Our Team

Hiroshi Tamura

Co-Founder, Managing director

Hiroshi Tamura is Co-founder and Managing Director at Re:public Inc. Hiroshi also serves as Co-Founder and Executive Fellow at i.school of The University of Tokyo where ground-breaking interdisciplinary innovation education program is offered to all the schools at the university since 2009. His career started at Hakuhodo Inc., one of major advertising agencies in Asia and he has developed his career as a research expert through investigating in digital media, ethnographic praxis and design-led innovation aka. design thinking. After leaving Hakuhodo, Hiroshi launched Re:public, a novel think-do-tank dedicated to innovation architecture with Fumiko Ichikawa, and started a new initiative to co-develop innovation ecosystems partnering with government, industry and university at home and overseas. Now he is also taking a teaching profession at Kyushu University and Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology as Visiting Professor.

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Fumiko Ichikawa

Co-Founder, Managing director

Fumiko Ichikawa has received her Masters degree in Human Computer Interaction from Keio University. In her commercial career, she has worked with many leading companies and design offices, where she took lead in global design research based in Finland, China, and Japan. After the financial crisis and the great earthquake that took place in Northern Japan in 2011, Fumiko co-founded a company Re:public, Inc together with Hiroshi Tamura. Together with national and regional governments, companies of all sizes, and educational institutes, her mission is to empower individuals and develop innovation platforms for the better future. Fumiko is a member of Reach, the global design research network, and a founding director of Innovators 100, an innovation program commissioned by Hiroshima prefecture. She also organizes a Serial Innovators consortium, an alliance where she studies how innovators create and deliver breakthrough innovations.

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Yuki Uchida

Senior Director

Yuki Uchida graduated from Waseda University with bachelor degree in Architecture. After working as a media producer at Recruit Ltd., she majored in Sustainable City Design at Ferrara University graduate school in Italy in 2012. She was involved in regional planning projects in Italy, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam etc. as well as UN Sustainable City Alliance Project in the Brazilian Government. Also, she took part in a project to produce participatory guidebook : “Fukui-jin:People in Fukui” in 2012, as a founder.
Yuki was involved in the establishment of Re:public in 2013. She is a founding director of “Innovation Studio Fukuoka” which program to promotes citizen innovation in Fukuoka, “make.fukui” including XSCHOOL, a design school and project incubation program for young innovators and local industries commissioned by Fukui city. She has also managed foresight programs with a R&D department in several companies, universities and so on. She appointed as a regional revitalization evangelist by the Cabinet Office in 2017.

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Ryo Shirai

Senior Director / Editor in Chief, MOMENT Magazine

Ryo Shirai is a senior director at Re:public, working with local governments, companies of all sizes, and educational institutes. He has studied Cultural Anthropology at Waseda university in Japan and also, studied at Media Lab Amsterdam. Since June 2014, Ryo has started working at Re:public and managed several projects: a Serial Innovators Consortium, an alliance where he research how innovators create and deliver breakthrough innovations in mature firms, and XSCHOOL, an innovation program for young innovators and local industries commissioned by Fukui city. Since June 2019, he is an editor in chief of MOMENT Magazine, a trans-local magazine for people exploring the futures of cities published by Re:public.

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Atsushi Suzuki

Director

Atsushi holds a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo. He also earned bachelor’s degrees both from International Christian University (political economy major) and Aichi Sangyo University (architecture major) . He has an extensive experience in market and policy research through his work at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), especially through his position as a Director of Research at the JETRO New York Office between from 2014 to 2019. He joined Re:Public in 2019.

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Noriko Yahata

Associate Director

Majoring in sociology, Noriko has rich background experiencing different cultures. After working as sales and purchasing in a major department store, has lived in Seoul, Korea, and has worked for a marketing company promoting Japan overseas. In 2012, she enrolled herself in a Women’s Innovation Leadership Program as the first batch. Since 2017, works as a director for Re:public, inc. and since then, has been responsible for multiple projects including foresight project for Kyushu Electricity and New Normal, a new project identifying craftsmanship in today’s context, for Saga prefecture.

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Yoko Tada

Office Manager / Tax accountant

Yoko Tada is an office manager responsible for the back office of Re:public. For over 13 years she has been a professional tax accountant, offering a support to any individual and organizations in field of entrepreneurship and business creation. Her aim is to have a long-term relationship so that people involved in economic activities can continue to be fulfilling and heart-full. She studied management and tax policy at Kagoshima University, and previously worked at Kagayaki Tax Office and Deloitte Tohmatsu Tax Corporation.

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Yumiko Matsumaru

Director

Yumiko is an independent editor based in Tokyo. Joined Re:public in 2017, she has been engaged in several projects including make.f in Fukui. She studied Cultural Anthropology and Art History at Hitotsubashi University and University of California Santa Cruz. She had worked for a magazine titled ‘Tokyo-jin’ , exploring various cultural heritage of the city of Tokyo.

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Hazuki Kosaka

Director

Hazuki Kosaka is an Assistant Director at Re:public, and is involved in the research and co-creation of emerging lifestyles, based on the interplay with the local. She also serves as Research Fellow at the Social Art Lab in Kyushu University’s Faculty of Design. As a recipient of Austrian Government scholarship, she conducted the majority of her research at Innsbruck University, and was awarded her doctorate in musicology from the Tokyo University of the Arts. An active critique of Classical Music, she is a regular contributor to Ongaku no tomo magazine, a major Japanese periodical in the genre.

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Ryota Kamio

Senior Director

Ryota is a Yokohama native, an urbanist, and a designer. He earned a master’s degree in Design for Emergent Futures from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) / ELISAVA School of Design and Engineering. He also has a master’s degree from the University of Barcelona in Spatial Planning & Environmental Management. Since 2016, Ryota has been a freelance researcher working around urban issues that deal with housing, gentrification, and public spaces. He also designs lifestyles and living environments that complement emerging technologies.

