2021年度の活動報告

Musashi University Faculty of Economics　Noriyuki Takahashi

As with last year, the spread of COVID-19 has shown no signs of abating, and although we had planned to hold research courses in person for the first time in two years until autumn, we had to abandon this plan and instead held all five courses via Zoom.

On-site surveys were also conducted in two locations in March, when the spread of infection had shown signs of slowing down somewhat, but even so, the number of surveys was less than half that of previous years.

As in the previous fiscal year, the operating environment was restricted, but the following shows our achievements.

The first is the implementation of a community business "research" course. This research course, which has been held continuously since 2012, is aimed at people who want to learn more about community business or who have already started a business, and covers the environment surrounding community business and hot topics in the area. It is characterized by being aimed at a wide range of people, including those who are only interested, those who are not planning to start a business themselves but are interested in supporting it, those who are considering starting one, and those who have already started. The ultimate aim is to form a "community" related to community business. This year's course was held five times. The theme for this year was "New developments in community business" in the region and "COVID-19". In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that has lasted for almost two years, community business leaders and supporters talked about their new initiatives (see Tables 1, 2, and 3).

The main contents of each session are as follows:

Our first guest, Mr. Norimasa Azechi, is a person who has received a certain degree of recognition as a central figure in revitalizing the Shimanto River Basin in Shikoku and revitalizing community businesses. The Shimanto Drama is also an interesting example of a successful "roadside station" that is rare. This time, we asked him about how he is creating new connections online, making use of the assets he has cultivated in disseminating information in the past, even as fewer people are actually visiting the area amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hideyuki Funakoshi, who will appear in the second installment, took over from Takayuki Nishioka, who will appear in the third installment, and has been further developing the system on top of that foundation. Recently, with the goal of increasing the flow of people from outside the prefecture, Funakoshi has been making progress toward achieving this goal by adding novelty to various initiatives. For example, they have floated a large-deck boat on Lake Biwa and are attempting to conduct teleworking on the lake. The background to this is the development of human resources, and this time we spoke mainly about how they develop their human resources.

The University of Shiga Prefecture, where Takayuki Nishioka teaches in the third session, is focusing on educational programs rooted in the community, such as making the subject of Regional Coexistence a compulsory subject for first-year students in all faculties. Nishioka has used his experience and connections, working for a city bank for 26 years and the Shiga Prefecture Industrial Support Plaza for 11 years, to launch a minor course called the Social Entrepreneur Course at the university, nurturing leaders in the local economy. We spoke to him mainly about the content of the program.

Our fourth guest, Kawabata Hironori, grew up on Amami Oshima as the heir to a kimono shop that handled Oshima Tsumugi, but was worried about the future of Oshima Tsumugi, so instead of simply selling Oshima Tsumugi as kimono, he came up with a way to use Oshima Tsumugi as an accent in leather products, and succeeded in developing products that embody the individuality of the region. In this episode, we talked to him about his attempt to incorporate social media and other media into his business amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and to use a variety of marketing methods to disseminate information from rural areas to major metropolitan areas such as Tokyo.

In the fifth episode, Terutaro Nakai studied Indonesian at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, after which he became aware of the potential of forestry, and believed that one of the reasons forestry was not profitable in Nishiawakura Village, Okayama Prefecture, was the complexity of forest ownership. He used drones and ICT technology to visualize forests (trees), and improved the efficiency of deforestation and returning the land to the owners. Combined with the development of the local timber-related industry, he succeeded in commercializing the project and made a significant contribution to the development of the local community. In this episode, we spoke with Nakai, focusing on the business development of another company he founded, and the reforestation that takes place after logging.

The second project is a field study of local community-based revitalization efforts.

 

This year, the survey was conducted once in January and once in March 2022, when the infection situation had calmed down somewhat (Table 4).