This text is my personal reflection on the announcement that the Wikimedia ESEAP Strategy Summit 2027 will be held in Osaka. I would like to clarify that these are not the official views or opinions of the Wikimedians of Japan User Group, to which I belong, nor of the Wikimedia Foundation or any other Wikimedia-related organizations.
Until I joined the Wikimedians of Japan User Group in 2023 and came to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia for the ESEAP Conference in 2024, I had little interest in the Wikimedia community or global trends. While it’s true I started contributing to Wikipedia in 2007 (making me quite a veteran now), and gained administrator privileges in 2010, I still believe that these were the result of a series of coincidences.
Given this background, when I landed at Kota Kinabalu International Airport in May 2024, I spoke with the Organization Team members who greeted me there and with the other participants on the way to the hotel where the event was being held. Or rather, it might be more accurate to say that I was overwhelmed by the shower of English and could barely say anything myself.
Even amidst all that, I was invited by Eugene Ormandy, who is fluent in English, and Yuriko Kadokura, who is very energetic, to talk with various people. However, because I’m not good at opening up to people I’ve just met, I feel like I wasn’t able to communicate effectively.
Perhaps it was the karaoke session on the second day of the conference that liberated me from my inner turmoil. Having acquired the rather arrogant belief that “Japanese anime songs are universally appealing,” I chose one and sang it, and I felt like something inside me was released.
After participating in subsequent Wikimania events, including Wikimania in Katowice, Poland, the ESEAP Strategy Summit in Manila, Philippines in 2025, and Wikimania in Nairobi, Kenya, I began to question whether the Japanese Wikimedia community should continue as it is.
Is simply writing articles truly the only way to contribute to Wikipedia? Will the Wikimedia platform even continue to exist? Is there really no future where leaving a mark on Wikimedia, even if it doesn’t go as far as restricting access, becomes a disadvantage in life in Japan? These are questions I began to consider after learning about the current situation surrounding Wikimedia around the world.
With these things in mind, in February 2025, I asked Alan from Wikimedia Deutschland and Ivonne from the Wikimedia Foundation staff to hold a mini-conference within the Open Source Conference, and in December 2025, I invited staff from ESEAP Hub and members from Wikimedia Korea to hold the West-Japan Wikimedia Conference.
Through these steps, we were able to announce at the final day of the ESEAP Conference 2026 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, that we would be holding the ESEAP Summit 2027 in Osaka in May 2027.
This wasn’t something I wanted to do alone. I wanted to hold an international conference in Japan in some form (partly because I was encouraged in various ways by everyone at ESEAP), and I would like to add that I spent a fair amount of time discussing this with the user group members, holding several meetings, and making the decision together with them. That’s why two other user group members and I joined as the Core Organizing Team, and we’ve also received expressions of cooperation from Wikimedians both inside and outside the user group.
While it has been decided that the conference will differ from the ESEAP Conference in that it will focus more on strategic discussions, nothing else has been decided. We will not be following the program of the Manila Summit two years ago, and instead, we would like to decide on a format that will allow more Japanese Wikimedians to participate.
In any case, first and foremost, we want to share this decision with the people of Japan and go through the process of building it together.
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