NISHIO Hirokazu
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Nurturing the Next Generation
In 2002, at age 20, I was selected for the first cohort of IPA's Mitou Youth program
(the youth track of Japan's Exploratory Software Project) and certified as a "Super Creator" the following year.
Being funded and mentored to immerse myself in my own project was the starting point of my career
as a researcher and engineer. The twenty years since have been a story of
moving from the mentored side to the mentoring side.
Today I am a co-founder and mentor of Mitou Junior,
a program supporting creators aged 17 and under.
Why I work on this
Creating an environment where young people can pursue original projects is the longest-horizon
practice of my through-line, "improving intellectual productivity
(the means) for the progress of civilization (the end)."
If augmenting one person's knowledge work with tools plays out over years,
nurturing the next generation of creators plays out over decades.
It is also paying forward the support I myself received from the Mitou program.
My origin on the teaching side goes back to graduate school. The Mitou genome-visualization project led me into a bioinformatics lab, where I found myself teaching programming to junior students. Since it was a lab of comparative genomics, I built teaching materials that compared multiple programming languages — "comparative programming linguistics," as I called it. That experience led directly to my book Coding o Sasaeru Gijutsu (2013, Japanese).
Teaching has also been inseparable from studying how people learn.
Lecturing on "designing how you learn" at my alma mater Nada School and at Kyoto University Summer Design School,
and writing "How Engineers Learn" for WEB+DB PRESS, led to my book
The Engineer's Way of Creating Knowledge (2018).
Record of practice
- 2001–2003: Joined an adopted IPA Exploratory Software Project as a developer (2001; the project was led by someone else), then had my own project selected for Mitou Youth (2002); certified as a Super Creator in 2003 — my starting point on the mentored side
- 2003–2006: The Mitou genome-visualization project led me into a bioinformatics lab (comparative genomics) at NAIST, where I taught programming to junior students with materials comparing multiple languages — the direct origin of Coding o Sasaeru Gijutsu (2013)
- 2004–2006: Tutor at MEXT's IT School 2004/2005 and ICT School 2006 (national IT talent development programs)
- 2009–2011: Lecturer at Security & Programming Camp (working group member in 2010; chief lecturer of the programming languages class in 2011)
- 2013–2014: Ran three-day workshops at Kyoto University Summer Design School — "Design of Teamwork" (2013) and "Designing How You Learn — Finding Your Blind Spots" (2014)
- 2013–2014: Lectures at my alma mater Nada School — "Career Strategy: Diversity of People, Lives, and Work" (2013) and "Designing How You Learn" (2014); also lectured at Kyushu Institute of Technology's Mitou Juku (February 2014)
- 2014: Wrote "How Engineers Learn" (WEB+DB PRESS Vol.80, Japanese) — the prototype of The Engineer's Way of Creating Knowledge
- 2015–2017: Part-time lecturer at Tokyo Metropolitan University (summer intensive courses)
- 2015–2025: Director of the Mitou Foundation (stepped down May 2025)
- 2016–present: Co-founder and mentor of Mitou Junior — a program that funds and mentors creators aged 17 and under; I have mentored selected projects every year since its founding, for ten years now
- 2017–c.2018: Technical advisor at BeProud Inc. — contributed to the machine learning curriculum of the online learning service PyQ
- 2018: Published a programming book for elementary school students (co-authored with Hidemi Kawai, in Japanese), expanding a 2016–2017 magazine series for children
- 2018–2024: Program-Specific Associate Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology
The Mitou Junior mentor community also became a junction for my later work.
Takahiro Anno, with whom I worked on broad listening in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election,
was a fellow Mitou Junior mentor before that.
And Rikuto Niimi, one of the initiators of Plurality Tokyo (2023), is a Mitou Junior alumnus —
the ideas of Plurality were circulating in the Mitou Junior community early on.
Read more
Related stories: Intellectual Production / Broad Listening in Practice / Plurality / Visualizing High-Dimensional Vectors
This page is a record as of 2026-07-29. Nurturing the next generation is an ongoing practice,
and this page will continue to grow.