This paper proposes a simple model that depicts the relationship between community and extra-community stakeholders that will enable the effective development of sustainable tourism. “Sustainable tourism” in this paper is defined as tourism that utilizes community resources for tourism development and re-invests the returns from tourism to the destination resources. The tourism relationship model, with a community-based intermediary as its subsystem, is introduced and applied to a case in Hokkaido, Japan. The application demonstrates that the model is a valid tool to identify two important factors for successful development of sustainable tourism, which are a “circulation mechanism” that connects community resources and extra-community stakeholders through community-based intermediaries, and a “balancing mechanism” that considers the existence value and economic value, supplemented by the community-based intermediary’s functions to transfer financial and technology capital from non-tourist sources.