On June 10, Ritsumeikan held a ceremony on the Biwako-Kusatsu Campus (“BKC”) to pray for the safe and successful construction of the tentatively named Ritsumeikan Advanced Cross-verse Innovation Commons (“CVIC”) and Grassroots Innovation Center (“GIC”). Both facilities are scheduled to open in 2025.
Chairperson of the Board Tomomi Morishima, Chancellor Yoshio Nakatani, and other university officials attended the ceremony along with representatives from Takenaka Corporation, the company supervising the design and construction of the facilities. Chairperson Morishima performed the ritual groundbreaking and offered up the traditional tamagushi tree branch to pray for the safety of the construction.

Society 5.0 refers to a human-centered society where cyberspace (the virtual world) and physical space (the real world) will be highly integrated. As the realization of this society progresses, the new CVIC will contribute to the development of a new research field called “the embodied environment,” and it will serve as a hub for interdisciplinary co-creation among researchers from a wide range of fields including sport and health science, neuroscience, information science, psychology, and the human sciences. Ritsumeikan aims to create social impact with an eye on Society 5.0 by clarifying how human activities and communication in a society where the real and the virtual are integrated affect the mind and body and lead to wellbeing.

The GIC is a facility that will promote entrepreneurship and business development by harnessing the research output generated primarily at BKC in collaboration with various stakeholders, including companies and local governments. Equipped with a Fab Lab and other facilities to enable flexible manufacturing, the GIC will foster innovative and emergent human resources who will pioneer a new society through inquiry-based STEAM education that transcends the sciences, arts, mathematics, and other academic disciplines.

Ritsumeikan aims to realize its goal of becoming a “next-generation research university” that creates value for coexistence with society by using these two facilities to take research and education to the next level and practically applying the outcomes of this advanced research and education to society.