What is Team Mirai?

A political party's manifesto (its list of campaign promises) is usually written by the party and presented to voters. There are few places where voters can say, "please change this part". Team Mirai is a Japanese political party that is trying to make this flow go both ways, using AI and internet tools.

In short

Team Mirai ("mirai" means "future" in Japanese) is a political party founded on May 8, 2025 by Takahiro Anno, an AI engineer and science fiction writer who ran in the 2024 election for Governor of Tokyo. At the press conference announcing the party, Anno spoke of a goal of, in effect, using technology to build a Japan that leaves no one behind [1].

The party practices "digital democracy", which uses technology to widen participation in politics. Its manifesto presents Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl's Plurality (the idea of using technology to support collaboration across differences) as an important guideline for digital democracy [2].

For example

The "interactive policy platform" (2025 House of Councillors election). This system was launched on May 16, 2025. An AI interviews a voter and sends a proposed change to the manifesto to GitHub (a service where changes to documents can be recorded and proposed). The party received 8,559 policy proposals. A book on broad listening (listening widely to many voices and grasping the whole picture) written by practitioners in Japan sums up that in the governor's election, 104 change proposals had come in directly on GitHub, so making "dialogue" the entry point increased the number about 80 times [3].

Questions in parliament (2026). In the Internal Affairs and Communications Committee of the House of Councillors on May 21, 2026, Anno asked questions based on 264 voices of experts and people directly affected (about 47 hours in total), gathered through AI interviews on "Mirai Gikai" (みらい議会) [4].

In more detail

Born from the governor's election

In the 2024 governor's election, Anno's campaign ran three systems at once: an AI avatar (a digital double) called "AI-Anno", Talk to the City, which uses AI to organize many voices, and improving the manifesto on GitHub. Anno received about 150,000 votes and finished fifth [3][1].

At the press conference founding the party, Anno described his 154,638 votes as coming from "1%" of Tokyo's 14 million residents, and said he would use this "1%" of support as the basis for building a national political party [1]. This "1%" was Anno's way of putting it relative to Tokyo's population; his share of the vote in the election was 2.3% [9]. According to Japanese Wikipedia, many of the party's candidates in the House of Councillors election were members who had gathered to support Anno in the governor's election [5]. This is covered in the article on Takahiro Anno's 2024 Tokyo campaign.

Becoming a national party

In the election for the House of Councillors (a chamber of Japan's parliament) on July 20, 2025, the party won 1 seat (Anno) in the proportional-representation vote. Its share of the vote was about 2.6%, which met the legal requirements to count as a "political party" [3][5].

With political party grants from the national government, it set up a "Nagatacho engineering team" (Nagatacho is the district of Tokyo where the national parliament stands). It has launched "Mirai Marumie Seiji Shikin" (みらい まる見え政治資金, October 2, 2025), which lets anyone see how political funds flow, and "Mirai Gikai" (October 16, 2025), which explains bills in plain language [6].

In the 51st election for the House of Representatives (the other chamber of parliament) on February 8, 2026, it received 3,813,749 proportional-representation votes (6.66% of the vote), and 11 of its candidates were elected [7]. That brought the number of its members of parliament, including Anno, to 12. The party reports that in half a year it took part in more than 150 rounds of questioning in parliament [8].

A cycle of "listening, refining, and communicating"

The manifesto for the governor's election contained the idea of turning quickly through a cycle: "listening" to voters' voices, "refining" policies and "communicating" them. The book on broad listening explains that this forms the core of the party's systems [9].

At the party's first convention on July 18, 2026, about 1,100 people used the party's app to take part in votes by smartphone. The party presents Anno's view that the aim of digital democracy is not to leave political decisions to AI, but to use AI's help to increase the number of people who take part, connect the voices that come out to policy, and make it possible to check what happened afterward [10].

Reworking the systems

The "interactive policy platform" in the House of Councillors election also ran into problems: dozens of proposals clashed over the same passage, people who made proposals did not feel they had been heard, and GitHub's comment sections turned rough [3].

So for the 2026 House of Representatives election, the party changed it to a "platform where your voice is heard". It added a screen where people can select text in the manifesto to start a question or proposal, a chat in which the AI offers choices, automatic classification of proposals and grouping of similar ones, and an administration screen for staff [11]. According to an article in the magazine Noema, in the House of Representatives election the party's chatbot received more than 38,000 questions and more than 6,000 proposals. It was also said to have helped identify a group of voters skeptical of cutting the consumption tax [12].

The link with DD2030

In January 2025, Anno started an open-source community (open source means publishing in a form anyone can use and improve), "Digital Democracy 2030 (DD2030)", with Ken Suzuki and others. But to maintain political neutrality, he stepped down from its governing role (the board) on May 7, 2025. Team Mirai made a copy of DD2030's Kouchou AI, added features for elections, and contributed those improvements back to the original project [13].

