Park-PFI in Brief
The three-part structure under Urban Park Act Article 5-2: solicitation guidelines, certified plans, and the special installation/management permit
The unit costs and amounts that follow are assumptions this article makes, not published statistics. They move a great deal with the building, the area and the line of business, so replace them with your own quotes and comparable local results.
Park-PFI sites in active use
203 sites
MLIT, as of 31 March 2026
Sites considering adoption at the same date
187 sites
Maximum installation/management permit period under a certified plan (extended from the standard 10 years)
20 years
Maximum building coverage ratio cap under the special rule (up to 10 percentage points added to the base 2%)
12%
The 10 points of added coverage are shared with rest facilities, not granted separately to each. A park that already reaches 12% coverage through rest or sports facilities cannot add a Park-PFI amenity building (Guidelines, §2.3).
Park-PFI (Public Solicitation Management System) was established by the 2017 amendment to the Urban Park Act. The statutory basis is Article 5-2, which defines the framework for the park manager to select a designated installer through public solicitation. The system rests on three elements.
First, the public solicitation guidelines. The park manager publishes these guidelines prior to solicitation. They define the scope of the target park, the types of facilities eligible for solicitation, the maximum installation/management permit period, the building coverage ratio cap, and the policy for returning revenue. Second, the certified plan. Applicants prepare this plan in accordance with the solicitation guidelines, and the park manager certifies it after selection. Third, the special installation/management permit. The permit issued under a certified plan can run up to 20 years (extended from the usual 10-year ceiling), and the building coverage ratio can be raised by up to 10 percentage points above the base 2%.
In short, Park-PFI is a system for selecting through public solicitation a private operator to install and run revenue-generating facilities, and for granting that operator a long-term permit. Compared with the Designated Manager System, which entrusts overall park management to a private entity, Park-PFI focuses specifically on the installation and operation of revenue facilities.
→ For the basic structure and comparison with the Designated Manager System, see What Is Park-PFI?.
Awards and Solicitations in 2025
The count by fiscal year and the cumulative total of 203, the geographic and business-type composition of 2025 projects, and the shifting balance between large-city and regional-city projects
National Statistics in Motion
Park-PFI was in use at 203 sites at the end of FY2025, with a further 187 sites considering adoption. By the fiscal year adoption began: 4 in FY2017, 17 in FY2018, 22 in FY2019, 23 in FY2020, 34 in FY2021, 30 in FY2022, 29 in FY2023, 21 in FY2024 and 23 in FY2025. FY2021 was the peak at 34 sites; since then the run rate has held at 20 to 30 a year. This document is the only status publication MLIT currently hosts, and it gives no counts for dates inside a fiscal year.
By prefecture the largest counts are Tokyo with 18 parks, Fukuoka with 17, Kanagawa with 14, Aichi with 13, and Osaka with 13. The same list names the park manager but carries no population figure. No published document counts how many municipalities have used the system, or how the parks break down by municipal size.
Projects That Moved in 2025
The main movements visible in 2025 from PPnet and other public sources are summarized below.
Projects under solicitation (installation and management type):
| Municipality | Park | Movement |
|---|---|---|
| Saga City | Kono Park | Solicitation announced June 2026 |
| MLIT Shikoku Regional Development Bureau | Sanuki Mannou National Government Park | Solicitation as a "specified operation business" |
| Kawasaki City | Tamagawa Mihari Park | Operator selection for installation and management |
| Okayama City | Karasujo Park (Ishiyama district) | Solicitation scheduled for April 2026 |
| Osaka Prefecture | Minoh Park and five additional parks | Broad-area package, operations starting April 2027 |
Public-private collaboration feasibility studies and sounding:
| Municipality | Park | Movement |
|---|---|---|
| Tokushima City | Bizan Park | Private-sector activation feasibility study |
| Okinawa City | Misato Park | Drafting solicitation documents under review |
| Otsu City | Yanagasaki Lakeside Park | Public-private collaboration feasibility study |
New cases opened or selected in 2024–2025:
- Naha City — Manko Park
- Toyama Prefecture — Joganji River Park "BBQ TERRACE"
- Beppu City — Shoningahama Park "SHONIN PARK"
- Tsushima City — Tennogawa Park
- Yamagata City — Ekimae Park "Kasumi Terrace"
Two things stand out in the geographic distribution. First, large-scale package projects are forming around designated and core cities. Osaka Prefecture's Minoh and five additional parks operate at the prefectural scale, and Kawasaki City's Tamagawa Mihari Park is designed as an integrated project with the riverine green space. Second, regional hubs are moving — Saga, Tokushima, Otsu, Okinawa, and Okayama, all in the 300,000 to 700,000 population range, line up across the list.
