Message from the Founder

Thank you for coming to this page. I am Soka Horii, Executive Director of TEIGEN JP.

I grew up in Adachi City, Tokyo, the Tokyo ward with the lowest youth turnout and the lowest average income of the twenty-three. Neighbors looked out for me and I spent my public elementary and junior high school years running around on the banks of the Arakawa — and still, in a town where something like resignation hung in the air, I stayed in the audience, like everyone else my age.

That changed in the spring of 2023, when I started at a private high school in Bunkyo. I was overwhelmed by people my own age who had serious ambitions and who went at extracurriculars and social problems on their own initiative.

Looking at them, I saw my friends from home, and felt something I could not name. Turning it over, I arrived at an answer.

What separated them from my friends was not ability. It was the chance to meet society and find out what they were capable of.

Anyone should be able to stand at the center of society, whatever their circumstances — and for that, someone had to go first.

That decision is where TEIGEN JP starts.

ActionSix months from founding

• 2023.6Formed the team TEIGEN at Fifteen — the forerunner of TEIGEN JP — with four classmates who had served on the student council and as class representatives at Adachi Municipal Fourth Middle School
• 2023.10Won first prize at the inaugural National High School Policy Championship →
• 2023.11Co-created with the Adachi Ward Office, Ward Assembly, Board of Education and Election Administration Commission, and held the first Mock Ward Mayoral Election — The Other Side of the Ballot Box →
• 2023.12At the Prime Minister's Office, proposed mock elections in schools, among other things, to then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida →

All of that happened within six months of founding. Since then the Mock Ward Mayoral Election has run again and again in Adachi, and Osouji-tai: Protect Your Neighborhood has begun in elementary schools. Not just saying a TEIGEN but building it — that is what we have been doing, at the same table as the ward office and the assembly.

OrganizationFrom one person's question to something that outlasts a decade

This is no longer mine alone. Thirty-eight high school and university students from across Tokyo and the three neighboring prefectures are here now, drawn by the mission that every teenager should get to meet the person they have not yet become. A student who came to the Mock Ward Mayoral Election as a participant is at the center of running it the following year. The person who received the opportunity comes round to making the next one.

We have also changed the shape of the organization so that it does not depend on one person's energy. The general meeting is the highest decision-making body; the board and each division decide for themselves. The alumni association, Shofukai, stays alongside the current members, and the five-year vision committee is drawing the next course.

Something that began with one person's question, made into something that does not end with one person. It is an attempt to get past the short life expectancy of a student organization — to hand it on, and to keep producing chances for teenagers to experience democracy.

PromiseWhat I promise as executive director

TEIGEN JP has set out TEIGEN VISION 2030, taking our work to all 47 prefectures by 2030. The citizenship education and cleanup education we grew in Adachi have to be sharpened into a model that any classroom anywhere can run, without depending on one place or one person.

Beyond that lies the aim I will give everything to: that teenagers anywhere in this country, whatever their circumstances and wherever they live, find out what they are capable of and have a door through which to take a step into society.

None of this would exist without the people in government, assemblies, schools, companies and the community who took a fifteen-year-old's question seriously, and without the families who let their children come and do this. Thank you, sincerely, for the encouragement and the support.

Toward the future that lies past the question, we will go on being Questioners, and as one team we will push harder. Until every teenager gets the chance to meet the person they have not yet become.