Shinagawa City, Tokyo, Japan, May 18, 2021—Akatsuki Inc. announced today that its board resolved today to back the Kamiyama College of Technology, Design and Entrepreneurship, a private technical college working toward welcoming its first cohort of students in April 2023. The school’s founding is the first initiative to take advantage of Japan’s enterprise-oriented Furusato Nozei program for diverting a portion of owed municipal taxes to revenue-strapped regional municipalities to promote their revitalization.
The Kamiyama College of Technology, Design and Entrepreneurship (Kamiyama Kosen) will be a private technical college that is schedules to open its doors in April 2023. It will be sited in Kamiyama-cho, Tokushima Prefecture, a place reputed to be a “rural community of miracles,” and the marugoto (“all-encompassing, comprehensive”) in its name is intended to imply that the school will involve all of Kamiyama, using the whole community as a classroom for providing its hands-on, practicality-oriented learning experience.
“In the coming age, technical colleges that foster self-starting, self-motivated individuals able to follow their own curiosity, can only gain importance. Kosen is intended as a place for students to transform their ‘what shall I do?’ into ‘what I can do,’ and I believe the more experiences kids have increasing their ‘what I can do’s, the more ‘what shall I do’s they’ll be able to nurture inside themselves,” said Akatsuki CEO Tetsuro Koda. Recalling his personal experience, he continued: “I’m delighted that Akatsuki will be helping bring up ambitious young people through our support of Kamiyama College. I went to the National Institute of Technology’s Sasebo College, where I acquired knowledge of programming and other subjects in the information-processing domain in good balance with mechanical and other skills in the manufacturing domain. After moving to the University of Tsukuba, I got involved in robotics research. But it was my manufacturing-domain experiences at NIT that have been instrumental to me since I left school, both in business and in building organizations.”
The institution’s stated mission is to be a school that can change humanity’s future through the melding of technology and design. Its curriculum is meant to depart from technical colleges’ traditional focus on hard skills training alone, providing a well-rounded educational foundation in software-oriented technology and a foundation of training in design as applicable to user interfaces, UX, and art. And it will attempt to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset among students to foster individuals capable of going on to transform the world for the better, regardless of the kind of society they live in.
You can learn more about the Kamiyama College of Technology, Design and Entrepreneurship at its website or through its note or Twitter account.
Note: Some details on the Kamiyama College of Technology, Design and Entrepreneurship are unfinalized and subject to change. The April 2023 opening date, in particular, is contingent on government approval and could change depending on when approval is granted.