What is debated

• Is Plurality just a signboard? A citizen's note.com article (October 2025) criticizes the party's Plurality as all ideas, with no description of the institutions that would support it. It also argues that the change proposals gathered for the manifesto effectively ended up unused, and that the approach makes division harder to see rather than overcoming it. The article does, however, include claims that have not been verified [14]. For reference, the party's policy repository has received 9,686 change proposals (pull requests) in total, of which 194 have been merged. Updates to the manifesto on GitHub stopped on July 26, 2025 [15][16].
• Will supporters become dogmatic? Kazuki Ichida, while valuing the book PLURALITY, questions its treatment of Japan's QC activities (workplace quality-improvement activities) as an unqualified success. Ichida then says the same concern applies to people in Japan who sympathize with the book, giving change proposals to the party's policy repository as an example [17].
• Who draws the line on what gets asked? Noema (June 2026) points out that the code of the party's chatbot contains "NG words" (banned words), and that together with the constraints of the underlying AI (Claude), the range of political conversation may be decided in places that are hard to see. At the same time, it credits the party's tools as democratic in that they did not try to manufacture consensus and left judgment to the party and voters [12].
• The makeup of its support. In an interview with the Asahi Shimbun (May 2026), the philosopher Hiroki Azuma said that the party's advance in the House of Representatives election came from its becoming a home for voters after the opposition parties fell apart on their own, and from the hopes of younger generations, and that its main supporters are wealthy people and tech businesspeople. In this view, the party carries hope and, at the same time, the limits of an elite [18].
• Team Mirai is not the same as Kouchou AI. Kouchou AI and Idobata are open-source projects of DD2030, not the party's property [3]. In February 2026, Shinta Nakayama, the lead author of the book on broad listening, wrote that the party no longer uses either Talk to the City or Kouchou AI [19].

Where it fits in Plurality

Chapter 5-4 of Plurality, "Augmented Deliberation", cites Anno's campaign in the 2024 governor's election, before the party was founded, as an example of bringing broad listening into elections [20]. The party's name itself does not appear in the book.

Team Mirai can be read as an extension of that: an attempt to build what the book calls augmented deliberation (efforts to deepen discussion with technology) into how a party is run. Smartphone voting at the party convention and the use of AI interviews in parliamentary questions overlap with the concerns of ⿻ Voting and adaptive administration. The book, however, does not discuss them directly.

The overall picture of how the book has been received in Japan is given in the article on the Plurality movement in Japan.

Further reading

1. Noema, "Democracy Needs Friction To Function" (English, article) — https://www.noemamag.com/democracy-needs-friction-to-function
2. Broad Listening, chapter 6, sections 1 "Team Mirai's Efforts in the 2025 House of Councillors Election" and 2 "Team Mirai Initiatives in the 2026 House of Representatives Election" (Japanese and English, book) — https://broadlisteningbook.com/
3. Wikipedia (Japanese), "チームみらい" (Team Mirai) (in Japanese, encyclopedia) — https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/チームみらい
4. Full transcript of the press conference founding the party (2025-05-08, in Japanese, article) — https://note.com/takahiroanno/n/nebe958c4651c
5. Report on the results of the 51st House of Representatives election (in Japanese, party article) — https://note.com/team_mirai_jp/n/n4a15f23f129d
6. Hirokazu Nishio, insights from the interactive policy platform (in Japanese, article) — https://note.com/nishiohirokazu/n/nb35e8d526fd4

Sources

1. Takahiro Anno, full transcript of the press conference founding the party (2025-05-08, in Japanese) — https://note.com/takahiroanno/n/nebe958c4651c
2. Team Mirai manifesto, "ステップ1 デジタル民主主義" (Step 1: Digital democracy) (in Japanese) — https://github.com/team-mirai/policy
3. Broad Listening, chapter 6, section 1 "Team Mirai's Efforts in the 2025 House of Councillors Election" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/06_01_team_mirai.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
4. Team Mirai, record of the House of Councillors Internal Affairs and Communications Committee (2026-05-21, in Japanese) — https://note.com/team_mirai_log/n/n3c57f6729185
5. Wikipedia (Japanese), "チームみらい" (Team Mirai) — https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/チームみらい ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
6. Team Mirai official website (in Japanese) — https://team-mir.ai/
7. Team Mirai, report on the results of the 51st House of Representatives election (in Japanese) — https://note.com/team_mirai_jp/n/n4a15f23f129d
8. Team Mirai, record of its first half year in parliament (2026-08, in Japanese) — https://note.com/team_mirai_jp/n/nb07827d2292d
9. Broad Listening, chapter 4, section 1 "Takahiro Anno's Initiatives in the 2024 Tokyo Governor Election" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/04_01_takahiro_anno_initiatives.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
10. Team Mirai, on smartphone voting at its first party convention (in Japanese) — https://note.com/team_mirai_jp/n/n2092f0dc600d
11. Broad Listening, chapter 6, section 2 "Team Mirai Initiatives in the 2026 House of Representatives Election" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/06_02_team_mirai_2026_house_of_representatives_election.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
12. Noema, "Democracy Needs Friction To Function" (2026-06-10) — https://www.noemamag.com/democracy-needs-friction-to-function
13. Broad Listening, "Development Work on 広聴AI (Kouchou AI, Broad Listening AI) by DD2030" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/10_00_dd2030_kocho_ai_development.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
14. A citizen's note.com article (2025-10, free portion, in Japanese) — https://note.com/ippanjin_2025/n/n299555fb4908
15. List of team-mirai's GitHub repositories — https://github.com/team-mirai/policy
16. README of team-mirai/policy (in Japanese) — https://github.com/team-mirai/policy
17. Kazuki Ichida, note.com article (in Japanese) — https://note.com/ichi_twnovel/n/n1a945d0925da
18. Asahi Shimbun, interview with Hiroki Azuma (2026-05-21, free portion, in Japanese) — https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASV5N2691V5NUPQJ004M.html
19. Shinta Nakayama, post on X (2026-02-07, in Japanese) — https://x.com/tokoroten/status/2020004238718570604
20. Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/ ［CC0］