How Municipalities Can Finally Make MyNumber APIs Work — A Founder’s Roadmap

どうも〜おかむーです！

• Municipalities struggle to integrate My Number / マイナポータル APIs into citizen services (see Cabinet Office report Apr 24, 2025).
• I grew up in a family yakitori shop, led a university startup circle, shipped consumer apps at Kayac and later founded no plan inc. and NoGears — I’ve seen what community + tech can do.
• Proposal: a shared, open-source "Municipal API Hub" + community-driven product play (pilots, low-code connectors, local content automation) to unlock digital services fast.

Conclusion

Local governments can stop treating APIs as a technical burden and start treating them as public infrastructure. Build a shared, open-source Municipal API Hub (cloud-hosted connectors + low-code citizen service templates), run pilot programs with community-backed onboarding (influencers, creators, local businesses), and measure everything via an independent analytics function — the kind of approach I’ve used with ReCone, GawainAI, and my open policy repo on GitHub.

When the Cabinet Office’s April 24, 2025 report on マイナポータル APIs highlights fragmented adoption and integration hurdles, that’s not a tech problem only — it’s a product, people, and governance problem. Let’s fix all three together.

Body — future-back thinking

Imagine five years from now: every town hall publishes useful services (child allowances, medical registration, permits) as easy-to-use web or mobile flows that talk securely to My Number via well-maintained connectors. Citizens sign up once and can complete tasks in minutes. That’s the vision.

Why this hasn’t happened yet is clear in the Cabinet Office paper “マイナポータルAPIの現状と課題” (Apr 24, 2025) and the official provider list on myna.go.jp — many APIs exist, but municipalities lack people, product design, and reusable code. I know this pattern well.

I grew up in my parents’ yakitori shop “ほどほど” — helping at five taught me to listen to diverse people and make services humans actually use. At university I ran the P&D circle and learned to motivate unpaid teams to ship real products. At Kayac I shipped iOS and backend work fast; later as a founder (no plan inc., 2019) I learned the hard finance lesson of keeping control by taking debt financing. I also built ReCone to bring mainstream creators into Web3, and GawainAI to automate promotional short videos — both projects are about wrapping complex tech in delightful UX so ordinary people adopt it.

So here’s the playbook (concrete):

1) Municipal API Hub (open-source core)

- Provide production-ready connectors for マイナポータル APIs (private delivery API, medical insurance retrieval, etc.) referenced in the Cabinet Office report.

- Ship Dockerized services, hosted by prefectures or a shared regional cloud, with clear SLAs and a subscription model.

2) Low-code citizen service templates

- Prebuilt flows for common tasks (child allowance, residency, health insurance). Designers and engineers can customize without deep backend work.

3) Community onboarding via creative campaigns

- Use approaches from ReCone and GawainAI: enlist local creators to produce short vertical videos explaining how to use services; reward early adopters with local perks. This reduces friction far faster than dry manuals.

4) Measurement layer — "Analysis Ministry" idea

- Publish metrics openly (completion rates, time saved) and iterate. I’ve advocated open policy design on my GitHub repo "election" — same transparency model applies here.

5) Funding & staffing

- Start with pilot debt or pooled prefectural budgets; use startup secondments (grow-your-own approach I used while building teams) to bring engineering skills into municipalities.

Summary

The Cabinet Office report (Apr 24, 2025) makes it obvious: the tech exists but adoption is fragmented. By combining a shared API hub, low-code templates, creator-driven onboarding, and an open analytics layer, municipalities can deliver real digital public services quickly and affordably.

おかむーから一言

I’ve seen small bets turn into things people love — from lining up at Apple Stores to a friend meeting their partner through my simple app. Local government digital services can be just as lovable if we design for people, not for seals on PDFs. Tech can do this — let’s build it together!