Three teams of graduate students presented proposals for multicultural coexistence in Sapporo to officials from the City of Sapporo’s International Division on Wednesday, June 17, 2026, closing eight weeks of work on Global Advanced Course I: Practice of Problem Solving. The session formed the final week of the course and doubled as part of Hokkaido University’s 150th Anniversary Project under the banner “Sapporo Together: Designing Sustainable Community Interaction.”

The brief came directly from the city. The City of Sapporo’s International Relations Department asked students to design something the city cannot yet build alone: an intervention supporting daily life for foreign residents or promoting cross-cultural understanding among all residents, judged on whether it works, whether the community could run it without outside help, and whether it could start on a budget of around ¥100,000. The numbers behind the brief are stark. Sapporo recorded 24,305 foreign residents as of April 1, 2026, about 1.2 percent of the city’s population, with arrivals in 2025 already exceeding the city’s own projection for this date. Only 43.9 percent of foreign residents now say they want to remain in Sapporo, down from a baseline of 46 percent, against a city target of 56 percent. When foreign employees joined a local disaster drill in Shiroishi Ward, Japanese residents’ attitudes toward them measurably improved; the students treated this as confirmation that interaction itself is the system’s leverage point.

Rather than designing solutions in the first week, students spent the first four weeks mapping the problem: identifying stakeholders, drawing the system’s hidden dynamics, and locating where change was possible before any proposal took shape. Below is an overview of what each team built:

• Team 1 (Building a Foreigner-Friendly Sapporo): Mallory, Nanase, Mizuki, and Haruki found that 73 percent of Japanese residents in Sapporo have never interacted with a foreign resident, and that 68.3 percent hold some bias toward them. Their proposal pairs Natural Disaster Orientation, a mandatory multilingual orientation for new international residents, with a Housing Matching Coordinator Pilot that places bilingual staff at ward offices to connect foreign residents with local real estate agencies.
• Team 2 (Doyō Happy Day): Known to classmates as 雑談dam, the team of Amane, Bram, Mei, Moeka, and Seunghoon traced foreign residents’ disengagement from Sapporo’s community life to a cycle of short-term work, low wages, and Hokkaido’s long winter; 33.4 percent of the city’s foreign residents come from tropical countries, for whom the climate itself is a barrier to joining outdoor community activities. Their response is a weekly Saturday programme inviting foreign and Japanese residents to garden, clean riverbanks, prepare food, and staff local markets together, paired with a second scheme, Doyō Escape Day, which activates parks, evacuation sites, and university grounds through recurring shared events.
• Team 3 (Weaving Community): The team of Chika, Fernando, Hansani, Kai, and Kenta examined the reinforcing cycle of anxiety, reduced contact, and isolation that keeps Sapporo’s foreign and Japanese residents apart, noting that 87 percent of foreign residents understand yasashii nihongo, or Easy Japanese, while most local residents neither know it nor use it. They proposed Connecting Communities in Sapporo, a series of monthly multilingual events with rotating activities and on-site translators, alongside a second proposal, Changing the Way of Thinking, a public awareness campaign publishing interviews with foreign residents already contributing to the city through ward offices, social media, and neighbourhood events.

Members of the City of Sapporo’s International Division attended the showcase and questioned each team. Team 3 was asked to describe, in concrete terms, what its proposed community events would look like in practice. Team 2 faced questions about what residents stand to gain from a Saturday programme and how participation might be sustained once the novelty wore off; officials noted that a recent flower-planting event run by a local chonaikai (neighbourhood association) had already moved residents from working individually to working together, which they took as evidence that Team 2’s approach has local precedent. Team 1 was pressed on funding, and on whether real estate agencies could be drawn further into the housing scheme to reduce the budget the city itself would need to commit.

Student presentations from the class can be viewed below.

Global Advanced Course I: Final Presentations (2026.6.17)

Global Advanced Course I: Team Proposal Overviews (English and Japanese)