About Toimikke
Finding society's questions (toi) early, and spotting them (mikke).
This is why we go looking
Daishiro Sasaki — Representative Director, Toimikke
In 2011, I was homeless myself.
I had been sharing a flat with a friend. When he moved back to his home town we gave the place up, and on my own I could not secure the next one. I kept working on a job renewed every two months, and slept in internet cafés for about six months. I never told anyone. It was the same situation as the people we support today.
At the time, I did not recognise myself as being in trouble. I worked every day and had somewhere to sleep that night. I assumed tomorrow would be the same. So it never occurred to me to ask for help.
In the end my diet deteriorated, my health broke down, and only then did I realise I could not go on. I searched desperately online and eventually found the Moyai Support Centre for Independent Living. I talked to them, and through them reached public support. The distance between being in trouble and reaching something you can rely on was astonishingly long.
Hardship looks completely different now. With a smartphone and an app you can find that day’s work on the spot. Which is exactly why people can keep working right up to the edge. The moment things break is unreadable even to the person themselves — even less visible than it was for me.
What we have to do has not changed. Make it possible for someone in trouble to reach support at the moment they need it. If waiting means never meeting them, go and find them. That is why we build places of refuge in the city, provide a route for an SOS that survives losing your phone, and deliver support information as short videos to people it never reaches.
For background on the problem itself, see Homelessness in Japan today, in one minute.
The two problems we work on
Communication poverty — Being able to communicate has become indispensable to living in society, yet public support does not adequately cover it. We believe communication is a human right. We run a voice-chat consultation system so that anyone can send an SOS to a support organization even after losing their phone, and a citizen-led public free Wi-Fi project to guarantee connectivity under any circumstances.
Outreach to a population in hardship that has become harder to see — As gig work built on digital infrastructure spreads, traditional food distribution and consultation events reach fewer and fewer people. To build connections with those drifting between precarious work and precarious housing, we run Sekai Bivouac and “Welfare Uncle”.
Finding society’s questions early
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across society and hit hardest those already in vulnerable positions.
This “pandemic poverty” brought several problems to light. One of them: although the ability to communicate had become essential to living as a member of society, conventional public welfare — focused mainly on food, clothing and shelter — had not moved beyond that.
Communication should now be guaranteed as a human right, yet we remain far from that point.
Meanwhile, among those providing support, the need for digitally enabled infrastructure came into focus, and its development moved forward. Private web services for applying for public assistance (seikatsu hogo), and the sharing and analysis of support information across multiple schemes, are casting new light on the reality of people living in the city with unstable work and unstable housing — a reality that until now has been understood only intuitively.
The number of people who fall outside conventional support is growing: gig workers whose livelihoods presuppose digital infrastructure, drifting between precarious work and precarious housing in the gap between everyday life and poverty. Reaching them requires support schemes that do not yet exist.
With this in mind, we founded Toimikke to address communication poverty and outreach to a newly emerging population in hardship.
Find out more
Organization profile
Legal details, officers, partners and access
Annual reports
Plans, budgets, activity reports and accounts by fiscal year
Our work
What each of our four programmes does
FAQ
Our name, our legal status, and how Sekai Bivouac relates to us
Homelessness in Japan today (Japanese)
Background on the problem we work on