We are the people who make north by north.
Hirokatsu Ohigashi
大東 洋克
CEO, Ximera Inc. / CEO, Largo Inc.
Joined GMO Internet in 2002, where he served as head of the web infrastructure division and helped launch new and overseas businesses. In 2009 he founded GMO Domain Registry, building businesses around country-code, regional and corporate-brand domains. After going independent in 2013, he worked on startup launches, business support and incubation across the US, Southeast Asia and Japan. In 2018 he joined CAMPFIRE as Director and COO, overseeing product, marketing and overseas business across the group and helping launch lending-type and equity-type crowdfunding. Since 2019, as CEO of Ximera, he has provided data analysis and subscription-support services to newspapers, broadcasters and web media, and in 2024 he founded Largo. After twenty years in internet and startup work in Tokyo, he moved the center of his life and work to Shimokawa, Hokkaido. From a base in Dohoku, he is now assembling north by north — handing the toolkit he built over a career of launching businesses to the people who steward Dohoku’s mountains, rivers and seas. Alongside the collaborators who create the experiences, he supports the overall structure from the business, planning, editorial, operations and PR side.
Junya Murakami
村上 淳哉
President & CEO, Nayoro Shimbun / Governor-certified outdoor guide
As president of Nayoro Shimbun, a local newspaper founded in 1947, he reports news rooted in Dohoku — centered on Nayoro, Bifuka and Shimokawa — through the paper and its website "Dohoku Net." In February 2026 he signed a comprehensive partnership with PR TIMES, the first case in Japan of a local paper and a press-release distribution service linking up. He is also a Hokkaido governor-certified outdoor guide (summer and winter mountaineering), and since 2015 has offered guiding with a disaster-preparedness element — combining climbing with map reading, fire-making and weather forecasting — mainly across Daisetsuzan, Dohoku, Nayoro and Horokanai. He is a certified nature observation and conservation instructor and has completed MEDIC First Aid BasicPlus. Seeing Dohoku through two lenses — the print reporter and the mountain guide — Murakami takes on the role of covering each event north by north builds across the region from the closest possible local viewpoint, turning it into words and records to send outward.
From Suginami, Tokyo. Since 2017 he has followed the cyclocross world championships in Europe, bringing their front lines back to Japan as one of the country’s foremost photographers — known as NB. He publishes the photo book "CROSS IS HERE" at a pace of one volume a year and runs the podcast "Inner Frames." In 2024 he moved to Nakagawa in Dohoku, and in summer 2025 held "Green & White," Hokkaido’s first solo exhibition of work shot since his move through cycling, fishing and skiing, at "01. Outdoor & Life Shop" in Sapporo’s Sōen. Cycling, fishing, skiing, music — he lends his eye for capturing the air of Dohoku to north by north’s records as well. The experience of an activity turns into memory the moment it ends; NB’s camera hands back, later, the expressions a participant never noticed in themselves and the texture of a landscape they passed by.
Tomonori Sakaguchi
坂口 智則
Representative, THE DAY Ltd. / Representative, Ishikari Water Patrol
From Sapporo. After high school he worked as a lifesaver at Otaru’s beaches in summer and as a ski patroller at resorts such as Tomamu in winter. In 2008 he founded the voluntary group "Ishikari Water Patrol" and became its representative; since then he has been contracted by the city of Ishikari to monitor beaches and has run the "Jr. Water Project," teaching children about water safety. Leading THE DAY Ltd., he operates Minshuku Nihonkai, the beach house RED&BLUE, and the SUP tour "RED&BLUE" in Hamamasu. In winter he moves his base to Nayoro, where he has run the restaurant "Log Panorama" inside Piyashiri Ski Resort since 2020, the single-rental lodging "Nayoro Base" since the 2023–24 season, and from 2026 the restaurant at the Nayoro Shirakaba Country Club. While offering Sea-of-Japan experiences built around SUP, lodging and the beach house in Hamamasu, he supports north by north’s year-round operations with the know-how honed in winter Nayoro. Sea in summer, snowy mountains in winter — a gaze trained on preventing accidents is ingrained in him.
Born in Chiba in 1984. After university and a sales role in apparel, he joined the Japanese arm of Germany’s BIRKENSTOCK, where he gained expertise in footwear and foot counseling through comfort shoes developed from a medical perspective. After further experience at foreign fashion and footwear firms, he is now independent in outdoor business. Built around running his own brand, he operates across many layers in Dohoku — decoration and operation of outdoor events, camp experience classes, bonfire dinners, food-event planning, and foot-care counseling. At north by north he takes on the role of crafting experiences down to their attire and setting. Event decoration and operation, food planning, and the distinctive layer of foot care — by arranging the perimeter of a tour, the heart of the experience rises into view.
Born in Hidaka, Kochi, in September 1999. A Shimokawa relocation tour led him to the town, and in February 2023 he took up a post as a wildlife-management support officer in the Industry Promotion Division of the Shimokawa town office. For three years he worked on wildlife management together with the local hunting association. In January 2026 he completed his term as a regional revitalization volunteer, and from February joined Largo (Kitatsumugi Shoten, Kikuchi Meat) and Ximera. He still belongs to the hunting association and continues his relationship with the mountains. After three years facing wildlife management in Shimokawa, he moved from the side that confronts wild animals to the side that builds the local table. As a steward who knows both — what is brought down from the mountains and what is placed in the shop — he supports north by north’s "food" experiences from inside production and distribution. His hobbies are drums and mountaineering.
