Profile at a glance

  • Full name: Ogaki Chiaki (大垣 千明)
  • Role: Founder and president, Motosu High School Outdoor Activities Club (野外活動サークル, nokuru)
  • Signature philosophy: good camping on a tight budget
  • Favorite shopping venue: Daiso (100-yen shop)
  • Japanese voice: Sayuri Hara

Who Chiaki is

Ogaki Chiaki is the founder and president of the Motosu High School Outdoor Activities Club, the reason the club exists at all, and the character who drags the rest of the cast — Aoi, Nadeshiko, occasionally Rin — into group camping trips that would not have happened without her. Her personality is the loudest in the cast: she is the one with the plans, the schemes, the themed food ideas, and the bottomless capacity for making fun of her own bad calls five minutes after they fail. She is also, underneath the comedy, the cast's quiet egalitarian. Her entire aesthetic is built around the premise that good camping does not require expensive gear, and that a well-used 100-yen shop item is worth more than an unused flagship product.

Chiaki's gear philosophy has a name in the Japanese camping community: yasui kedo ii kyanpu — “cheap but good camping.” She carries it out with Daiso cookware, with DIY fixes, and with a Uniflame Fire Stand II she shares with Nadeshiko. The Fire Stand II is the one piece of real gear she actually commits to, and she commits because it is lightweight, packs flat, and costs about ¥6,400 — all of which fits her argument that money should be spent only where it is load-bearing.

The Outdoor Activities Club as a small political project

The series' running joke about the nokuru is that it barely qualifies as a club. It meets in a corner of the home economics room. It has no trophies. Its signature event is the nabe kyanpu — a hot-pot camp where the point is that everybody brings one ingredient and they all share. This is, in the manga's quiet reading, a small political statement. The alternative to the expensive, individualistic outdoor scene is not to give up on outdoor life. It is to make it collective in a way that does not require anybody to buy a ¥100,000 tent. Chiaki is the character who holds that line, and the whole reason the club works is that she holds it cheerfully rather than moralistically.

The adult timeline: a U-turn to the Yamanashi tourism board

Chiaki's arc after high school is the most dramatic in the whole cast. She initially takes a job at a Tokyo events company, a reasonable post-graduation path for somebody with her organizational instincts, and then, in the film's time skip, she quits and moves back to Yamanashi to take a position at the prefectural tourism promotion organization (山梨県観光推進機構). The term for this in Japanese labor policy is a U-turn shuushoku — a move from a Tokyo career back to one's home prefecture — and it is the single policy the rural prefectures have been trying to encourage for twenty years. Chiaki's U-turn is not framed as a retreat. It is framed as the first right decision she has made since founding the nokuru.

The film's central plot belongs to her. Adult Chiaki identifies an abandoned rural school building, proposes rebuilding it as a campground, secures municipal permission, and recalls her high-school friends from Tokyo, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Yamanashi to help finish the work. The project is the manga's practical demonstration of kankei jinkou — the Japanese urban-rural policy concept of “relationship population,” the network of people who are not formal residents of a depopulating town but who return to it often enough, and care about it enough, to be counted as part of its future. The manga stages the concept through a single abandoned schoolhouse and a single returned friend group, and the 2025 Yamanashi Machi-Tabi Mission, with its 1 November–26 December 2025 quest trail of real Minobu and Fujikawa shops, is the policy version of the same idea.

Pilgrimage: walking where Chiaki walked

Around Minobu Station (Yamanashi)

Chiaki's school-life and buying routes are mapped onto the streets around Minobu Station, and the 2025 Yamanashi Machi-Tabi Mission deliberately routes visitors through the same local stores she uses. Eishoudou, Serva, and the other small shops in the Minobu-cho shopping street are the real-world economic beneficiaries of the pilgrimage.

Lake Shibire (Shibire-ko, Yamanashi)

The quiet, mysterious lake at the center of the club's first group camp. The “ushi-oni” (cow-demon) story that the manga jokes about is a real local legend. The campground is reachable by road from Minobu and offers the same still, half-fogged atmosphere the manga draws.

The abandoned-school campground (model site, Yamanashi)

The film's central location, an abandoned school building being rebuilt as a campground, is modeled after a real former school in the Yamanashi countryside. The real site has become one of the post-film pilgrimage destinations, and several of the surrounding municipalities have used the film as a reference for their own revitalization planning.

Why Chiaki still matters

Ogaki Chiaki is the rare slice-of-life character whose comedy role is also her political role. She founded a club on the argument that outdoor life should not be a wealth filter, and she followed that argument into a career that is literally about making her home prefecture worth visiting. Visiting Minobu in 2026 is about walking the same streets where a fictional club president argued for a quieter, cheaper, more collective idea of the outdoors, and recognizing that the argument has since become public policy.