The MLIT list has no column for the type of business. It records only the prefecture, the park manager, and the park name, and no document counts how many cafés or how many glamping sites exist nationwide. The business types of the projects listed above were taken one by one from each municipality's solicitation guideline and selection results.
Reclassifying the Award Patterns
Three new patterns added to the existing six typologies: broad-area packaged management, national park application, and Park Renovation Agreement combination
The Six Established Typologies
A previous article analyzing successful cases in municipalities under 100,000 people organizes Park-PFI success patterns into six typologies (see Park-PFI Strategy for Smaller Municipalities).
- Regional resource type — Combined with hot springs or historical assets (Kadaru Terrace Kindaichi in Ninohe, among others)
- Problem-solving type — Addressing underuse and aging of existing parks by introducing childcare or welfare functions
- Glamping type — Lodging and camping formats coupled with tourism demand
- Vertical type — Vertical use of narrow sites enabled by the building coverage exception (Harukigawa Park in Beppu)
- Anchored to a larger project — Designing the park as part of a development already moving nearby (Kokorun City Park, Maebashi)
- Townscape company type — A locally funded SPC leading as the lead applicant
These six typologies cover the range of cases observed between 2017 and 2023. Looking at 2024–2025 movements, however, several patterns appear that the six typologies do not fully capture.
New Patterns Visible in 2024–2025
Pattern A: Broad-Area Packaged Management
A single operator providing broad-area packaged management across multiple parks at the prefectural scale. Osaka Prefecture's Minoh and five additional parks, with operations set to begin in April 2027, illustrates the prefecture-scale package model. This extends the existing "package type" from the municipal to the prefectural scale and can be read as a complementary design for situations where smaller municipalities cannot sustain a project alone.
Pattern B: National Government Park Application
The "specified operation business" advancing at Sanuki Mannou National Government Park is not a Park-PFI under Article 5-2 of the Urban Park Act in the strict sense, but a new route that brings a Park-PFI-equivalent design into the national park system. For smaller cities that host a national government park, this opens a new commercialization route.
Pattern C: Park Renovation Agreement Combination
A movement to combine Park-PFI with the new Urban Park Renovation Agreement system. Possible variants include integrated operation alongside townscape development and pairing with the introduction of renewable energy installations. The agreement system sits outside Park-PFI as a separate scheme, but combined use is likely to grow in practice.
Patterns A through C do not displace the six typologies; they add options that enable broader-area and more composite projects.
Regional City Cases
Detailed preconditions and figures for Kadaru Terrace Kindaichi (Ninohe), Harukigawa Park (Beppu), and Kokorun City Park (Maebashi)
Three concrete cases give the patterns texture. Each is a previously documented case, but reading them in light of 2025 developments brings the open questions into sharper focus.
Case 1: Kadaru Terrace Kindaichi (Ninohe City, Iwate Prefecture; population approximately 23,000)
A locally funded townscape company, Kadaru Mirai, established an SPC and developed hot spring, sauna, lodging, restaurant, and indoor pool facilities at a nearby park of approximately 2 hectares. The case is documented in detail on PPnet and received the Excellence Award at the 2023 Japan Society of Civil Engineers Design Awards.
Three points are worth noting. First, the case showed that even at the 23,000-population scale, a project can stand up when a regional resource (Kindaichi Onsen) sits at the core. Second, the third-sector townscape company carried the SPC, structuring a local operator as the lead applicant. Third, by aligning Park-PFI with the replacement of the aging municipal bath facility, the city ran Park-PFI not as a single-facility project but within a broader framework of public asset restructuring.
Case 2: Harukigawa Park (Beppu City, Oita Prefecture; population approximately 110,000)
A case using the multilevel urban park system on a narrow site — the West area at approximately 0.92 hectares within a total park area of about 1.17 hectares. In the West area, a supermarket and tenant on the ground floor and an artificial turf field, café, and management office on the second floor stack vertically. The case is introduced as the first Park-PFI multilevel urban park in western Japan. Annual usage fees to the city are projected at approximately ¥14 million.
The point is that the case showed a cramped site can still work if it is built upward. Neither the Urban Park Act nor the guidelines set a minimum park area for Park-PFI; the place an area line is drawn is the subsidy, where the public-private hub creation project under the Social Capital Development Grant requires an urban park of at least 0.25 hectares (Guidelines 4.2). Combining the building coverage exception (up to 10 percentage points) with the multilevel urban park system brings small parks in built-up districts within reach of Park-PFI. The case is a useful reference for regional cities sitting on underused small parks in commercial and residential areas.
Case 3: Kokorun City Park (Maebashi City, Gunma; population approximately 325,000)
A single cafe with community space was placed in a 0.19-hectare neighborhood park. Project cost was ¥41 million, the term runs from September 2021 to August 2041 (20 years), and the operator is Sanwakai, a certified nonprofit corporation. The park opened in July 2022.
