[City Promotion Award 2026 Gold Award] Easing a Mother's Chores: A Middle Schooler's 'Challenge for One' Becomes Regional Pride

An initiative by a junior high school student living in Moka City, Tochigi Prefecture, born from the 'Japan Wagamama Awards 2025', a practical program for teens hosted by IRODORI Inc. (Headquarters: Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Takahiro Yatsu), has won the Gold Award at the 'City Promotion Awards' (Organizer: City Promotion Award Executive Committee; Secretariat: Japan Management Association). This initiative was highly evaluated as a logic model that connects the solving of a single person's immediate problem to the improvement of youth self-efficacy, leading to the resolution of social issues and the creation of regional value. It garnered attention as a new case of co-creative city promotion bridging government, education, and residents. [Overview of the Award] The 'City Promotion Award 2025', managed by the Japan Management Association (Headquarters: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; Chairman: Takehisa Takahara), honors and supports local governments and organizations engaged in accurate city promotion that leads to the 'happiness' of people connected to the region. Moka City won the Gold Award in this competition. 'The commitment to achieving results that lead to regional pride—such as winning the Global AI Hackathon Final Showcase & Awards hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US—and the logic model connecting this to improving the self-esteem of young people are extremely clear.' Reference: https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000323.000078820.html [The App 'ChoCook': Starting from 'Thoughts of Mother' and Involving the Region and the World] 'ChoCook', developed by a (then) 3rd-year junior high school student living in Moka City, is a food loss reduction app that utilizes AI to read ingredient information from receipts and suggests recipes that can be made with the food available at home. This project was inspired by a close-to-home awareness of the problem: 'I want to reduce the burden of household chores on my busy mother.' During development, the student organized and verified the issues from a user's perspective, starting from specific, concrete problems in daily life. Furthermore, alongside implementing features utilizing AI and OCR (Optical Character Recognition), the student focused on ease of use (text truncated at source).