Case Study | Learning through community cleanup
Turning cleaning
into an education in public life.
Osouji-tai: Protect Your Neighborhood is an outreach class for elementary schools. The curriculum was developed with the cooperation of Duskin Co., Ltd., and first delivered at Adachi Municipal Adachi Elementary School in December 2025.Open to elementary schools, any year group.
Why are Japan's streets
among the most beautiful in the world?
02 The Reality | Where we stand
Japan's cleaning culture is an educational asset almost no other country has.
In 2024, one of our members studied abroad in Canada and New Zealand. Walking the streets there, what struck them was the litter on the ground and the smell that came with it. Having grown up in Japan, they say it was only on returning home that they realised how genuinely beautiful Japan's streets are.
So where does that beauty come from? There are hardly any bins on the street. Thinking it through, they arrived at an answer: the cleaning time at primary school. It felt like a chore at the time. Even so, perhaps those minutes were what taught them to imagine how the person doing the cleaning feels, and nurtured the sense of cooperation Japan is often said to have.
In schools abroad, cleaning is usually contractors' work. Japanese school cleaning, in which children keep their own space in order themselves, is an unusual educational culture by world standards. At home, however, it has hardened into a chore imposed from above, and its educational meaning — ownership of one's neighbourhood, a sense of the public, an eye for beauty — is rarely discussed.
A town stays clean and handsome not because someone is looking after it, but because each person's public spirit is. That is why we want to hand the meaning of cleaning to primary school children, at the age when character is formed, as something they experience. That thought is what our Clean Education Division was founded on.
03 Our Insight | The hypothesis
Cleaning is the nearest thing to civic participation a child can reach.
Putting your own classroom, and your own town, in order with your own hands is the first contribution to the public that a child can actually make. Osouji-tai is not a class about cleaning technique. It is designed so that, through cleaning, a child arrives at the idea that the town is partly theirs to build.
With the cooperation of Duskin
In developing the curriculum we received the cooperation of Duskin Co., Ltd., professionals in cleaning. The class itself is planned and delivered by TEIGEN JP.
Overseas experience, student-run
Planned and run by high school and university students who know both systems from the inside, and who are close enough in age for children to listen.
Character, and a sense of the public
Raising people who can protect what is good about this country and give something back to it. Cleaning, redefined as character education and community education.
04 The Experience | How the class runs
Why do we clean at all?
Start with the question. See how schools elsewhere differ, and work out what cleaning is for.
Learn how professionals do it
Hands on the tools, learning the cleaning methods we were taught while developing the curriculum.
Connect cleaning to the town
Using littering and streetscape as the material, argue out what it means to look after where you live.
As a member of Osouji-tai
Put what you learned into your own words, and carry it into the classroom and the neighborhood.
05 The Result | What we have done
First delivered at Adachi Municipal Adachi Elementary School.
"Handling the correspondence with Duskin Co., Ltd. and coordinating the school visits taught me the practical side of running a program — writing documents, handling email, managing people. It was an experience of building something from nothing."
"When they asked 'why do we clean at all?', the room went completely quiet — and then hands went up everywhere. What struck me was that the children who usually hang back during cleaning time were the ones leaning furthest forward."
06 Voices | After the class
They told us cleaning had stopped being a chore and started meaning something.
From the teachers
"Afterwards you could see them cleaning carefully, thinking about the methods they had been taught."
"The children listened with real interest and enjoyed putting it into practice."
"Even for the older year groups, it was a class that made them think again about why cleaning matters."
From the children
"I learned that cleaning is also about taking care of things."
"Now that I know the right way to do it, cleaning is fun."
"I found out that cleaning makes things last longer and makes it nicer to be there."
Excerpts from the post-class questionnaire for Osouji-tai: Protect Your Neighborhood (December 2025, three fifth-grade classes at Adachi Municipal Adachi Elementary School). Respondents are identified by year group only.