The Japan Study Programme is a design research platform connecting workshops across distinct geographical and cultural contexts: a rural post-agricultural village, an inner-city neighbourhood in Tokyo and a woodland fabrication workshop. Across these contexts, creative design emerges through cyclical relationships between objects, local knowledge, skills and stories, guided by direct observation and community engagement as an economy of means. The programme encourages active observation and individual creative responses to the social and cultural landscapes of Japan. The interlinking nature of these workshops allows new knowledge to emerge through encounters between contrasting conditions, bringing together notions of the global and the local – GLOCAL.

A workshop situated in the post-agricultural village of Koshirakura in the mountainous Tsumari district, exploring the relationship between rural territory, community life and small acts of making.

The Koshirakura Landscape Workshop began in 1996 as a field research initiative in a small village approximately 250 kilometres north of Tokyo. It was first established as an independent research project in collaboration with the Niigata Prefectural Government. What began as an experimental endeavour –initially expected to last only a few years – has since evolved into an annual event, becoming a sustained and evolving tradition.

Each year, up to thirty international architecture students gather in the village, working alongside members of the older local population. Through drawing and mapping, they engage closely with the landscape, tracing its contours, its uses and its gradual transformations. These acts are modest, but cumulative – forms of attention that register not only space, but the ways in which it is lived, remembered and maintained.

Within this setting, the roles of those involved begin to shift. The act of drawing becomes at once architectural, ethnographic and observational. Mapping becomes a way of recording stories as much as territory. The distinctions between architect, historian, artist or anthropologist are not explicitly defined, but quietly dissolve through practice.

In this sense, the workshop does not simply reflect broader changes in design methodologies – it enacts them. Knowledge is assembled through proximity and participation, rather than imposed as a fixed framework. What emerges is not a singular disciplinary perspective, but a composite understanding of place, formed through collaboration, observation and making.

Participants are encouraged to also join the subsequent workshop, Archaeology of the Present Time, in Tokyo.

In association with Maeda Corporation as a core design research partner, the programme works with a range of cultural and civic institutions.