The same question,
from both ends of the world.
I used to think school wasn’t for me. Now I run two. This is the letter I wish someone had handed my parents, twenty years ago.
Hoshino Tatsuro · Founder & Headmaster · NIJIN GLOBAL ACADEMY · NIJIN ACADEMY
When parents ask me, “Why did you start this school?” — I almost never begin with curricula or fees. I begin with two children. One I met on the other side of the world, in a village reached by an unpaved road. She was eight, and wanted to be at school that morning, but couldn’t. The other I met years later, in an ordinary classroom in Japan. He was eleven, and could be at school — but wouldn’t go.
For a long time I thought these were two problems. I was wrong. They were the same question.
Chapter 1 · 2
Two children, two hemispheres
At twenty-two I joined the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers and was sent to Guatemala for two years. A girl of eight walked an hour each way to a half-day class. One afternoon she asked, very politely, whether she’d be allowed to keep coming the next year. I had no answer. I still don’t.
Back in Japan I became a teacher, sure I’d entered the easier side of the problem. Then an eleven-year-old stopped coming. In his living room I asked what he wanted from life. He thought a long time, then said softly that he didn’t really expect anything good to happen. He was eleven.
Both were being asked to be someone they were not, in order to be allowed to learn.
Chapter 3 · 4
NIJIN ACADEMY — and a model that travels
In 2023 I opened NIJIN ACADEMY in Japan, for children not attending traditional school. We made one decision that changed everything: we did not try to fix the child. We changed the environment. Three years on, 400+ are enrolled and 1,000+ will have passed through by the time NGA opens. And every time a child felt safe being themselves, they began making others happy. That is Do Happy.
Be happy first. Do happy follows. Always in that order.
I realized we hadn’t just built a school — we’d found a model that could travel: Diversity × Co-creation. I could not keep that question inside Japan. So we built NGA: the same model, opened to children wherever they live, online, in classes of eight, with classmates from across Asia and Oceania.
Chapter 6 · 7
What I promise — and an invitation
I do not promise your child a top-ranked university or a top test score. If those are your goals, there are excellent schools for exactly that. What I promise: your child will sit beside children from countries they’ve never visited, and be heard every week. They will discover that the version of themselves they were quietly told to hide is the version the world needed all along.
Rigorous academics, yes. Academics as the measure of a person, no.
NGA has no entrance exam, no selection, no one-shot April deadline. What it has is a single conversation, every weekday, in your language, in your time zone. In our admissions language: you don’t apply to NGA. We apply to each other.
If you’ve read this far, I’d love to meet you. Welcome.
Talk to the Founder.
A monthly online “Talk to the Founder” session, in English and Japanese, for families considering NGA. No pitch. No pressure. Just a conversation.