PROJECTS

What this work most wanted to express was the image of the world becoming one living village. Information technology as an extension of the human nervous system; individuals deeply connected; each person, like hemoglobin in the blood, part of the whole yet living freely. After a modernity that scattered us apart, could people return once more to the "village"?

Using algorithmic design, it read Google's road data and drew a model in which villages generate themselves across the world. The sense of wholeness embedded in this single drawing became the prototype for everything that followed — and over the next fifteen years, one would spend implementing this drawing not as a concept but as an actual place: prsm, Cift, NESTO, the retreats, and finally architecture.

Finalist, Sendai Design League 2011 / Fujimura Ryuji Prize, Red Brick Graduation Design Exhibition 2011

Using an entire derelict building in Yutenji, Tokyo, PROTO was a six-month community that creatively "prototyped" living, working, making, and playing. Twenty-six diverse creators brought their ideas, tools, and companions; serendipity accumulated, sparked, and became a great swirl. Dissolution was part of the design from the start, and it closed on schedule after half a year — once it ended, nothing remained, and it all felt like a dream.

The conviction that a time limit purifies a community, and the irreplaceable companions gained here, became the foundation of the extended family Cift — where the founder would this time become a resident himself.

Renting an entire floor of SHIBUYA CAST. and taking on the risk of becoming a resident, the single condition of entry was: believe that everyone here is family. Starting from the premise that "the relationship already exists," this social experiment among a hundred professions grew past 200 members nationwide, and continues to this day, spreading further even after the founder handed over his role.

Placing no authority at the center and drawing no border at the edge, letting community arise naturally as a result — that stance grew slowly out of this experiment. At the same time, he felt that sharing space alone did not quite reach the quality of connection he was seeking. Featured as a new form of family by NHK, Yomiuri, and GQ.

Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia — The Arts (2018)

Against the idleness and loneliness the pandemic exposed, NESTO offered "distant neighbors" — online communities — and "rhythms of life," subscription routines synchronized in time. Over fifty rhythms, seasonal online festivals, a 110-episode podcast, and a seed round of ¥100M in 2021.

In December 2023 the company was liquidated with a sense of completion. From interim to final, its reports were published openly rather than hiding failure, and the dissolution closed with a ceremony — an ending designed, as with PROTO. What became clear after three years was that the post-modern wellbeing he sought could not be fully embodied within the "social OS" of a corporation. He graduated, quietly, from the corporate form itself.

People with different values and worldviews are invited to eat and sleep together for three days and two nights, held across Japan. The program is not scripted; dialogue accumulates along the theme, following its natural course.

Three principles distilled from practice: de-servicization (letting go of the drive to deliver a promised value); transparent, equally shared costs; and multiple hosts, in a paternal–maternal contrast. Themes have reached religion, reconciliation, and pilgrimage — "harmony and dialogue" at Engakuji temple in Kita-Kamakura, "religion and dialogue" at the foot of Mt. Fuji.

Where energy gathers, people connect of their own accord. "I felt myself returning to who I originally was." "This place felt like home." — participants' words quietly bear out that conviction.

Returning to the Jomon sense of inseparable coexistence between people and nature, JOMON is a device in which harmony arises of itself within a community. A thatched roof held by a great central pillar, a hearth whose fire never dies, a waterfall, a circular plan — architecture that dissolves the boundary between dwelling and praying. Its conical diagram is designed so that harmony emerges not only in space but in the cycle of a single day.

Interpreting the torus-shaped electromagnetic field generated by the heart, TORUS is a retreat center for around sixteen mid-term residents. From a sunken circular space at the center, the energy of prayer flows in a torus, raising collective coherence and resonating with the earth's magnetic field. The "arrangement for harmony" — the center is transparent — rendered directly as space.

Envisioned on the shore of Lake Shikotsu in Hokkaido: a "wellbeing infrastructure for regeneration and harmony." Within a national park's nature, the architecture takes inspiration from the blue transparency of the lake's water. A place where, through meditation, dialogue, and contact with nature, the relations between people, and between people and nature, are regenerated.

The crystallization of the current practice is Coherence Circle — an invitation-only experience that, on the accumulation of dialogue gatherings held since 2022, began walking under this name in June 2024.

Two days of remembering the connection between oneself, others, and the world within a field of coherence. Each person dives deep to the phase of their "wish," while "insight" rises from the whole of the circle. When both are passed through, awareness and healing beyond the individual — harmony — appear of their own accord in the transparent field of resonance (the Coherent Field). The place where the question that has continued since the graduation design — "for the world to become one village" — is practiced at the scale of a single person.

healingconnections.jp