内山慶治村長（Mayor Keiji Uchiyama）

Yamae Village is famous as a village that is proactive in promoting DX. Its digitalization efforts have been recognized and it has won numerous awards. We have summarized Yamae Village’s DX strategy, focusing on the story of Mayor Uchiyama Keiji, who is so knowledgeable about ICT that he is called the “IT village mayor.” (Kitajima Kei)

Yamae Village, located in Kumamoto Prefecture’s Kuma District, has a population of about 3,200 people and an aging rate of about 38%.

Famous nationwide as a village that is proactively working on DX, Mayor Uchiyama Keiji, who is passionate about village development through information dissemination, is so knowledgeable about ICT that he is called the “IT village mayor.”

“I think DX is a transformation of the region through the use of digital technology by villagers. It’s not just about bringing in technology to make things more convenient, but having villagers use digital technology to revitalize the community and change the region rapidly. Unless the village becomes like that, it can’t be called true DX,” he says.
Yamae Village has a long history of utilizing IT.
In 1996, it was the first in the country to create a “resident director.” Resident directors are activities that form a local community by creating and disseminating local information by local people. It can be said to be the forerunner of YouTubers.
Yamae Village was also the first local government in Japan to create a video-only website. This was in 2004. As the first local government in the country to create a video-only website, it received the Regional Award from the Digital Media Association. In 2008, it received the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Award after activities based on the Resident Director model were deployed in 18 regions nationwide.
The purpose of the video-only website was to allow villagers to watch content created in the community, but at the time, the Internet penetration rate in Yamae Village was around 17%, and in reality, the videos were not viewed very often. In order to spread local content within the village, the village opened its own cable TV station in 2009. At the same time as the cable TV, an optical broadband infrastructure was also built, allowing many villagers to watch local content.
Mayor Uchiyama said, “This initiative was extremely useful during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, school classes were able to be switched to online classes immediately. Digital is extremely useful in crisis management. I was able to experience this firsthand. It was a case of the villagers’ use of digital technology transforming the region.”
Yamae Village is also focusing on ICT education, and has attracted attention from local governments around the country as a pioneering example. Ahead of the rest of the country, the village has been working to improve its ICT environment with a 10-year plan since fiscal 2011, focusing not only on distributing digital devices to students but also on training teachers who can use ICT.
“The use of digital technology such as ICT is essential for children who will live in the future, which is said to be the era of Society 5.0. By using ICT in classes, such as generative AI for English learning, which is particularly well suited to ICT, the rate of third-year junior high school students who passed the Eiken Grade 3 exam exceeded 80%. Since purchasing ICT equipment all at once would be a burden for teachers, we gradually purchased ICT equipment according to teachers’ requests. As a result, super teachers who can teach using ICT effectively have appeared.” (Mayor Uchiyama).

Students’ academic ability has also improved. In the National Academic Ability and Learning Status Surveys in 2014, 2015, and 2017, the village achieved a correct answer rate that was significantly higher than the national average. Some families have moved to Yamae Village because they wanted their children to receive ICT education, which also plays a role in encouraging people to move and settle there.

These efforts have been recognized, and the village received the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Award at the Japan ICT Education Awards in 2018.

山田大王神社。正安年中（１２９９－１３０２）に
創建されたといわれている。国指定重要文化財（ Daio Shrine. It is said to have been founded during the Shoan era (1299-1302). Nationally designated important cultural property）

Yamae Village’s main industry is agriculture, and chestnut cultivation is popular. Yamae is famous for its Yamae chestnuts, and the annual Yamae Chestnut Festival attracts about 9,000 fans from all over Japan. Last September, the 20th Yamae Chestnut Festival was held to commemorate the registration of the chestnut as a Japanese Geographical Indication (GI).

Currently, they are planning to build a Chestnut Station as a base for communication and outreach.

“It will be a roadside station of about 5,000 square meters, and we would like to complete it in 2027. Chestnuts were a 100 million yen industry, but with processing it will become a 300 million yen industry. In order to expand this further, we would like to create a base for communication and outreach together with private companies and promote the village as a chestnut village,” said Mayor Uchiyama.

Yamae Village is actively promoting DX, but the current issue is that the villagers are not making much progress in using digital technology.

Due to the large elderly population, there are few people who use the web on smartphones. It cannot be said that not only the elderly, but also young people in mountainous areas are making full use of smartphone functions.
“If the use of the web and various apps on smartphones becomes more widespread, we will be able to have a ‘palm-of-the-hand town hall’ that uses smartphones and it will be useful for disaster prevention. It will also become easier to provide shopping assistance and remote medical care. Our immediate challenge as we advance digital technology is how to expand the use of smartphones,” says Uchiyama, the village mayor.

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