From June to September 2026 the National Film Archive of Japan ran a crowdfunding campaign and raised more than ¥150 million from more than 5,500 people. In the same fiscal year, the state's operating grant to the National Museum of Art, which runs the archive, was ¥8.46 billion, about ¥320 million more than the year before. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the institution decides how the grant is split among its museums, and the archive's share of the grant fell sharply after the balance between grants and self-generated revenue was adjusted across all museums. This piece reads the work the Agency says the state funds alongside what the money raised is used for.

In September 2026 Japan's National Museum of Art announced higher fees for its collection exhibitions. Free admission for high school students and younger, people aged 65 and over and others continues, and the fees rise for general visitors and university students. Five museums' collection exhibitions drew 1,126,594 people in FY2025, but the institution's performance report gives only totals by museum. The National Museum of Western Art's annual bulletin breaks down its 690,302 collection gallery visitors in FY2024 by category: general visitors and university students together made up 26%, and those who entered with a special exhibition ticket or through Campus Members made up 49%. This piece checks how far published figures can show where the burden of the fee rise falls.

In September 2026 the National Museum of Art, the institution that runs seven national museums in Japan, announced higher admission fees for the collection exhibitions at six of them. General admission will be ¥1,000 at five museums, up from ¥430 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto and the National Museum of Art, Osaka. The announcement does not mention the medium-term objectives. Yet the objectives set by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in February 2026 require admission fees to be raised and dual pricing introduced during the period, and set a target for self-generated revenue to cover at least 65% of exhibition costs by FY2030. This piece reads the original text.

The Tokyo Shimbun's morning edition of 25 September 2026 carried a comment by Naoya Yokota, representative director of ISVD, in its Kochira Tokuhobu section. The article covers the fee rise at Japan's national art museums and the government's call for exhibitions that earn money. The interview related to a column ISVD published in March.

From the 2012 Social Impact Design Summit to the 2026 framework paper for assessing design's social impact, this literature map organizes the English-language genealogy of evaluating and critiquing social design through seven verified sources. It distinguishes two strands, framework-building and critical theory, and shows the gap in Japanese-language reception.

This note analyzes MindLab, the Danish cross-ministerial policy innovation lab that operated from 2002 to 2018, through the six-field integration model of Social Design Foundations. In contrast with Kamiyama (community-led NPO type), it presents the structure of a top-down, inside-government model and the structural reasons behind its 2018 closure, along with three pitfalls when transferring the model to a Japanese context.

This note analyzes twenty years of practice in Kamiyama, Tokushima (population 5,000) — artist-in-residence programs, satellite office attraction, and the founding of Kamiyama Marugoto College — through the six-field integration model of Social Design Foundations. It presents both the limits of transferability and three or four generalizable principles.

This essay presents a four-stage procedure for translating the six-field integration model of social design foundations (social policy, agnotology, epistemology, participatory design, EBPM, civil society theory) into concrete practice. It maps the procedure onto the empirical work of ISVD's four other labs (agnotology, KOUSOU 0, public-asset-ppp, traffic-noise) and reports three challenges observed during implementation.

This case study compares three small concession implementations in small cities of 30,000–100,000 population — Fukuchiyama, Tsuyama, and Miyawaka — by examining how each contract design broke through the profitability, funding, and know-how walls presented in the earlier structural analysis. Three patterns emerge: zero public-burden, subsidy-hybrid, and private-proposal, differentiated by contract term, rent, and risk allocation. Implications for other municipalities considering adoption are drawn.

For PPP/PFI practitioners: a working model of where to read and what to read for. Built around a three-stream reading of foundational clauses, a five-type classification of risk allocation matrices, and a four-element chain of monitoring provisions — pushing all the way down to a 12-item checklist for the moment a contract draft lands on your desk.

A cross-axis reading of the 22 research notes (coding: 7 axes) accumulated in the Agnotology Lab. Top mechanisms: attention-control / silence-structuring / doubt-manufacturing. Actors: institution dominates with 15 notes. powerDirection: top-down accounts for 18 notes. The next research agenda emerges from both the strong biases and the blank spots.

