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Paper short abstract

Ethnographic action research in Nagoya (2012-2024) rethinks youth outreach from supported youths' perspectives. With youth, the Centre questions outreach's purpose and shifts from crime-prevention referrals to "co-presence," where youth open and run a hub, self-governing beyond merit-based control.

Paper long abstract

Existing research on youth support has documented the techniques and outcomes of professional outreach. Yet in contemporary Japan, many children and young people remain in downtown public spaces while refusing institutionalisation and formal professional intervention, even as welfare services and risk-management frameworks expand. Research rarely centres youth-led practices in which young people assemble support themselves, and rarely treats outreach not only as a technique but as a question of governance, power, and participation.

This paper addresses this gap through a fourteen-year ethnographic action research study (2012–2024) of the National Child Welfare Centre, a community-based organisation in Nagoya founded and led by the author, a social worker and child welfare practitioner. The Centre engages annually with more than 2,000 young people, including runaway youth (e.g., Tōyoko Kids), youth with delinquency histories, survivors of sexual violence, and other marginalised participants. Rather than prioritising management, behavioural correction, or risk control, it welcomes participants not as “clients” or “patients” but as collaborators in making the place together, and decisions arise from shared lived experience rather than professional authority. Weekly outreach is anchored in the Nagoya Station West Plaza, where colourful costumes signal safety, invite contact, and soften stigma in public space. Participants value sustaining and running this community for themselves—a practice of community autonomy.

Drawing on long-term participant observation, field records, and reflexive analysis, the study shows that outreach becomes effective by going to where young people gather, listening to concerns and aspirations, and co-creating activities through which those aspirations take form. Participation is not made to “work” through compliance; trust grows through encounters and continued involvement, and shared self-governance gradually takes shape. Everyday interaction continually revises boundaries between supporter and supported, expertise and lived experience, and how responsibility is held.

The findings suggest that youth support is most sustainable when helper/helped distinctions are unsettled, participants are freed from the patient role imposed by institutional logics, and governance is replaced by shared responsibility, mutual presence, and collective care. Situated within Japanese social welfare and youth policy, this model offers a critical rethinking of youth outreach and social support beyond Japan.