Born December 2001 in Kumaishi, Yakumo, Hokkaido. In 2025, while a student at Rakuno Gakuen University, he moved to Nakagawa as a regional revitalization volunteer. Extending the hunting he began in 2023, he experienced firsthand the rising population of sika deer and their potential as meat, and launched a meat-processing and sales business that integrates capture, butchery and sales himself. Together with other volunteers in Nakagawa he also runs a food business, and at events he cooks and serves the deer he has caught. Gun, knife and frying pan are all on the same line. A 24-year-old who runs the whole chain from mountain to table single-handedly, he becomes the creator who, at north by north’s Nakagawa base, brings people all the way to a place where they eat what the nature of Nakagawa yields. He supports the dish that follows an activity, directly from the mountains. His hobbies are fishing, foraging for wild plants, and backcountry skiing in winter.
Born and raised in Shimokawa. After graduating from university in 2014 he worked as a certified medical-information manager at a municipal hospital in Hokkaido. A strong attachment to his hometown, combined with attraction to the unusual and rare work of the Shimokawa Furusato Kogyo Cooperative, became the main reason for his U-turn, and he joined the cooperative in October 2022. Convinced that "keeping this work alive serves Shimokawa," he chose to contribute to the region’s development from a young age. Now, under the philosophy of "revitalizing our hometown through product development that makes the most of local resources," he develops and manufactures health foods, supplements, cosmetics and agricultural materials from local useful plants such as kuma-zasa bamboo grass, Japanese knotweed and wood vinegar. He works on monetizing the "mottainai" — turning previously discarded unused resources such as asparagus trimmings and off-spec tomatoes into revenue — and on creating flexible employment through bamboo-grass gathering that even people in their 70s and 80s can join. At north by north he takes on the role of translating the bounty of Shimokawa’s forests into the context of food and health. His hobbies are camping, mountaineering and snowboarding.
Shunya Izumi
和泉 竣也
Nakagawa Regional Development Corporation
Born in Sapporo in 1994. Studying abroad in Canada and the Philippines exposed him to English and diverse values, and after graduating he built a career using English — overseas sales at a noodle company, manager of a language school, and more. Through three career changes he gained practical experience in sales, web direction and marketing, and during the pandemic, feeling he "needed to establish a specialty," he began supporting community development across Hokkaido and running training for JICA participants. He encountered Nakagawa amid city life, was strongly drawn to the closeness of nature and people and to the social-design potential that only a small municipality allows, and decided to move. Since May 2025 he has been a regional revitalization volunteer at the Nakagawa Regional Development Corporation, working on tourism-based community development, running a Tokyo satellite shop, e-commerce management, hometown-tax promotion and specialty-product development. Attentive to the flow of time created by the Teshio River and broadleaf forests, and to the power of wild plants and herbs, he keeps taking on the challenge of growing Nakagawa into a base for healing and renewal. At north by north he handles the practical work of tourism-based development in Nakagawa and the gradual expansion of the related population. His hobbies are reading and basketball.
From Narashino, Chiba. Over twenty years of raising three children in Saitama after marriage, the constant companion was the struggle to "value both child-rearing and work." At Mama no En LLC she devoted herself to "place-making" that connects women’s dormant skills to society — overcoming, as a person living it herself, the layered hurdles women face in childcare, caregiving and community roles. Through the great upheavals of the 2011 earthquake and the pandemic, what she came to see was a way of living in which people design their own lives and work with their own hands. In 2022, under the theme of "child-rearing & farming," she moved with her family to Shimokawa. Diving into farming with no prior experience, she completed three years of training and, in 2025, at the milestone of fifty, took over farmland and began anew as a fruit-tomato farmer, MK Farm Hokkaido. Embodying the belief that "wherever you are, at any age, people can change," she keeps taking on the next challenge of problem-solving amid the rich nature of Shimokawa. At north by north she becomes a steward of food and farming experiences, including the fruit tomatoes grown in the soil of Shimokawa.
Shunpei Kuroda
黒田 峻平
Doctoral student, Graduate School of Agricultural Science, Kobe University
Born April 2001 in Soka, Saitama. He completed a master’s at the Graduate School of Agriculture at Hokkaido University, then advanced to a doctoral program at Kobe University’s Graduate School of Agricultural Science. His starting point was learning, in a class at Hokkaido University, about the "migrants" who move to Dohoku and create work and activities there. Drawn to the very act of leaving the city to "deliberately" relocate to the countryside, he first visited Dohoku in 2023. Since then he has visited continually, taking on tasks such as helping run volunteer intake at local events while carrying out research grounded in practice. His research theme is the mechanism by which migrants settle into a region while connecting with local people — and his style is to step inside that mechanism himself and observe. Resonating with north by north’s work of turning visitors from "guests" into "members of the community," he joined in April 2026. He takes on the role of recording and analyzing the practice by which people who gain a point of contact with a region become members of its community, and returning the insights gained to the region. His hobbies are watching football (Urawa Reds), baseball (Hanshin Tigers), and Perfume.