Minase first encountered the metaverse in early 2022. He had just entered the Graduate School of Technology Management and was thinking about what research topic to pursue. He was keeping an eye on a variety of cutting-edge technologies, but he found himself most intrigued by the metaverse, which was showing signs of a global boom. He has always been a gadget enthusiast and already owned a VR headset. “I didn’t think too much about it when I started. I just thought I would give it a try,” he recalls.

Minase donned his VR headset and started to go deeper and deeper into virtual spaces. He said he was immediately captivated by the world he experienced there. "I would run around with other users and look at beautiful scenery. I was both surprised and impressed by the ability to share experiences as if you were really there,” he explains. Minase became so enamored with the metaverse that sometimes he would even spend 12 hours a day in the virtual world. The metaverse is a place where numerous people participate in activities using anonymous avatars. He became friends and interacted with people from many different backgrounds, including fellow students, of course, but also business owners, company employees, and people with disabilities. “I found I could get to know people—people I would not normally have contact with in the real world—without any preconceived notions. It was extremely refreshing and enjoyable,” says Minase.

Minase came to realize the appeal and potential of the metaverse so keenly that a desire to "try something on his own" welled up inside of him. The first thing he did was become the administrator for a community called Yuzu Club— a place where the people who gather can test a wide range of projects and events in the metaverse. “We got bored of just playing around, so we started doing many other activities like radio broadcasts and school trips in the metaverse. The advantage of the metaverse is that it costs very little to do something as long as we do it by ourselves, so we adopted the mentality of ‘let’s just do it and see what happens,’ and we tried our hand at tackling many different interesting challenges,” he explains.

As the community continued to grow steadily, Minase began to think that the members should not only do events but also work on projects that only they could do because of who they were. This led to the establishment of the Metaverse Support Program for Truant Students, an idea that came to him after an encounter with a girl in the metaverse. “There was a girl in the metaverse who I happened to become friends with, and when I talked to her, she told me she was not going to school. She told me that she ended up in the metaverse because she didn’t want to go to school but she still wanted someone to talk to,” explains Minase. Later on, as the girl began to interact with Minase and his friends in the metaverse, a major change occurred. “Several months after I met her, she told me that she was going back to school. She told me that she felt like going back to school because she had a found a place where she could be herself in the metaverse and because of the emotional support it provided her. And she actually ended up going back.” This experience reaffirmed Minase’s belief in the potential of the metaverse, and he immediately took steps to implement the support program. First, he approached the Social Welfare Council in Hiroshima City, where he is from, and after making persistent efforts to persuade them, he was able to obtain sponsorship and subsidies. To ensure the quality of the program, Professor Tatsuya Sato of the College of Comprehensive Psychology at Ritsumeikan University joined the program as an expert advisor. Other members included a clinical psychologist, a licensed psychologist, a school counselor, a school teacher, and a lawyer who were among the people friends he had made in the metaverse, and together, they formed a solid framework to provide support to truant students. “If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right,” says Minase emphatically.

The program was launched in late September 2022, and three high school students living in Hiroshima City joined. Under the supervision of experts, a wide variety of programs were held over an eight-day period, and well-known metaverse users were invited to give lectures. The girl who inspired the project, a former truant herself, also participated as a lecturer. A key point about this project is that participants were lent VR headsets free of charge. On the last day of the program, all participants commented on how happy they were to have participated in the program, saying such things as “I would like to come back”, “I had a lot of fun” , and “I didn’t want the program to end.” Minase adds: “I have heard that two of the three participants have already returned to school.” Reflecting on the positive outcomes of this program, he continues: “We don’t think that getting children to go back to school is the only right answer. In the end, it is up to the individual to decide how they want to live their lives. I believe it is our mission to create a place where these students can think about their lives.” This program to create a new place that is neither school nor home where people can be accepted for who they are took full advantage of the strengths of metaverse, where people of all walks of life can come and share their experiences.

Having fun while tackling the challenge of setting up a business that will have social impact