The significance is that the park was never made to pay for itself in isolation. It was designed as a new park inside the Japanese Red Cross site CCRC development, and the solicitation conditions required collaboration with the local development group already active there. The city had first approached national chains, which declined on grounds of project scale, and only then turned to local operators. The case shows that the governing condition is not the size of the park but what is already moving around it.
Connecting Park-PFI and Small Concession
Shared VFM-exempt status, the minimum-administrative-burden design pattern from Fukuchiyama-type Small Concession, and the connection language in the May 2025 revision
When regional cities consider public asset utilization, the use-case separation between Park-PFI and Small Concession becomes unavoidable. The two systems differ in eligible assets, contract form, and revenue-return mechanics. The May 2025 guideline revision explicitly opened a connection between them.
Shared VFM-Exempt Status
VFM (Value for Money) is a cost-effectiveness indicator whose calculation is mandatory under conventional PFI under the PFI Act. Park-PFI and Small Concession, in contrast, derive from their own statutes (the Urban Park Act and the laws governing public facility operating rights), and they fall outside the PFI Act's mandatory VFM calculation. This is common to both systems.
Not requiring VFM calculation substantially lightens the burden of council deliberations and internal procedures. PFI Act projects routinely produce repeated council debate over the precision of the VFM calculation, which Park-PFI and Small Concession avoid. The two schemes can be understood as operating outside the typical bottleneck of "we cannot proceed because we cannot produce a VFM figure."
Minimum Administrative Burden as a Shared Design
Park-PFI standardizes a design in which the private side bears the cost of revenue facilities and the public side bears part of the cost of specified park facilities (up to one-half of the portion contributing to enhanced park functions). Small Concession can push the minimum-administrative-burden design further — the Fukuchiyama type, with zero administrative burden and zero operating-right consideration, is a representative example.
For regional cities aiming to hold down administrative burden, a workable sequence is to first examine Small Concession feasibility and then select Park-PFI when the target asset is an urban park. The primary criterion is whether the target asset is an urban park, with secondary considerations being the need to combine revenue facilities and the need for a long-term installation/management permit.
→ For a fuller comparison, see What Is Small Concession? Mechanism and Cases.
Integrated Use of Parks and Adjacent Facilities
What the May 2025 guideline revision made explicit is a design that uses Small Concession for adjacent public assets (such as a closed school or former community hall) while developing the park portion under Park-PFI as an integrated project. Rather than running the two schemes in parallel, an integrated solicitation can serve as a vehicle for restructuring public assets across an entire district.
Specific combinations to expect:
- Integrating a former community hall (Small Concession) with an adjacent park (Park-PFI)
- A coordinated solicitation pairing a closed school (Small Concession) with a new urban park on its schoolyard site (Park-PFI)
- Packaging a former bath facility on land adjacent to a park (Small Concession) with revenue facilities inside the park (Park-PFI)
For regional cities, these combinations shift the approach from "one public asset at a time" to "restructuring across a contiguous area."
Failed Solicitations and Regional Limits
Structural analysis of Hitachi City's Kamine Park and Aichi Prefecture's Odaka Greenery Pool Site across the population-scale, park-location, and revenue-model axes
Tracking only awarded cases obscures the limits of the system. Failed solicitations and full-withdrawal cases that surfaced in 2023–2024 deserve structural treatment.
Notable Failed Solicitations
| Case | Municipality | Population | Park Scale | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kamine Park Exchange Facility | Hitachi City, Ibaraki | Approximately 160,000 | Large suburban | Solicitation closed (outcome not publicly disclosed, FY2024) |
| Odaka Greenery Pool Site | Aichi Prefecture | Prefectural | Pool site | All applicants withdrew (FY2023) |
| Kitaya Park | Shibuya Ward, Tokyo | Central Tokyo | 0.78 hectares | Operational restrictions following event-occupancy controversy |
A Three-Axis Classification of Failed Solicitations
Read through a regional-city lens, three axes emerge.
Axis 1: Revenue model
The mismatch among surrounding population, tourism demand, and year-round operability. At large suburban parks, visit frequency tends to be heavily dependent on season and weather, making the financial sustainability of a permanent food and beverage outlet difficult to secure. A design that places permanent revenue facilities in a large suburban park in a regional city operates under stringent feasibility conditions.
Axis 2: Required service level
The gap between public-interest standards (the level of park function that must be assured) and the private-side revenue expectations (the scope an operator can responsibly propose). The Odaka Greenery Pool Site reached the point of applications being registered before all applicants ultimately withdrew, which points to a gap between required service levels and operator assumptions.
