Seven Hills Gate, Inc. Launches In-House Corps “RainmakerZ.”

A Strategy-to-Institution Studio carrying every step from vision to implementation, having led the establishment of ESG-IIDA, CCRSS, and the Kitahiroshima Regional Symbiosis Consortium.

Seven Hills Gate, Inc.  is pleased to announce the formal launch of its in-house corps, “RainmakerZ.”

Rainmakerz is a new form of implementation body, designed as a gathered collective that runs every step from Strategy through Tactics to Implementation — from A to Z — by its own hand. It brings into formal organisational form the work of the core members who have, to date, led the establishment and implementation of the ESG Investment Infrastructure Development Association (ESG-IIDA), the Council for the Creation of Regional Symbiosis Sphere (CCRSS), and the Kitahiroshima Regional Symbiosis Consortium, among others.

A Question, at the Beginning

For some time, we have been holding a single question.

“How might the financial systems, the industrial foundations, and the credit culture that Japan has built over more than a century — these three layers of institutional accumulation — be shared with the world?”

For more than seventy postwar years, Japan has carried its experience of recovery to the world in the form of aid. But the era of aid is drawing to a close. What lies ahead is an era not of giving, but of sharing — an era in which the people of the developing economies are received not as recipients of support, but as co-founders with whom new economies are launched together.

For this work, what is needed is neither an organisation that articulates vision alone, nor one that executes alone, but a body that carries both, end to end — what is sometimes called a Think and Do Tank. To raise such a body in Japan, where this rare type is exceedingly uncommon even by international measure: this is the founding motive of Seven Hills Gate, and the reason RainmakerZ now stands as a corps within it.

The Philosophy Held Within the Names

The name “Seven Hills Gate” draws upon the memory that humankind has, from earliest times, raised civilisations upon seven hills — Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and others. We re-read these “seven hills” as the “seven continents”, and we hold a hundred-year vision: to build, upon each of Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, Oceania, and Antarctica, a “gate” for a new age.

The gate of which we speak is not a barrier that blocks the passage of people or capital. It is not a place that exacts tolls, nor a boundary that divides outside from inside. It is the very opposite of these — a node, a co-creation site, a bridge, a scaffold, and a common table at which to face one another as equals. When all of these are gathered into a single place, that place is what we call a “gate.”

Within the name “RainmakerZ“ four streams have been woven together.

The first is the spirit of the shamans of indigenous North America. Among the Hopi, the Zuni, and the Navajo, the Rainmaker was the figure who called down the rain for the life of the community. The second is the prayer offered to the eight million gods of Japan. The prayers of amagoi — to Ryūjin, Suijin, Kura-okami, and Taka-okami — are among the most ancient prayers of these islands. The third is the legibility, across the world, of a word from the American commercial sphere. The centre of the world’s working economy remains, even now, in America, and the words we will first exchange with the world’s people will most likely pass through American English. The fourth, encoded in the closing letter Z, is our resolve to run, as a gathered body, from A through Z — the conventional plural “s” was replaced with “z” to mark that this is not the work of a single Rainmaker, but of a body of Rainmakers gathered into one.

In its surface, then, a piece of American slang that any voice in the world may speak; at its root, a word bound deeply to the prayer offered to the gods of Japan — Rooted in Japan. Spoken to the world. — that is the spirit of RainmakerZ.

Gates Built, and Gates Yet to Come

The first gates that Rainmakerz has raised within Japan are already standing.

• ESG-IIDA (the ESG Investment Infrastructure Development Association) — an institution founded to build the institutional infrastructure for ESG investing in Japan. A gate of the financial-systems layer, joining international standards with the Japanese context.
• CCRSS (the Council for the Creation of Regional Symbiosis Sphere) — a council that conceives and implements the regional symbiosis sphere as a new socio-economic unit. A gate of industrial foundations and social foundations, crossing multiple regions.
• The Kitahiroshima Regional Symbiosis Consortium — the first ground of implementation for a regional symbiosis sphere, taking Kitahiroshima Town in Hiroshima Prefecture as its starting point. A gate of on-the-ground implementation, joining municipality, locality, and private sector.

These three gates function at different layers — national, cross-regional, and on-the-ground — circulating wisdom among themselves and accumulating the knowledge needed for international expansion.

In the coming decade, Rainmakerz will raise its first gates abroad, beginning with the emerging markets of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia. Over the two decades that follow, the work will extend across Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific islands, opening the first horizon of a hundred-year vision in which gates will, at last, stand upon all seven continents.

A Word from the Founder

“Peace does not endure upon the page of a declaration. It endures only upon the economic reality in which person needs person, and nation needs nation, and each supports the other. We take upon ourselves the name Rainmakerz that we may carry forward, into the place of the modern economy, an old truth from humanity’s deepest layer: that the prayer which calls the rain calls it only when offered for the sake of the community. To share, on equal terms, Japan’s institutional accumulation with the people of the emerging economies, and to raise new economies together with them — with Rainmakerz, we now take the first step of this long journey.”

— Hisashi Otani , Representative Director