Turning what happens on the ground
into the language of institutions.

Background: teenagers get asked, but never get into the decision

The voting age is 18. Below that there is almost no institutional room to take part in politics at all, and the proportion of young members on government advisory councils remains extremely low (see the relevant reports from the Children and Families Agency). A teenager's view may be heard at a one-off consultation, but it is rarely built into any structure that affects a decision. That is what it looks like from where we stand, and it is where this starts.

The design: five steps

Design questions

Membership would be open to 13-to-24-year-olds who live, study or work in the ward, drawn by a combination of open application and random selection so that it does not fill up with the already-engaged. We are working through committees by policy area — education, environment, disaster preparedness, urban development — a duty on the administration to respond to a TEIGEN and a right to demand reconsideration, small wins deliverable within thirty days, links into schools, and short-term participation slots. The aim is to lower the barrier to taking part while guaranteeing real influence by rule.

International reference: the Toronto Youth Cabinet

Toronto has the Toronto Youth Cabinet, through which people aged 13 to 24 make proposals to city government. In 2024, at Toronto City Hall, TEIGEN JP met its Executive Director, Stephen Mensah, and learned how youth proposals have actually moved city policy — creating summer jobs for young people, for example — and how the body is run. This model is also an attempt to translate that international knowledge into a Japanese local context.→

Where we have presented this model

• August 2024Meeting with the Executive Director of the Toronto Youth Cabinet (Toronto City Hall) →
• June 2025Conversation at a special lecture by Mercy Tembon, then Vice President of the World Bank, on youth participation worldwide and youth councils →
• July 2025Summer Conference 2025, organized by the Junior Chamber International Japan: raised the youth council model on a panel with Ashiya Mayor Ryosuke Takashima →

The research this proposal is built on

The youth council model rests on evidence, not on a hunch. We publish a paper examining what a mock election does to a young person's sense of themselves as a participant in politics, based on surveys of Mock Ward Mayoral Election participants (33 in 2023, 30 in 2025). Satisfaction moved from 3.60 (2023) to 3.73 (2025) on a four-point scale.

Soka Horii (Executive Director, TEIGEN JP) / Written August 2025 / Keywords: citizenship education, political participation, active learning

Roads, parks, schools — the places we use every day are also the public space that makes up a society. Yet when we find dirt or litter there, we tend to think of it as something someone else will clear, and rarely get an occasion to notice our own relation to it.

In our cleanup class the emphasis is not only on technique but on the process: observing the dirt, working out where it comes from, and improving the place together. Three classes and around a hundred children so far, turning cleaning from something you do because you were told into noticing a problem near you and changing it yourself.

Cleaning does not produce public-mindedness by itself. What matters is asking why you are doing it, and looking back at what your actions changed for other people and for the space you share. The cleanup class and citizenship education differ in scale but are the same education: the feeling that society is not something you leave to others, and that you can stand on the side that builds it.

The research that tested this approach

We have published a paper by Masatsugu Goto, Manager of our Clean Education Division, testing the effects of the visiting class we gave to three fifth-grade classes at Adachi Municipal Adachi Elementary School in December 2025. In the post-class survey (85 valid responses), 96.5% agreed that they understood why cleaning matters, 95.2% that they now knew how to clean properly, and 96.4% that they wanted to keep Japan's culture of keeping things clean.

Masatsugu Goto (Manager, Clean Education Division, TEIGEN JP) / Evaluates the December 2025 classes / Keywords: cleaning education, active learning

Turnout among 18- and 19-year-olds at the 2022 House of Councillors election was 34.49% (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). The figure is routinely produced as evidence that young people do not care about politics. We read it instead as a problem in the structure of who gets to take part.

Article 137-2 of the Public Offices Election Act bars anyone under 18 from campaigning. Even resharing a candidate's post can fall foul of it. So a teenager arrives at the day they get the vote having had almost no sanctioned place to practice being involved at all, and becomes a sovereign citizen overnight. The circuit through which interest would grow is structurally closed.

So we build places to do it, not awareness posters. 34.49% is not our generation's fate.

Most mock elections are designed around comparing prepared candidates and manifestos and then voting. That is worth something, but it never touches the substance of politics: how you analyze a problem, how you assemble a policy, how you reach agreement with people who want something else.

In the Mock Ward Mayoral Election, participants are on both sides — choosing and being chosen. We also built in a "paradigm change" session in which they re-examine their own policy from another position: an older resident, a family with young children, a local business. That puts the part of deliberation where you doubt your own rightness inside the experience itself. The details and results are in the case study.

