We present our pathway through participation in the blind Kumamoto exercise, particularly the Step~1 of site characterization. As a first stage, the combination of passive and active seismic imaging techniques are used to image the velocity profile beneath the KUMA site. The estimation of a broadband Rayleigh wave dispersion curve is based on crosscorrelations of ambient seismic noise and analysis of active seismic shot gathers. We calculate correlations from the entire time series (only vertical components) of each seismic array after classical pre-processing of ambient noise data (mean and trend removal, tapering and bandpass Butterworth filter between 0.05-20 Hz, whitenning, and one-bit signal binarisation). Then a passive seismic section is constructed using all available stations pairs and stacking the crosscorrelation traces with similar interstation distances. The obtained passive seismic section is analyzed using a high-resolution Radon transform in order to obtain the dispersion image of Rayleigh waves traveling through the array. Manual picking of the dispersion curve is done for each dispersion image from KUM-LL, KUM-M and KUM-SM arrays. Then, the information is merged and interpolated to obtain a final broadband dispersion curve. Additionally, active source seismic data is used with the high-resolution Radon technique to constrain the model at shallow depths ($<$~30~m). In this way, a broadband dispersion image is constructed with significant energy from 0.9~Hz to 45~Hz. The final dispersion curve is inverted using the non-linear neighborhood algorithm. Using just the fundamental mode Rayleigh wave, a first model with normal velocity variation in depth is obtained that corresponds quite well with the preferred model provided by the organizing committee. The addition of a mHVSR curve in a joint inversion better constrains the deeper part of the model ($>$~1~km). After comparison of the submitted dispersion curve to the theoretical dispersion curves for the preferred model, the authors note that there was a clear mis-interpretation in the fundamental mode of their submitted results, especially at frequencies higher than 5 Hz. Using both fundamental (only visible in the passive dataset) and first overtones of Rayleigh waves (only visible in the active seismic dataset) a refined velocity model near the shallow subsurface could have been be inferred, but we decided to keep our first submitted results. This detailed interpretation should be further studied as dispersion images from forward and backward hammer shots are quite different, which may indicate strong variations in the geometry and/or shear-wave velocities of the first meters of the subsurface.