In 2010, I was a graduate student thinking hard about how to tackle environmental problems, which was something I had been thinking about since I was a child.

I decided to travel around the world to see with my own eyes what environmental problems were affecting the world, rather than just relying on information from books, the TV and the Internet.Then I saw that litter was a significant threat to the environment at every place I traveled to. I also thought of how I might be able to eliminate litter from the world -- through a cheap technological solution. When I came back to Japan, I teamed up with my fellow graduate school friends to develop Pirika, the anti-litter smartphone app. "Pirika" means clean in the Ainu language.

On May 15, 2011, the smartphone app Pirika was launched, having been developed by Naoya Takahashi, now our Director, and the rest of the development team. During the first month after launch, only 100 pieces of litter were picked up. Even so, I was moved by the fact that people I did not know at all were picking up litter using the app.

I moved out of my then house to save on rent, and traveled between Tokyo and Kyoto in search of investors. We continued to make improvements to Pirika, and the amount of litter picked up through the app gradually increased.

We incorporated Pirika, Inc. in November 2011. In order to establish Pirika, I needed my postal address. That was how I ended my homeless life.

When the cumulative number of litter pieces picked up through Pirika reached 3 million in 2014, we began to have doubts about our mission. We started asking ourselves whether Pirika was actually contributing to litter reduction over the long run.
We realized that we did not have an answer to that question. There were no reliable quantitative litter data, nor established methods of litter research.

We believed that there was no point in sacrificing ourselves to try to solve the litter problem when our approach might not be effective.We also did not want our approach to be proven to be ineffective by someone else.
That is when we decided to embark on a new mission--to create a standard for litter research.

Despite our conviction, we struggled to develop a sustainable and scalable litter research method. The downside of relying on manpower was not only the cost and time involved, but also the inconsistency and human error that arose in conducting research.

One day, Naoya had a thought -- What if we recorded on video litter on streets and used the latest machine learning technology to analyze the litter.He took this inspiration to develop a program on his own. What's left is to train the system with human-checked data, which requires manpower and determination. Once the program was developed, we first hired 20 people to categorize litter captured on videos, in order to teach the program’s artificial intelligence.

We called the program Takanome, which means hawk eye. Immediately after we launched the program, we began to receive requests for our Takanome-based services from governments. We thus began our mission to gather information necessary to identify the root cause of litter.

The cumulative number of litter pieces picked up through Pirika has exceeded 100 million. Our research business is expanding, and our revenue and profit are growing.However, we have not solved a single environmental problem.Litter continues to grow at an alarming rate, and we still do not have a complete picture of how bad the problem is.And there are many other environmental problems that need to be tackled.

We remain passionate about our mission, just as we were when we first started out.Humanities have ever got over many crises such as pandemic, natural disaster, world war...We are working hard to do our part in helping humanity overcome what we believe is a growing environmental crisis.

We aim to overcome every environmental problem with the power of science and technology.

Pirika's challenge has just started.