Toshi believes regenerating architecture with natural materials should be simple. In practice, it takes time — and it means navigating a maze of rules and regulations most people never see. That can feel genuinely daunting.

So rather than wait for perfect conditions, we decided to start by actually doing it: regenerating one old guesthouse in Tazawako, with natural materials, in the real world. That makes Tazawako Onsen Coliving a living experiment as much as a place to stay — not finished, still showing its age in places, and built to keep evolving rather than to be called “complete.”

Tazawako Kogen Onsen is, in many ways, a legacy of Japan’s bubble economy — a resort area that boomed decades ago and has been quietly declining ever since, left with vacant buildings and a fading local economy and culture. It’s also a small mirror of something much larger: Japan as a whole is shrinking, and abandoned houses (akiya) are becoming impossible to ignore, here and almost everywhere else in the country.

We believe coliving can be part of the answer. By bringing people to stay for weeks or months, not just passing through, we hope this project becomes a small but real engine of economic, cultural, and social regeneration for the region.

People are consistently surprised by two things here: how quiet the place is, and how dark the night gets once the artificial light disappears.

That’s not a small thing. Real silence, real darkness, clean mountain air, water you can drink straight from the source — these are fundamental to being human, and modern life has quietly stripped most of them away without us noticing.

We believe soaking in that stillness — really letting yourself feel it, not just observe it — reconnects something in people. And what it reconnects, more than anything, is creativity. Nature doesn’t just calm the mind; it wakes it up. Some of the clearest thinking and the most original ideas happen not at a desk, but breathing real air and listening to real silence.

That’s the richness we want Tazawako Onsen Coliving to offer — not a stay you visit and consume, but a place where you live inside that richness for a while, and let it do its work on you.

Toshi’s company, Watsunagi Inc., exists to be a regenerative company — and Tazawako Onsen Coliving is its first project put into practice.

What we’re really hoping for is simple: that people who resonate with this project will come live here with us, even for a while, and help build that better society together, one relationship at a time.