Gakken & MysticLand: Where Two Worlds Meet
The two companies have had two very different journeys, but ended up arriving at the same idea. Here is a peek into their journeys and the meeting point.
Gakken — Eighty Years of Stability
Gakken isn't a program built around a single idea. It's one of Japan's largest education groups — founded in 1946 on a simple conviction from its founder, Hideto Furuoka: that a country rebuilds through its children's education, not around it. Eighty years later, that conviction has grown into more than 110 group companies, close to 29,000 employees, and a network of over 18,000 learning centers across Japan reaching hundreds of thousands of students today — alongside publishing, teacher training, and services that follow the same families from early childhood through old age. It isn't a single method that got lucky once. It's eight decades of consistently building children who are curious, capable, and responsible, generation after generation.
MysticLand — Four Years, One Universe
MysticLand's story is shorter, but no less deliberate. In just four years, it grew from an idea into a network of 150 schools and 150,000 students — not by following the standard publishing playbook, but by building something nobody else had: an entire fantasy universe of storytelling wizards that children live inside, not just learn from. When India's National Education Policy called for experiential, values-led learning, MysticLand didn't wait for a curriculum to catch up. It had already built the world where that vision plays out every day.
Where They Meet
Gakken brought eight decades of proof that character can be built systematically. MysticLand brought four years of proof that children learn best inside a story, not a lecture. Kokoro is what happens when you refuse to choose between the two: Japan's most rigorously tested values framework, delivered the only way MysticLand knows how — through narrative, character, and world-building that a child actually wants to return to every day.