The Hoiku Manifesto
Every year, thousands of families move to Tokyo with a child in tow and discover the same thing: nobody translated the part that matters.
Not the train signs. Not the konbini menus. The paperwork that decides whether your kid gets into a nursery at all — the admission scoring sheets, the benefit applications with deadlines that don't wait for you to learn the system, the forms written by a ward office for residents who grew up inside it.
We didn't build Hoiku because this information was secret. It was published, all along, on the ward's own site, in Japanese, in a format built for a different reader. That's the actual problem: not access, but translation — of language, and of a bureaucratic system that assumes you already know how it works.
So here's what we believe.
Every family navigating this deserves to see their own odds clearly — not a vague "it's competitive," but the actual index score, the actual cutoff, the actual number their ward used last year.
Every benefit you're owed should be visible before the deadline, not discovered after it. 児童手当, Tokyo 018 support, the medical card — none of it is automatic, and none of it should require knowing to ask.
Nothing here should cost you your privacy to use. No account. Nothing stored on a server. You came here for an answer, not to be a lead.
And nothing here should be trusted blindly. Always confirm against the official pages. We're not the ward office, and we don't want to be mistaken for one — we're a translation layer, not an authority.
Why us, specifically
Because one of us actually went through this. Not as a research project — as a parent in Nishikasai, Edogawa Ward, staring at the same index sheet everyone else is staring at, wishing someone had just decoded it first.
Hoiku exists so the next parent doesn't have to guess.