The Hinoki Project began in 2000 at Prof. Kikuko Nishina's lab at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's International Student Center as a collaborative effort between language education, linguistics, and computer science experts in building learning assistance systems for Japanese learners. The reading assistance system Asunaro was first made public in 2000, followed by the collocation search system Natsume in 2007, which was aimed at writing assistance. Asunaro provides multi-lingual word and phrase meaning lookups and can visualize the sentence structure, thus facilitating understanding during the reading process. Natsume makes use of large-scale corpora to provide a search interface for identifying salient word collocations when writing. Development on the Nutmeg composition assistance system began in 2010, which worked by using quantitative methods to identify words or expressions inappropriate for the target register of academic Japanese papers and reports. After Prof. Nishina's retirement, the project has continued with the support of JSPS grants led by National Institute of Informatics' Associate Prof. Takeshi Abekawa. From 2015, the project includes Associate Prof. Bor Hodošček (Osaka University) and Prof. Emeritus Kikuko Nishina (Tokyo Institute of Technology) as co-investigators, with Yutaka Yagi from Picolab Co., Ltd. as research collaborator.