[プロフィール]
1950年（昭和25年）高知市生まれ。東京・大阪の著名なクリエーターと親交を持ちながらも生まれ故郷の高知にこだわり、常人には発想できないまちおこしを手がけつづけるデザイナー兼プランナー。主な仕事に、かつお漁師が家族三人ではじめた「土佐の一本釣り・藁焼きたたき」を年商20億円に育てた「漁師が釣って、漁師が焼いた」プロジェクト。四万十川流域の町にある砂浜そのものを美術館に見立てた「大方町砂浜美術館」のプランニング。日本で２番目に小さな町、高知県赤岡町の古い町並みを残す「赤岡町まちのホメ残し隊」の活動など。自分の身の回りにあるものに工夫を加え、形を与えて楽しむこと、それがデザインだと思っている。

[profile]
Born in Kochi in 1950, Umebara is a designer and planner with strong ties to creative minds in Tokyo and Osaka who nevertheless remains firmly committed to his birthplace. He has undertaken a number of striking and extraordinary local development projects. One of his major successes was the "Caught by the Fisherman, Seared by the Fisherman" project, which built a three-person family business selling bonito caught using pole-and-line and seared over a straw fire into an operation with annual sales of two billion yen. Others were the planning of the Ogata Town Beach Museum, which positioned the very beaches of a town in the Shimanto River basin as a museum, and his work with the Akaoka-machi Machi no Homenokoshi-tai, which sought to protect the old neighborhoods of Akaoka, Japan's second-smallest town. Umebara believes the essence of design is the joy of modifying things one finds in one's surroundings to give them new form.