Before I talk about Rainbow, let me start with the story of one night.
It was around the time I first left my child at nursery. In the classroom, children the same age ran about and traded words. My child had not yet caught up to that.
At home, we celebrated together each time yesterday's impossible became today's possible. But the moment you place a child among a group, the measuring stick changes. No one said a word to me, yet on the walk home from pick-up there was a moment I realized: "my child is different."
That night, I sat alone and turned it over and over.
How do I support this child? Search, and all you find are generalities. In the dead of night there is no one to tell this worry to. And when tomorrow comes, I have to send them off, the same as before.
—— People living through nights like this exist all across Japan, at this very moment.
Years later, I could finally put it into words. What I truly wanted that night was someone who would find what is good and keep saying it out loud for my child. Not “they’ll catch up eventually,” not “let’s wait and see a little longer,” but someone who would meet this child as they are today and hand over their good points in words, patiently, every day— I wanted someone like that beside me.
It’s the thing a parent seems most able to do, yet finds hardest. Precisely because you face them every day, it’s the “can’ts” that burn into your eyes. Thirty minutes to get dressed again today. Couldn’t play with friends again today. Amid that pile-up, the room to catch a small good moment and say “that’s wonderful” that same day has vanished by the time night falls.
So someone has to build a system that carries that role — every single day.
This isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s strange that it doesn’t already exist. That society has no system to speak daily to a child’s strengths. That a parent carrying it all alone has no window that reaches them in the dead of night. That an older person with no one to talk to when they come home from the field goes unseen unless they raise their own hand. — These can be solved, if someone builds them in earnest.
So I’m building it.
Rainbow is a project to make “finding what’s good and keeping on saying it” the standard of society, through AI and the local community. For children, and for older people. Across generations, for everyone living through the same night.
If we wait, no one will build it.
So I will.
To give what I longed to give the self I was that night —
now, to someone living through the same night.
Rainbow Project, Founder
Chiyo
This message is only a small part of how Rainbow came to be.
My father, my daughter, and how it all connected ——
The full story is told across the 7-part note series “Stories of That Night.”
Read the note series “Stories of That Night” →