A methodology for systematically excavating problems that were never debated. Connecting Foucault's archaeology, Trouillot's four-stage silencing, and Fricker's hermeneutical injustice, this essay organizes silence into four layers (Absence / Concealment / Distortion / Delegitimization) and matches them with five methods of retroactive detection (statistical absence / archival inversion / testimonial reconstitution / comparison / temporal shift).

This note proposes a method for reading shrinking assets — decommissioned gas stations, closed schools, idle public facilities — not as liabilities but as raw material for rewriting the city's memory, organized across five layers: materiality, directionality, responsibility structure, temporality, and collectivization. The note examines whether this methodology can be applied as an initial evaluation framework for PPP (Public-Private Partnership / Private Finance Initiative) projects, with an implementation sketch drawn from decommissioned gas stations.

This note presents a methodology for internationally comparing counter-design practices that implement epistemic justice. It sketches a comparative framework across five axes (thought, subject, method, evaluation, funding) for four lineages — Nordic co-design, U.S. Design Justice, U.K. civic tech, and Latin American popular education — and makes explicit ISVD's position and its chosen combination of lineages.

Japan's decommissioned refineries and oil terminals have come one after another: Cosmo Sakaide in 2013, JX Muroran in 2014, ENEOS Osaka in 2020, ENEOS Wakayama in 2023, Seibu Oil Yamaguchi in 2024. Most sites have been repurposed as logistics hubs, petrochemical bases, or Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) production facilities — cultural and architectural adaptive reuse remains virtually absent domestically. Internationally, three landmark precedents exist: TANK Shanghai, Gasholders London, and the Vienna Gasometers. This note compares ten domestic cases and three international cases to examine the prospects for architectural adaptive reuse in Japan.

This essay examines Counter-Design theory through domestic Japanese cases. Using five criteria (implementation of epistemic justice, collective intervention, analyzability of structure, continuous operation, transferability), it selects five cases and analyzes their target structures of ignorance production, forms of counter-design intervention, and achievements and limits.

Japan's gas stations peaked at 60,421 stations at the end of fiscal 1994 and fell to 27,009 stations by the end of fiscal 2024 — roughly 33,000 closures over thirty years. Under Fire Prevention Notice No. 78 (消防危第78号), underground tank disposal after closure follows the principle of removal first, with in-place filling permitted only when unavoidable. In practice, the cost burden has made in-place filling the common choice. This note classifies the 'subsurface infrastructure legacy' subtype within the larger category of shrinking assets, reading both the legal framework and on-the-ground reality.

Conventional media literacy education is biased toward individual responsibility and does not address the production structure of ignorance. This essay proposes a counter-design theory built on three layers — analysis of the production structure, critical reading by recipients, and design of collective intervention — with epistemic justice at its core, and derives five curriculum design principles.

Can adding an Industry Responsibility Clause move noise governance beyond the limits of enforcement alone? Drawing on the hypothetical municipal soundscape ordinance model (equivalent to 25 existing articles, plus a proposed addition) that ISVD is developing at the research stage, this essay examines a four-part Industry Responsibility Clause — covering recognition, declaration, dialogue, and certification — against existing ordinance compatibility and international precedent. A research-stage institutional design sketch, including pathways for joint declarations with quiet-riding motorcyclists.

The KOUSOU 0 assembly-response corpus currently holds 2,211 speeches (65 speakers / 18 sessions) from the Toshima-ku assembly for 2024-2025. This case note reads that pilot slice honestly, holding the analysis at municipality-aggregate granularity, and treating the non-recording of other wards including Setagaya-ku as 'ingestion not yet started' rather than 'nothing to observe'.

The WHO Regional Office for Europe's 2018 environmental noise guidelines identify road noise at Lden 53 dB and above as raising the risk of heart attack and stroke, and recommend nighttime Lnight below 40 dB. Japan's environmental quality standards permit 45 dB at night in residential zones and 65 dB at night along arterial roads. This note reads the gap against the health-effects research.

A methodological account of how machikarte acquires, normalizes, and quality-assures local assembly response data, and how the labs layer turns that base into structural analysis material.