framing. In a 2019 interview, Shinya Ominami expressed a critical distance from KPI-driven regional revitalization policies. The design idea is not to stop the population decline, but to deliberately reconfigure the composition of the population (age, occupation, diversity) during the decline.

The participatory design side. KAIR, launched in 2004, is an artist-in-residence program. Invited artists and residents work on shared projects across the stay period. This is one classical form of participatory design. Rather than a top-down setup in which external experts design without the people concerned, external actors enter the residents' everyday space in a bottom-up form. The collaboration structure that Manzini (2015) formulated between "diffuse design (design by everyone)" and "expert design (design by trained designers)" is built directly into KAIR.

The civil society side. What sits at the center of Kamiyama's practice is not the local government but NPO Green Valley. This structure — an intermediary organization handling decisions and resource mobilization between administration and residents — is an implementation of the social capital that Putnam (2000) discussed. Green Valley handles the town's vacant-house registry, reception of prospective in-migrants, corporate attraction negotiations, and external fundraising in one place. It has operated not as a complement to the administration but as a parallel decision-making body.

The agnotology side. Kamiyama's twenty years are also a rewriting of the story that "mountain villages equal places in decline." Agnotology is the field that examines mechanisms of ignorance production. Kamiyama's practice includes a practice of "reusing things that had not been treated as resources." Forests, old houses, surplus bandwidth on communication infrastructure, and latent demand from young urban workers were not treated as resources in earlier regional policy. KAIR and satellite office attraction redefined these as "material for co-working offices in mountain settings" and "environments for artist residencies."

The EBPM and epistemology sides are limited. Kamiyama's practice does not explicitly claim EBPM (evidence-based policy making). If anything, Ominami takes a position that criticizes KPI-driven approaches. Epistemology (the articulation of local knowledge) has also proceeded through accumulation of practical knowledge rather than systematic theorization. These two fields have entered mostly through outside researchers and academic institutions analyzing Kamiyama's practice after the fact. From the perspective of six-field integration, this is a rare case of "practice-first, theory-later."

Structural Analysis of the Implementation Process

We read Kamiyama's twenty years along three axes — decision making, funding model, and risk — split into three periods.

Period 1 (2004-2010): Inversion of Meaning

The founding of Green Valley and the launch of KAIR sit at the core of Period 1. The decisions in this period responded to a challenge: how to sustain long-term projects that do not fit the single-year, report-driven subsidy cycles of government, through an NPO structure. The funding combined a small-scale mosaic — early grants from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' emergency support programs for regional residents, arts grants from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and corporate donations — deliberately avoiding dependence on any single large source.

The risks of this period were friction between outside artists and residents, and internal criticism about whether art was needed at all in a mountain village. According to the National Association of Towns and Villages forum article, the early KAIR spent a great deal of its energy on explaining to residents what it meant for outsiders to enter the village. What Period 1 achieved was not an economic indicator but the earlier construction of an inversion of meaning — from "marginal community" to "place of creation" — as a receptor for the corporate attraction that would come twenty years later.

Period 2 (2010-2018): Uncovering Resources and Attracting Companies

Sansan's opening of the Kamiyama Lab was the pivot. Sansan's official announcement framed the satellite office as "a ten-second commute — the best of city and countryside." Decisions in this period moved together with the roll-out of the fiber-optic network, completed around 2011. The presence of communication infrastructure — a condition that had not been assumed to exist in mountain villages — sharply lowered decision costs for companies.

The funding model settled into a division of labor: companies covered the cost of setting up satellite offices themselves, and Green Valley handled property brokerage, mediation with residents, and support for daily life. Dependence on government subsidies dropped below Period 1 levels, and corporate attraction itself began to function as direct investment into the local economy.

The risks were concentration of decision making around key people (Ominami and a small number of central figures) and loss of scarcity once the "Kamiyama model" spread across the country. What this period achieved was a satellite-office cluster: Sansan, Plat-Ease, film-related companies, and IT startups moved in one after another, reaching nine companies by 2013 and later climbing past sixteen.

Period 3 (2018-2023): Building Educational Infrastructure

Period 3 runs from the launch of the preparatory committee for Kamiyama Marugoto College in 2018 to the opening in April 2023. Decisions in this period started small. In 2016, Chikahiro Terada (representative of Sansan) and Ominami exchanged messages about "wanting to build a school in Kamiyama," and this led to a twelve-person preparatory committee.

The funding model has a two-layer structure: a roughly 10-billion-yen scholarship fund from eleven companies, and operating funds as a private school. To make five years of tuition effectively free for students, the school combined two different donation structures — ten companies at 1 billion yen each, and 50 million yen per year for ten years from Deloitte Tohmatsu. The distinctive feature of Period 3 decisions is that a funding model was assembled without depending on government subsidies or national treasury funds, entirely through a corporate network.

The risks were the sustainability of a private national-college-style institution, opposition from local residents, and management risk on 10 billion yen. the Business Insider Japan article reported the process of overcoming local opposition. What Period 3 achieved was standing up an unprecedented piece of educational infrastructure — a private technical college in a mountain village — on top of the accumulation of Periods 1 and 2.

Limits of Transferability

Many attempts have already been made to treat Kamiyama's twenty years as a "model" and apply it to other mountainous areas. Yet there are limits specific to Kamiyama.

First, there are initial conditions specific to Kamiyama. Its location in the central Shikoku mountains guarantees urban access — about one hour by car from the prefectural capital, Tokushima — while giving it a clear brand as a "mountain village." A town area of 173 square kilometers is a scale at which key people like Ominami can build face-to-face relationships across twenty years. The political decision not to enter a municipal merger has been decisive in preserving continuity of decision making.

Second, there is a structural risk of dependence on key people. The fact that Ominami and a few central figures kept making decisions for twenty years is a condition that is hard to imitate. Shoji Kanda (2018) pointed to the succession of key people as the biggest issue for "Kamiyama's next twenty years."

Third, there is the risk that surface imitation of the "Kamiyama model" spreads nationwide without its context. Many municipalities that pulled out only the outer parts — satellite office attraction, artist in residence, regional branding — imitated the outer shape of Periods 2 and 3 without going through the inversion of meaning and accumulation of relational capital that Period 1 required. What Masatada Shinohara (2014) portrayed of Kamiyama is not a simple success story but a continuous sequence of trial and error across twenty years.

Given these, we draw out three structural principles that generalize from Kamiyama's practice.

Principle 1: Presuppose a twenty-year time horizon. The inversion of meaning in Period 1 does not close within single-year projects. Five-year KPI management under the regional revitalization framework and twenty-year implementation of social design collide on the time axis.

Principle 2: Design the intermediary organization as a decision-making body parallel to government, not a complement. Green Valley operated in parallel with the administration, not as its complement. An NPO subordinated to government cycles cannot sustain twenty years of continuous decision making.

Principle 3: Reassemble the funding model stage by stage. The mosaic funding of Period 1, corporate investment reception of Period 2, and corporate-network funding of Period 3 are structurally different. A design that depends on a single funding source will break down somewhere during the twenty years.

The three principles sit at the intersection of "civil society theory, participatory design, and social policy" among the six fields. The remaining three fields — EBPM, agnotology, and epistemology — function as tools for reading this intersection after the fact. Kamiyama's twenty years show that six-field integration is not a theoretical unification but something that appears unevenly in practice.

→ Related: Six-Field Integration Model / Literature Map — Participatory Design / Literature Map — Civil Society / Literature Map — Social Policy