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The Red Dot Schoolレッドドットスクール Offering ・ 受け入れ

For visiting universities & studios

A page for universities and studios outside Japan who want to bring students to Sagishima. Every year we host students and professors from the University of Tokyo and Hiroshima University, who come to perform research, advance their studio brief, and collaborate with us. We would like to host yours too.

We are a working design school on a depopulating island in the Seto Inland Sea. What we offer a visiting university is not a tour and not a venue rental. It is access to an active institution and a living community: a curated studio embedded in real salvage-and-reconstruction work, in a place where the relationships that make the work possible are decades, sometimes centuries, old.

Aerial view of Sagishima: headland, observation tower, and Sagiura harbor in the Seto Inland Sea

Fig. 01Sagishima from the air, with Sagiura harbor and the headland observation tower.

01

What the fee covers

We price a visit in two parts: a per-student fee that covers the things we set up once for your group, and a daily rate that covers the cost of each student being here, fed, housed, and working, each day.

Per-student fee

Charged once per student ・ 学生一人につき一度

  • A dedicated, curated studio brief built with your faculty: we integrate your curriculum, pedagogy, and learning outcomes into the visit rather than running a fixed package.

  • Coordination and a faculty liaison before and during the visit: scheduling, logistics, a point of contact, and translation and interpretation between your group and the island.

  • Procurement of specific tools and materials your project needs, sourced for the brief.

  • Access to sites on and off the island, arranged through our standing relationships: salvage sites, akiya (空き家, vacant houses) we are working on, civic buildings, the Sunoue gymnasium workshop, and partner sites in Onomichi and Mihara that we can open because the islanders and the city know us.

  • Onboarding into our digital infrastructure: the project Discord, our shared documentation, and our SagiWiki and FoundationWiki knowledge bases.

  • Photo and video documentation of your students' work, which you keep.

  • Access to our reclaimed-material stock held in the gymnasium, as a design resource.

Daily rate

Charged per student, per day ・ 学生一人・一日につき

  • Housing in our donated and restored island buildings.

  • Two cooked meals a day (breakfast and dinner), taken together outside between the teacher houses, plus a packed bento for lunch in the field.

  • Studio and workshop space: the Sunoue gymnasium as salvage warehouse, workshop, and gallery; tools and equipment; the gathering and meal spaces.

  • Local transport on and around the island for the day's work.

  • Daily facilitation and instruction: our faculty working alongside your students, plus the standing rhythms of island life we fold visitors into (morning radio taiso, shared dinners).

  • Consumable materials and supplies used up in the day's making.

02

How we curate a visit

We work with studio professors and university administrators to integrate their curriculum and pedagogy into the curation of their visit: procuring specific tools and materials, gaining access to sites on and off the island, and satisfying eclectic needs and ambitious ideas.

In practice that means: before you arrive we build the brief with you; while you are here we open doors that took us years to open; and the whole time, your students are doing real work inside a real institution, not visiting one.

Visiting students learning to plane reclaimed wood under master carpenter Mr. Shikata inside the Sunoue gymnasium

Fig. 02Mr. Shikata's planing workshop at the Sunoue gymnasium, January 2024, with visiting students working salvaged timber.

03

The invisible infrastructure

Much of what makes a Sagishima studio possible is not bought. It is given. The island runs an old, living mutual-aid economy, and when we arrived the islanders folded us into it. We do not take this for granted, and we do not want to: a visiting student should understand that the school works because the island carries it.

  • Cars, lent to us when we need to move people or material, so we have never had to buy a schoolbus the islanders know we cannot afford.

  • Hands when we get stuck: help fixing things, moving things, solving the day's problem.

  • Grandmother-sweets: island elders cooking for and welcoming the cohort, like the batch of kashiwa-mochi the grandmothers brought to our June 2026 studio at the schoolhouse and read us a letter over.

  • Food from the fields and the sea: unsellable vegetables given free to families, a good catch turned into sashimi and shared at our outdoor dinner, watermelons, salt-making shown to us.

  • Knowledge and access: islanders showing us hokora, telling us histories, vouching for us so the city and neighbors open sites to us.

  • The daily rhythm itself: radio taiso, beach-cleaning, that we are invited into rather than charged for.

If we are doing things right, our internal mutual-aid system should resemble the mutual-aid systems already operating here before we arrived. The elders of this island have practiced mutual aid longer than any of us have been alive, and understanding how they do it is part of what a studio here gets to study.

Students, faculty, and Sagishima community members shoulder a bundle of salvaged timber together up the seawall, the bundle wrapped in red cloth and red-and-white festival rope

Fig. 03Students, faculty, and islanders carrying a bundle of salvaged timber up the seawall together. September 2023 studio.

04

To see if we are a good fit

To gauge whether our program is a good mutual fit for your students and our faculty, please tell us a little about your group, and then let's set up a call.

Come look at our Discord. Remote collaboration is something we are not bad at. Look at all the happy, busy, smart students doing things. Your students can be part of this.

05

About

Sagishima ・ 佐木島

An island of roughly 8.72 km² in the Seto Inland Sea, in Mihara City, Hiroshima Prefecture. Reachable by Shinkansen to Onomichi or Mihara and then a short ferry. It is depopulating and aging: nearly a third of its houses stand vacant. It is also, quietly, one of the most generous places we know, with a mutual-aid culture its elders have kept alive for generations.

Our project

The Red Dot School runs residential design studios on Sagishima built around Salvage-as-a-Service: we take vacant houses apart through careful disassembly, recover their material and their memory, and reconstruct from it, documenting what we recover as we go. The work is real (we are restoring island buildings and building a salvage economy), and it is taught (each studio is a curriculum).

Our facilities

A lecture inside the Kakumeisha classroom: students seated on tatami around a stack of zabuton cushions, listening to a faculty member

Fig. 04The Kakumeisha schoolhouse in use as a classroom: tatami seating, zabuton stacked at the back, a lecture in progress.

  • The schoolhouse, the oldest standing public structure on the island.

  • Student housing in donated and restored island homes.

  • The Sunoue gymnasium, our salvage warehouse, workshop, and gallery; the heart of the making.

  • Teacher housing, with meals taken outside, together, in the space between the houses.

  • Tools, equipment, and a growing library of salvaged material.

  • A standing digital layer: Discord and our SagiWiki and FoundationWiki knowledge bases.

06

About the future

Most of the world looked at a depopulating island and saw a sunset. We chose to read the same red dot as a sunrise. A studio here is a chance to build inside that choice.

Our mission. Sagishima is an aging, emptying island, and the easy thing was to manage its decline. We refuse that. The Red Dot School exists to restore the island's capacity to renew itself, in people and in spirit, so that the culture of mutual aid its elders still carry is inherited by a living community rather than archived as the record of one that ended.

The single test we hold everything to, including a visiting studio, is integration over extraction: does the work deepen the life of this island, or simply run alongside it. We ask that of ourselves first. We will ask it of your studio too, and we will help you meet it. That is what makes a visit here different from a field trip.

東西の日輪点じて島熱る

“East and West kindle the sun-disc, and the island grows fervent.”

Isso ・ 河本義成