Axis 3: Procedure
Procedural shortcomings: insufficient sounding, point allocations in evaluation criteria poorly matched to project realities, and inadequate channels for local operator participation. This is the area most amenable to prevention through careful, two-stage sounding at both the project conception and the project formulation phases.
Open Questions on Regional Application Limits
Three questions can be inferred from observed cases.
First, the question of a population floor for financial sustainability. Ninohe at 23,000 is cited as the lower-end success threshold; below that scale, successful cases remain scarce.
Second, the weakening incentive for major operators to participate. Smaller-scale regional projects often do not meet the revenue expectations of major firms, which makes it critical to design evaluation criteria around "participation by local operators" and "inclusion of local businesses in joint ventures."
Third, the gap in solicitation outcomes between projects that have used the national feasibility-study support (half-funding through the Comprehensive Social Capital Improvement Grant) and those that have not. Projects that have used the support appear to fare somewhat better in avoiding failed solicitations.
Structural Implications and Next Questions
The 20-year contract exit question, the packaging of public asset utilization schemes, and evaluation-criteria design for operating partners
The 20-Year Exit Question
Park-PFI was established in 2017, and the earliest case — Komeda Coffee at Katsuyama Park in Kitakyushu, opened July 2018 — will reach the 20-year contract terminus in 2038. At the eight-year mark, no contract has yet reached its scheduled end.
The system's exit strategy remains untested. Open questions include re-solicitation versus withdrawal versus continuation, ownership of revenue facilities and restoration obligations, and handover protocols to successor operators. Municipalities now initiating Park-PFI projects are entering a period in which they must design not only the first 20 years but also the 20 that follow.
Packaging Public Asset Utilization
The conversation is shifting from "Park-PFI alone" toward packaging multiple public asset utilization schemes. The PPP/PFI Action Plan (2026 revision) targets 40 trillion yen in project volume over the ten years from FY2022 to FY2031, and for parks sets a target of 35 projects opening a whole park to private involvement through a public facility operation project or Park-PFI. In that context Park-PFI is the workhorse for urban parks, but in practice it is increasingly combined with cross-domain PPP/PFI (143 cases as of March 2024) and broad-area PPP/PFI (27 cases at the same point).
For regional-city practitioners, the shift is from asking "what can Park-PFI alone do" to designing Park-PFI together with Small Concession, designated management, and the broader public facility management plan as a single coordinated framework.
Evaluation Criteria for Operating Partners
The structural breakdown of failed solicitations shows that the design of evaluation criteria for operating partners separates success from failure. How quantitatively to evaluate "participation by local operators," "assurance of resident utilization," "inclusion of local businesses in joint ventures," and "the probability of 20-year operational continuity" leaves substantial room for creative work at the municipal level.
→ For example designs of evaluation criteria, see Park-PFI Evaluation Criteria Design and Scoring.
Park-PFI in 2026: Nationwide Statistics, New Cases, and Policy Outlook
National Park-PFI statistics as of 2026, recent notable cases, and an overview of guideline revisions
Park-PFI Strategy for Smaller Municipalities
Six typologies and solicitation design for making Park-PFI work in municipalities under 100,000
Small Concession in 2026
VFM-exempt, minimum-administrative-burden public asset utilization, and the connection to Park-PFI
What to do next
In the order you can act on them, within the week you read this.
| # | What to do | Where | Rough effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pull the current building coverage of the candidate park: how much rest and sports facilities already use | Your parks team | Half a day |
| 2 | From step 1, confirm whether any of the 10 points remain. At 12% already, no amenity building can be added | Same | — |
| 3 | Count visitors yourself, weekday and weekend, rather than using an estimate | On site | Two days |
| 4 | Collect actual fees paid to the city at three comparable parks — not visitor counts | Ask those municipalities | 1–2 weeks |
| 5 | With 1–4 in hand, run market sounding. If no one comes forward here, no one will bid | Private operators | 2–3 months |
Steps 1 and 2 can be done today. If no headroom remains, nothing further is needed.
References
Park-PFI Activation Status — MLIT City Bureau, Parks and Greenery Section (2026)
Park-PFI Activation Guidelines (May 2025 revised edition) — MLIT City Bureau (2025)
On the Public Solicitation Management System (Park-PFI) — MLIT (2020)
Latest Trends in PPP/PFI Promotion — MLIT (2024)
Urban Park Act, Article 5-2 — e-Gov Law Search (2017)
PPnet (Park-PFI Support Network) — Solicitations — Park-PFI Support Network (2025)
Odaka Greenery Pool Site Park-PFI Solicitation Failure Announcement — Aichi Prefecture (2023)
Research on Introducing Park-PFI to Small Parks in Commercial Districts — Landscape Online, Vol. 18 (2024)