Hardly any school or municipality is still deciding whether to do citizenship education. The question has moved to what form it should take. The 2015 amendment to the Public Offices Election Act lowered the voting age to 18; the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Ministry of Education distributed the supplementary textbook "The Future of Japan We Will Open"; and from 2022 the subject Public has been compulsory in high schools. The institutional support is already there.

What still stalls things is that nobody has laid out how the options differ, or what each one will ask of you afterward. Here is both, written from the delivery side by people who have worked with schools and local government.

There are four options

1. The lecture	A guest explains how elections work and why taking part matters.From one period. Easiest to arrange and easy to give to a whole year group at once. But students stay in the audience, so it is hard to design for any change in what they do.
2. The mock vote	Real polling booths and ballot boxes; students go through the procedure of voting.One to two periods. Election commissions are usually glad to help, and it works well at removing the intimidation of the procedure. But the issues tend to come ready-made, and it rarely reaches the substance of policy.
3. Policy and candidacy	Students analyze a local problem themselves, build a policy, stand, speak, deliberate and vote.Several periods, or half a day to a full day. Being on both sides changes how responsible students feel more than anything else does. In exchange it needs time, and it needs someone who knows how to choose the material and run the room.
4. Institutional connection	A standing mechanism — a youth council — that carries students' proposals into actual policymaking.Measured in years. It leaves behind a channel through which a voice actually arrives, rather than a one-off experience. Because it involves drafting an ordinance or establishing an advisory body, it depends on agreement inside the administration first.

None of the four is better than the others; they are a function of your aim and the time you have. If you want to lower the psychological barrier to taking part, start at 2. If you want students to feel that their view could move something, 3. If you do not want it to be a one-off, 4.

Five questions you will be asked

1. Who designs the neutrality, and how?Real parties and candidates, or fictional issues? Hand this decision wholesale to an outside provider and the school loses the ability to account for it. The safest course is to agree in writing beforehand — following Article 14 of the Basic Act on Education and the Ministry of Education's notices — how the material is chosen, how differing views are presented, and what the rules are during the session. We have written Policy on Political Neutrality down and published it in full.

2. Decide how many periods you have, first.More proposals die on "good idea, no time" than on anything else. One period gets you 1 or 2; tie it to a school event or a student council election and 3 is within reach. Choosing the form from the time you actually have is what gets it done.

3. Design who it reaches.Ask for volunteers and you get the students who were already interested. That is not a bad thing in itself, but the people who most need citizenship education are the ones who think politics has nothing to do with them. Whether you run it by class, by year group, or by selection has to be worked backward from what you want.

4. Build an evaluation that is not just satisfaction.Post-session satisfaction always comes out high. What to look at is intention to vote, interest in local problems, and whether behavior changed afterward. Whether you built in the same questions before and after, and a follow-up some months later, decides how much you can say about the program later.

5. Will it survive the person in charge moving on?Anything resting on one enthusiastic teacher or officer disappears when they are reassigned. Are the materials, the running order and the steps for dealing with other institutions written down? Does a student take over running it? Continuity has to be built into the design; it cannot be added later.

Where TEIGEN JP sits

Our core program, the Mock Ward Mayoral Election, is type ③, co-created with the Adachi Ward Office, Ward Assembly, Board of Education and Election Administration Commission. For schools, we fit ③ into class time as outreach classes (Mock Ward Mayoral Election for School and Mock Principal Election; two to four periods). If only one period is available, we come as speakers instead. For ④, Youth Council Model (In Development).

Guide prices, what to prepare and how the day runs are on the outreach class page; how partnerships work with schools, government and companies is on the partnership page. We are happy to be involved from the point where you are still deciding the shape of it. Membership of a council or committee, hearings and research collaboration are set out on the advisory and committee roles page.

Most student organizations lose momentum when the founder graduates. Enthusiasm cannot be handed over. Only structure can.

TEIGEN JP is moving out from under its founder through a set of institutions: the general meeting, the board, monthly reports, a head of internal affairs, a training system (the TEIGEN Dojo), a code of conduct (the Questioner Policy), and an alumni association (Shofukai). In 2026 we set up a five-year vision committee, so that even the long-term direction is decided by the organization rather than by a person. What we have learned doing this we also share in talks and writing.

If you are about to start something, or struggling to run one: The first three months of starting a student organization in high school／Why nobody joins your student organization, or nobody stays set it out as a practical sequence.

It will appear here as soon as it can be published. For the institutional research, see Youth Council Model (In Development) below in the meantime.