Yamagata Science Park thrives, reviving a shrinking community

TSURUOKA, YAMAGATA PREFECTURE >> When Keio University professor Masaru Tomita accepted an offer in 2000 to head a new science lab in the city of Tsuruoka in Yamagata Prefecture, his fellow researchers — shocked at what they considered his relegation to the countryside — warned him that his career was ruined.

“They told me that no matter how hard I try, the lab will never succeed as long as it remains based in Yamagata,” Tomita recalled.

Nearly 20 years into the endeavor, Tomita prides himself on having proved them wrong. Today, the lab and a sprawling community of spinoff biotech startups, dubbed Science Park, are credited with slowing Tsuruoka’s depopulation and reinvigorating its economy.

Tsuruoka, home to about 130,000 people, was grappling with a shrinking population when it teamed up in 1999 with Yamagata Prefecture and Keio University to redevelop Shonai Field — vast swaths of countryside in western Yamagata — into a bioscience hub that would revitalize Shonai.

The hub was to be built on 21 hectares of paddy fields. Between 2001 — when Tomita’s lab, the Institute for Advanced Biosciences, was launched — and 2018, Tsuruoka and Yamagata invested 4.8 billion yen and 5.3 billion yen (about $44.2 million and $48.8 million), respectively, in the project.

Today, Science Park is centered on a lab that’s home to Spiber Inc., a startup that has skyrocketed thanks to its groundbreaking development of synthetic spider silk, plus other businesses pursuing similarly unorthodox endeavors. Metabologenomics Inc., for instance, analyzes feces to improve intestinal health, while SalivaTech Co. explores saliva’s cancer-detecting potential.

But the path taken by Tsuruoka’s Science Park has been a rocky one. Residents initially saw it as a gargantuan white elephant, and politicians lambasted the city for wasting taxpayer money.

“The truth is, taxpayers were initially getting no economic benefit in return,” Tomita recalled. “It would’ve been a different story if their money had been spent attracting a whole department of Keio, with the prospect of hundreds of students flowing in, but we were starting out with a lab of only a dozen or so researchers.”

But former Tsuruoka Mayor Yoichi Tomizuka pressed ahead with investment.

“Tomizuka was bold enough to declare that the project was not about benefiting current taxpayers, but about ‘planting seeds’ for the sake of future generations,” Tomita said. “He said if Tsuruoka didn’t start sowing some kind of seed now, the town would disappear in 30 or 40 years’ time.

“His long-term perspective truly amazed me. Not so many Japanese can think this way.”

Despite Tomizuka’s push, local skepticism continued to dog Science Park. When developer Daisuke Yamanaka moved to Tsuruoka in 2014 to work for Spiber, he found a city hesitant to redevelop the remaining 14 hectares of paddy fields.

As a former real estate developer, he stepped in. Just two months after he joined Spiber, he quit to launch his own firm, Yamagata Design, with one mission in mind: to redevelop the fields in a way that would dispel the animosity.

He found the answer in Shonai Hotel Suiden Terrasse, designed by architect Shigeru Ban to look as if it’s floating on the rice paddies. Opened in September 2018, the hotel was built to draw the public to Science Park and make it something of a tourist destination.

Yamagata Design also built Kids Dome Sorai, an indoor playground for children, adjacent to Keio’s lab.

“Local residents used to feel uncomfortable with Science Park because they had no idea what was going on inside these industrial facilities,” Yamanaka said. “But places like Suiden Terrasse and Kids Dome Sorai made it a place everyone can visit. We believe it was quite a paradigm shift.”

In a report published in March, local Yamagata Bank estimated that Science Park, which has created about 500 jobs and in 2017 attracted about 3,000 visitors, is generating economic ripple effects worth about 3 billion yen (about $27.6 million) annually in the city.

Tomita attributed the rise of startups like Spiber in part to the idyllic setting of Tsuruoka, with its tranquility, good food and fresh air. Creativity, he said, flourishes when you are away from the hurly-burly of urban life.

“If you look at developed countries overseas, universities are often located in rural areas. I can’t think of any other country that has such a high concentration of universities and research institutes in a metropolitan area to the extent Japan does,” he said.

The result is a Tokyo-centric mentality.

But Kazuhide Sekiyama, who co-founded Spiber in 2007, said his company’s distance from Tokyo has helped recruit an especially dedicated workforce.

“You would have to be really motivated and clear about your objective to migrate all the way to a place like Tsuruoka,” he said.

Sekiyama is a protege of Tomita. He first came up with the idea of commercially producing spider silk — a fiber deemed stronger than steel and more elastic than nylon — as a Keio student. In 2013, Spiber announced a technology that could mass produce the silk. Today, it is delving into protein, the main component of spider silk, to explore its use for industrial purposes.

Sekiyama said he’s been encouraged by Tomita’s “high tolerance for failures.” The professor allows his students to pursue projects that have little chance of success.

Tomita said in today’s world, that mindset is necessary. The economic “tailwind” of postwar Japan nurtured an idea that success was achieved by “diligently studying and working as told.” Now that it’s gone, diligence that demonizes risk-taking will only stifle growth, he said.

“We’re now in an age where (the Japanese) have to take a gamble every once in a while,” Tomita said. “We might lose in a gamble … but we’re destined to keep losing — bit by bit — if we don’t take a gamble at all. That’s the kind of era we live in.”