Rena Kawasaki is the 20-year-old founder of Earth Guardians Japan, an organisation she started when she was just 14 years old. Through her work, she ensures that young people are connected to public officials through online platforms, and that their thoughts and concerns are heard. What started as a small initiative mainly in her local community, soon grew to include more communities in Japan. While civic space is open in Japan, conservative ideas about young people and women mean that their contributions were largely ignored in the political sphere. Her work has earned her recognition from the International Children’s Peace Prize in 2022, and the Young Activist Summit(YAS) in 2025. She is currently pursuing her undergraduate studies in the United States.
Here Kawasaki shares how she challenged the status quo and made civic space more accommodating for Japanese youth.
I wanted to create a space where youth in Japan could feel empowered to voice their own opinions.
We’re unfortunately a society where the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, and it’s not really encouraged for young people, especially women, to speak out. So I wanted to create a space where people weren’t shamed for trying to improve their communities. Around the same time I heard that a lot of my friends, in different schools in Japan, were facing criticism from their own teachers and parents for trying to change some things in their school. I wanted to create a place in a community where people, especially young people, felt empowered to do that together.
After moderating a panel I did as an intern at an NGO called EarthX, I emailed that group of activists who happened to be on the board for Earth Guardians and found out if I could make a chapter in Japan. And that’s how I started Earth Guardian Japan at the age of 14.
Rena Kawasaki is photographed with friends on April 13, 2026 in New Haven, CT.
We were an incredibly small organization.
I started it with my friend Tanishka, it really started from just our school and we had a couple of members who were interested. My school had kindergarten to 12th grade in one school. We had a lot of members who were in elementary and middle school. It all started with small things where we would do monthly meetings, and everyone would gather to talk about issues and what we wanted to change in the school. Then we started slowly branching out to larger things like garbage cleanups and going to UN conferences to get our voices heard. It grew into doing more events that engaged larger communities that were around us, which then started the Let’s Talk to a Politician project. This was one of my passion projects. When I started high school, we had a national election in Japan; a lot of the time, young people in Japan feel as though they are disregarded in political spaces, so they don’t engage. A lot of people are disinterested, feeling like these problems are for someone else to fix.
I wanted to start a movement where youth… spread peaceful dialogue between people who might not see eye-to-eye.
I never thought that I would have the label of activist for this long.
However, I always was the type of kid who really cared about social issues. I felt as though I was the kind of person to stick out, and I also experienced bullying in my life as well. So I felt I wanted to be someone who makes sure people feel okay. For example, when I was really, really small, in elementary school my first ever action was to ask my art teacher whether we could make things to sell at the school fair to donate to camps for children in war zones. And that’s how my activism journey started.
My activism grew in 2020, when COVID started and I couldn’t go to school for around a year (because of the stay-at-home mandates). I felt that I was in a really privileged position when I saw so many people struggling on the news. This was around the time when a lot of political corruption in Japan came to light, there was a lot of negative news about politicians using their power to make it seem as though they were above the COVID mandates. I didn’t like the fact that this was causing a lot of division in the community I was living in, so I wanted to do something. That was when my art teacher, the same one from grade four, reached out and told me about a video competition for climate which she thought I could take part in.
Rena Kawasaki is photographed on April 13, 2026. Rena is the founder of Earth Guardians Japan. Through her work, she ensures that young people are connected to public officials through online platforms, and that their thoughts and concerns are heard.
It was done by an NGO called EarthX. I made a video and talked about corporations and greenwashing — because that was something that I was really passionate about debunking. The video didn’t really do well at all, but that led me to discover EarthX’s website and where they were looking for interns. That allowed me to start in this climate activist space, by being fortunate enough to be an online intern for EarthX. I was able to moderate a panel of activists that were mostly coming from Native American backgrounds from the organization, Earth Guardians. There I learned that there were people that were 18, 20 who were really passionate about activism and were fighting large corporations and governments in order to make sure that their communities were safe.
Japan had a prevalent history of violent youth activism in the 80’s.
I wanted to start a movement where youth were the ones trying to spread peaceful dialogue between people who might not see eye-to-eye. So I gathered a team that may be interested. We started messaging our local politicians directly to see if they were up to joining a Zoom call with us, a large group of our friends, and people from local middle and high schools. This was to start a conversation and destigmatise politics for young people, especially for people who don’t have voting rights yet.
It began as a series of monthly Zoom meetings with different politicians from different political parties. Unlike the US, Japan has an incredibly large number of political parties, so it was important to us that we have diverse opinions. All of these Zoom meetings were facilitated by both middle and high schoolers. We began by having normal conversations about what kinds of movies the politicians watch, while we also ventured into larger topics within communities. We made sure that the youth could, even if their opinions weren’t fully formed, feel they were safe enough to express themselves to these leaders. It turned out to be a large success. Some politicians even changed their campaign planning because of it — where they used to just go to nursing homes or places where older people gathered. They started realizing that they were disregarding youth, because they felt like they didn’t have anything to say. But faced with a Zoom room full of these youth who had really vibrant and strong opinions about how they wanted their community to look, they really seemed shocked and somewhat disappointed that they didn’t realize this sooner.
We were also recognized by the Ministry of Environment for our work mobilizing youth and making sure that these youth had funding for different communities. We started off as a very local organization, but then a lot of people found out about us through my media engagements and our website and we started having members from more places. I also co-founded a youth summit called U18 Summit, which brought together youth who were already doing a lot of work with their own communities and brought them all together for a two-day camp where they learned about leadership.
Being recognized by the Young Activist Summit was something that was a new starting point for me.
Rena Kawasaki photographed on April 13, 2026 in New Haven, CT.
The last time I got international recognition for my work, I felt as though I wasn’t worthy enough or didn’t have enough experience or knowledge to be speaking up about the issues. I felt a lot of shame in leaving behind a community to pursue my studies outside of my country. I also felt as though I was proving to the people that were hating online that I didn’t love my country enough. But I think that between the International Children’s Peace Prize and the Young Activist Summit, I really reflected on feelings of national pride and feeling as though I can love my home and I want it to become better.
I am so lucky that the YAS team wanted to recognize my efforts. Them recognizing my work and especially my self-discovery journey of going through online backlash has been important. When I won the Children’s Prize, my acceptance speech called on politicians to behave and take action to make youth in Japan proud of their country. This was in reference to videos circulating where decision-makers were openly sleeping during parliament meetings. People took my speech to be anti national pride and I received backlash. However I realised I could use this traumatic experience to the best of my ability as a shield. The recognition at that point in my life was life-changing, and made me feel that this is my second chance. How can I do it right by recognizing my weaknesses and my experience as an activist in Japan without feeling shameful that I was pointing out the weak points in the country that I love so much.
It’s really been affirming for me having the YAS community back me up, while I was super, super nervous to speak again on such a large platform. It was just very life-changing for me.
This article, as narrated to Gugulethu Mhlungu, has been slightly edited for clarity.
The 2025-2026 In My Own Words series is part of Global Citizen’s grant-funded content.