Monday, January 17, 1995. It was Ms. Ruriko Hoshika’s first year of enjoying student life in Tokyo. She had stayed up all night to work on a report which was due at the end of the semester. She received a phone call from her friend at 6 a.m. and was told that there had been a huge earthquake.

She quickly turned on the TV, and saw a map of Hyogo Prefecture. Tarumi Ward in Kobe City, where her parents lived, was one of the areas marked with an X indicating the epicenter. That was the moment when everything in front of her turned black.




Branding Kobe



Ms. Hoshika, with such experience, is now the representative of RURIKO PLANNING, a design planning company. She works as an art director on shop production, merchandise development, event planning, and she works on projects concerning Kobe City as well.

One of her most notable achievements is the creation of the application document for the Creative city network of UNESCO as a City of Design, which she was asked by Kobe City to work on.

Instead of emphasizing the development of the city or the recovery from the earthquake, as many public administrators do, I focused on how this port city has always been a design city since the opening of the port, and I cast a spotlight on key individuals who were involved. I didn’t think UNESCO could see a clear reason to certify Kobe as a design city if we didn’t show them how the city is beneficial to the world as a design city.

Ms. Hoshika’s strategy was a success, and, in 2008, Kobe became the first in Asia and fourth in the world to be certified as a UNESCO design city. It was about six years after she returned to Kobe.


The day I cried for my powerlessness

Photo: Ms. Hoshika when she was a student

Ms. Hoshika enrolled in the Department of Sculpture at Musashino Art University, hoping to be an artist. On the day of the earthquake, she couldn’t get in touch with her family, and she had no idea what had happened to her parents or their house. She discussed quitting college to return to Kobe on the telephone with her sister, who was also living in Tokyo.

Luckily, her parents were safe, and their house didn’t suffer from serious damage. Three weeks later, after the final exams at university, she returned to Kobe. She walked around the disaster-hit Kobe to see what had happened with her own eyes.

I was crying, not just for the fact that the city was destroyed, but more for my powerlessness against this disaster. That’s why I made a promise to myself to become a person who can be beneficial to Kobe and to return there with such an ability someday.

Designing life, a viewpoint I learned from city planning

Photo: Ms. Hoshika when she was working for a city planning company

Since then, constantly focusing on the things she would do when she goes back to Kobe, Ms. Hoshika expressed the image, the shock, and the recovery of Kobe after the earthquake in sculpture for her graduation project. However, she realized that, unless she could connect society and art, she would not be of any help in Kobe. She took a chance and started looking for a job, and was accepted at a city planning company.

Ms. Hoshika was taught by her boss to design people’s lives instead of houses. Her projects at the company included Yours Club, a visionary housing project developed in a new town in Ryugasaki, Ibaraki Prefecture.

We proposed four themes, including “Scandinavian wooden house” and “Renovated old house,” and the applicants decided the locations of streets and plots themselves, the idea of which gathered great attention. A lack of money for advertising led us to use a leading-edge strategy to gain the attention of the media.

Because the applicants were all interested in the concepts “Scandinavian” and “old house,” they got along well and the designing of the neighborhood went smoothly. This is a successful example of designing life. Ms. Hoshika uses this idea even after she started her business in Kobe.


Unexpected business launch during a one-week return to her hometown

In November, 2002, Ms. Hoshika, in a break from job hunting for a more challenging job, came back to Kobe. She interviewed those in the city-planning business about what the city was like ten years ago and what they did to recover physically and mentally.

Kobe is a special place for the city planning industry. Experts considered it a city where many cutting-edge houses existed. But I left for Tokyo without knowing about Kobe. I was planning to spend one week to interview two people or so in a day, thinking about what I could do when I returned to Kobe someday, and went back to Tokyo to work for another seven or eight years.

However, when she heard peoples’ stories, the interviewees often introduced other people to interview, and she had to extend her stay every time. Half a year later, a housing company employee I met during one of the interviews offered her a desk at the company they worked in, and she started a planning company.

I had completely let things happen by chance. I wasn’t sure if I could start a business, but people said I could, so I did. I didn’t start it out of a hungry spirit.

It was soon after the launch of her business that she was offered the chance to work on 133 Days Café, a project in the “Messages from Kobe” Projects and Programs in Commemoration of the Tenth Anniversary of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.


133 Days Café was the first job for Kobe



Photo: “Creators Kobe: clothing, food, and liberty” at 133 Days Café, a project by Ms. Hoshika

133 Days Café was open at “Times Meriken: Messages from Kobe” at Meriken Park for 133 days. It introduced Kobe’s lifestyle, including “Kobe’s Skills” which showed clothes, furniture, and shoes that were created by the skills improved through the recovery of the earthquake, and “Kobe Western Confectionary Selection” organized by 20 confectionary stores in Kobe.

Ms. Hoshika, invited by the friend from whom she had rented a desk, worked on the design and the promotion of “Creators Kobe: clothing, food, and liberty,” a project to sell products by artists in Kobe. It was as if the job had welcomed her home, but because she accepted the job without considering the profit: not only could she not pay her own salary, but she couldn’t afford to give her staff their salary without a loan.

I didn’t consider the 133 Days Café project as a way of making money but as a good chance to meet many people in the local government Luckily, however, this project led her to receive various work offers, which put her business on track. She was told by an experienced promoter that it was impossible to produce first-class work in a local region market like Kobe, but she now feels that Kobe offered a greater opportunity to work independently as a creator.

Work which would be offered to a large agency in Tokyo goes to a small privately-run company in Kobe. The costs of maintaining an office and general living costs are much cheaper than in Tokyo, and the city is near the ocean and mountains which provide a wonderful work and living environment. The airport and the bullet train station provide easy access to Tokyo.

There are many people in Kobe who start their own business when they are 27 or 28. I hope many young and talented people of these ages will come back to Kobe. It would be wonderful if there were more creators who travel between Kobe and Tokyo, designing everything from tourism to agriculture.

I could realize “Everyday’s Sunday” because I was in Kobe

Photo: Monthly work at the Rokko and Maya Vitalization Project. On the paper in the center, participants wrote ideas about what they can do for Rokko and Maya.

Ten years have passed since the launch of Ms. Hoshika’s business. She now has various titles concerning the branding of Kobe such as Vice Chairperson of the Kobe Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Design City Promotion Committee, member of the Review Committee of Design Creative Center Kobe, member of the Review Committee of “Port City Kobe” Ground Design, and committee member of the Rokko and Maya Vitalization Project. These titles all help the branding of Kobe. What she had dreamed about when she was 19 has come true.

In these 10 years, I never felt like not going to work. I would hate to have a life of waiting for weekends. I can say “Everyday’s Sunday” because I came back to this city.

My last question was what Ms. Hoshika wants to do in Kobe in the future.

The concept I had in mind when I started my business was to tell the world good things about Kobe and the whole of Japan. Kobe Beef is a successful example. If people in the world like something, it will sell. Our job is to give them a chance to like our products.

Ms. Hoshika also feels a strong need to reconstruct in the present the motivation every citizen felt at the time of the earthquake to act as a participating player, by creating a stage where the citizens can play an active role in Kobe. Examples include organizing a system to let citizens’ voices be heard in the product development process of consumer goods industries, and utilizing the power of design in industries with little design involved such as welfare, education, and tourism. If creators participate actively in creating life, the city will be vitalized even more.

The earthquake, and design. What creates the future of Kobe may be an unexpected combination of these keywords.


(Interviewed and written by Kyoko Sugimoto)
This article was created with the cooperation of greenz.jp.