Our Work

Toimikke runs four programmes along two axes: communication poverty, and outreach to a population in hardship that has become harder to see.

Why outreach and communication support are needed

The pandemic response brought into view people in socially isolated hardship for whom a phone functions as a social ID — and who are also the most likely to lose it. Public and private consultation services are built around the telephone as the point of entry, so losing a number means losing access. Internet access is just as unstable.

At the same time, more and more people drift through the city in precarious work and precarious housing: people who cannot or will not come to soup kitchens and outdoor consultation events, and who are not found by simple night patrols. Cheap, simple accommodation such as internet cafés, and the rise of day-labour apps, have lowered the barrier to getting through “today” alone — and, paradoxically, raised the barrier to saying you are in trouble.

Methods for finding and resolving these situations are urgently needed.

• Background: Homelessness in Japan today, in one minute

Current programmes

Sekai Bivouac

An emergency support network for people who have lost their housing and their money and can no longer move: one night's stay, and a route to support the next day. Citizens and ICT together build places of refuge in the city.

"Welfare Uncle"

Outreach that delivers information as short videos on TikTok, YouTube, X and Instagram, to people whom support information never reaches.

Voice-chat consultation system

A way to call a support organization free of charge from a browser, with one tap, even after losing your phone. It removes the mismatch caused by consultation desks being built around telephones.

Citizen-led public free Wi-Fi

A project in which citizens install the free Wi-Fi that becomes a last lifeline when a phone line is cut off.

Past programmes

The following two programmes were merged into Sekai Bivouac in FY2024. With the entry point for consultations consolidated into Sekai Bivouac, the three programmes had come to overlap. Where someone we reach has a need for them, we still lend bicycles and deliver food to accommodation case by case.

Merged into Sekai Bivouac

January 2022 – March 2024

Free bicycle lending for food-delivery workers

We started this programme having noticed that people making a living through food delivery during the pandemic were relatively likely to fall into hardship. Its full name was the "free bicycle lending project for food-delivery workers who have lost their housing". It began in January 2022, at almost the same time as Toimikke itself started as a voluntary group.

For these workers, a bicycle is the tool of the trade itself. We provided bicycles free of charge to people continuing food-delivery work while homeless, and used that as an entry point to ongoing support. It was also an outreach method for meeting a group that conventional support reaches poorly.

The programme was the subject of a Fuji TV documentary, The Non-Fiction: "Tokyo Delivery Story — Smartphones, Bicycles and Homelessness" (broadcast 9 October 2022).

• Programme page (Fuji TV, Japanese)
• Read the merger announcement and background (Japanese)

Merged into Sekai Bivouac

January 2023 – March 2024

Night Save Point

For people staying in internet cafés, net rooms and private video booths, this programme delivered food to where they were staying, held luggage they could not carry, and arranged online consultations with lawyers and doctors. Twice a month we ran a regular consultation session in a rented space near a station, and did direct outreach from individual contacts.

Records of the work are in the Night Save Point article archive (Japanese).