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Valentina Maria Vasile

Associate Director

Valentina is an Italian Interior Designer who graduated from Politecnico di Milano. In 2019 she came to Japan as an exchange student at Kyushu University in Fukuoka to learn more about Japanese architecture and design. After an internship in which she designed the interior renovation of a traditional Japanese house in the rural area of Yame, she joined the Re:public team in 2021. Now she is involved in a circular design and renovation project in the Kyushu area. Her background is about spatial and landscape design, focusing on how space can actively affect people’s behaviors and their emotions. Skilled in digital graphics, use of materials, and illumination.

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Kae Hirose

Associate Director

Kae graduated from the Faculty of Economics, Keio University / Graduate School of Media and Governance (X-Design program), Keio University. In 2019, she was a research intern at RMIT University where she participated in a project that bridges Japan and Australia. She also conducted her masters research in Morioka, Japan on the documentation and visualization of fieldwork using the omnidirectional-camera. She joined Re:public in 2020 and specializes in service design, fieldwork, and digital ethnography.

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Edward Masui

Director

Edward received his BA in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MA from the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) at the University of Chicago. After returning to Japan in 2010, Edward was part of the launching of Japan Digital Archives Center, while acting as an international liaison between the library sector in Japan and those around the world for the Japan Library Fair Organizing Committee. He also took lead in several company-wide projects, including but not limited to, re-branding and business incubation projects.

Edward’s focus is on designing learning environments that are conducive to collaborative making (things, events, social systems, etc.) activities, with an emphasis on digital fabrication technologies. He completed the Creative Leadership Program at Tama Art University in 2020, and joined Re:public Inc. in 2021.

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Atsushi Shimizu

Associate Director

Born in Shiga Prefecture. After graduating from a technical college with a major in architecture, he transferred to the Faculty of Art and Design, Kyushu University, and completed the graduate school’s Graduate School of Integrated Frontier Sciences. While in school, he studied design and editing, and was involved in the planning and management of exhibitions and workshops, as well as collaborative research with companies that applied future insight methods. Currently working on design research projects and as a writer/editor, he joined Re-Public Inc. in 2021.

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Yi-Pin Tsai

Associate director

Yi-Pin is graduated from the Department of Social Work, National Taiwan University, and the Graduate School of Crafts and Design, National Taiwan University of Arts. She came to Japan in 2019 and joined Re:public in 2022 after pursuing the PhD program at the Laboratory of Design Cultural, Chiba University.
Since coming to Japan, she has continued to distrubute local information as a researcher on local Japanese culture across multiple Taiwanese media as a columnist. In 2021, she published her first book in Taiwan, “LOCAL DESIGN” (Reveal Books).

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Garaeva Dinara

Associate Director

Dinara was a recipient of the MEXT scholarship and completed her Master’s degree in Law and Political Theory at Kyushu University in 2019. She assisted in visa acquisition for foreigners at the Startup Visa Center in Fukuoka City and worked as a research assistant at the Faculty of Law, Kyushu University. Dinara also participated as a researcher in a project under ICOMOS at Kyushu University, focusing on the case of Kumamoto City and its damaged cultural heritage and reconstruction efforts.

Before coming to Japan, Dinara worked at the International Tourism Department of the Tourism Ministry in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. Her responsibilities included working on international treaties, organizing MICE events, and preparing tourism strategies. Additionally, Dinara initiated the International Kazan Model United Nations movement in her hometown and successfully organized it for five years.

Currently, Dinara is working on her doctoral dissertation, exploring the topic of Historical Urban Landscape from a Legal Perspective. Alongside her research, she continues to support international students in building their scientific careers in Japan as an educational consultant.

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Mariko Fujiwara

Fellow

Mariko is a Japanese consumer futurist, named by Time Magazine as the foremost commentator in Tokyo, and a regular contributor to BBC World. A US-trained anthropology graduate from Stanford, she is one of the founding members of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living and policy adviser to the board of Hakuhodo, Japan’s second-largest ad agency. She has been a member of more than a hundred government committees, for MOF and MITI among others, and is currently a policy adviser on telecom competition and ITS (telematics). She is a regular speaker at international conferences, prolific author and adviser to many leading corporations.

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Kun-Pyo Lee

Fellow

Dr. Kun-Pyo Lee is a professor and head at Department of Industrial Design, KAIST, and Dean-elected, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is a former Executive Vice President and Head of the Corporate Design Center of LG Electronics, and a former President of IASDR (International Association of Societies of Design Research). He studied design in Korea, the United States and Japan, with his research interests including user experience design, human centered design, design methodology, and open design with crowds. He has published over 350 articles, papers, and books in Korea and abroad, and has been a keynote speaker and lecturer at over 150 conferences and institutions globally.

Full bio

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Bryan Boyer

Fellow

Bryan is cofounder and partner at Dash Marshall, an architecture and strategic design studio working with people who care about cities. Bryan runs the studio’s Civic Futures practice, serving clients such as Google, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Museum of Modern Art with a focus on reinventing urban environments and institutions. Previously he was a founding member of Helsinki Design Lab at the Finnish Innovation Fund, a pioneering organization working under the auspices of Parliament. Bryan writes on topics of design, entrepreneurship, culture, and public innovation, with publications including LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation (2016), Helsinki Street Eats (2012), Legible Practices (2013), and In Studio: Recipes For Systemic Change (2011). He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Architecture I degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Bryan serves on the board of directors for Public Policy Lab in New York City and is based in Detroit, MI.

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Re:public is a small team, working with people from different sectors around the world.
We are always looking for new Re:public members and partners.
If you are interested, please contact via e-mail below.

info@re-public.jp