Reopening Japan's classic texts,
aligned to today's classroom.

Currently 158 annotated lessons across Japanese literature, history, civics, science, math, English (as L2), and home economics — spanning material from the 8th century (Man'yōshū, Kojiki) to postwar Japan (1946 Constitution).

A starting point. Lesson pages have the Japanese original text, modern-Japanese glossing, contextual notes (in Japanese), discussion questions, and links to printable worksheets. All lesson pages are written in Japanese — they're designed for a Japanese-speaking learner — but the works themselves may be familiar.

• Japanese-language educators outside Japan who want primary source material with modern annotations and discussion questions.
• JET program participants and ALTs looking for context on what their Japanese counterparts are teaching.
• Comparative literature researchers exploring the relationship between Japanese classical texts and their place in the modern curriculum.
• Heritage learners reconnecting with Japanese literary canon through annotated public-domain texts.
• Anyone curious about how a country re-presents its own literature to the next generation.

Each lesson takes a public-domain Japanese text — typically from the Aozora Bunko digital archive, or pre-1928 Meiji/Taisho-era state textbooks — and adds:

• Modern kana orthography and furigana (reading aids)
• A glossary of archaic words, allusions, and proper nouns
• A modern-Japanese translation when the original is classical
• Discussion questions mapped to the current Course of Study
• A teacher's lesson plan (objectives, materials, two-period flow)
• AI-generated illustrations as scroll-following backgrounds
• Cross-references to the curriculum code (e.g. 古典 B(2)) and related works

All editorial additions are released under CC BY 4.0; the original texts remain in the public domain. The site itself is open source — see the license page for details.

The verb hiraku (ひらく / 開く) means "to open" — a book, a door, a flower, a possibility. The project name pairs the idea of re-opening texts that have already been closed by the passage of time, with the gesture of opening up education itself: free, modifiable, redistributable.

The original codename is project_procopios, after Procopius of Caesarea (c. 500–565 CE), the Byzantine historian who insisted on writing down the things he had seen. The full Japanese version of this site is at hiraku-5cb.pages.dev/.

Hiraku is built with Astro, deployed on Cloudflare Pages, and licensed under CC BY-SA. Pull requests, issue reports, and new lesson contributions are all welcome.