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.
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).
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.
Related stories: Intellectual Production / Broad Listening in Practice / Plurality / Visualizing High-Dimensional Vectors