update：July 18, 2024

 

Interviewed by Naomi Okiyama
Japanese text written by Nobuaki Takeda
Translated by Naoto Okamura

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The Laboratory for Global Dialogue, a Tokyo-based specified non-profit corporation, is engaged in connecting people from around the world via online video chat and meeting applications such as Zoom, giving them a rare opportunity in their day-to-day life to meet others from different parts of the world. The organization received grants on two occasions from the Toyota Foundation, first in fiscal 2017 and next in fiscal 2020. In this interview, Mr. Yuichi Watanabe and Ms. Makiko Nakagawa, Secretary General and Director of the Laboratory for Global Dialogue, and Mr. Atsushi Kadowaki, Representative Director of Community Art Laboratory, a Sendai-based general incorporated association, talked about their aims behind the two grant-awarded projects as well as their hopes and prospects for the future.

Indonesia was a common thread in both fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2020 projects, with a particular focus on community art. The concept of community art may not be so familiar to many. What is it all about? “It is about using art to reassess and resolve various issues facing communities by involving community residents, artists, and art activities. What’s more, artists themselves become inspired and apply that inspiration to their creative process, and organizing members like us also change accordingly. It is about providing such an interactive place,” said Mr. Watanabe.

Mr. Atsushi Kadowaki, an artist based in Sendai City, took part in this project alongside Mr. Watanabe and other members. “After the end of World War II, community art was born in Europe on the basis of cultural democracy, an idea that everyone has the rights to access arts and culture and to create artistic things, and community art has since developed in different parts of the world. Speaking of art, people tend to put priority on such criteria as high skills or unparalleled originality. Instead, what I find more appealing is the kind of expression or the way of living that can be generated in ordinary activities and yet can come uniquely from that person,” said Mr. Kadowaki. “As I was searching for words to describe an activity that can help visualize or trigger such things, I came across this existing concept called “community art”. In my view, collaborating on what people are interested in will help deepen understanding of and learning about each other, including different cultural backgrounds, and help boost their motivation. That’s why I have decided to employ a community art-based approach.”

As for the overview of grant-awarded project in fiscal 2017, Mr. Watanabe said, “Tohoku is a region that was hit hard by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, while Aceh is an area that was devastated from the Sumatra earthquake in 2004. The project was an attempt to transform local communities through developing two-way relationships between these two regions. We primarily worked on community art in Aceh.”
 

According to Mr. Kadowaki, local helpers in Indonesia asked him why he was trying to do art projects in Aceh where there were few art museums or galleries, while it would be more understandable to do so in Jakarta or Bandung. And yet, Mr. Kadowaki told them about his own experiences in Tohoku; he had organized a sweet red bean soup gathering monthly in a makeshift house for displaced residents in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake; those people, called “Hisaisha” or disaster victims, had taught him how to prepare local dishes, in which he saw a wealth of cultural legacy that was not lost even after tsunami waves had washed over their houses; and he and a 88-year-old woman had worked together to create a rap song about her life including her disaster experience. He recounted to the helpers each of those activities constituted what he calls community art. Only then did they understand that what he called art was not something complicated but rather ordinary things that they do in their lives. As a result, many young people came forward with a number of interesting proposals, Mr. Kadowaki said.

From Japan, for instance, a Japanese artist, Mr. Parco Kinoshita, organized an activity in which participants carved wooden dolls in memory of those who had perished in the Great East Japan Earthquake, and he held a similar workshop introducing this method to those Indonesian disaster victims of the Sumatra earthquake. Meanwhile, Ms. Manaka Murakami, also an artist, engaged in an activity that highlighted cultural differences between Japan and Indonesia through the “discovery” of a lone-standing tree in Aceh that withstood the earthquake-caused tsunami, a clear resemblance to the so-called miracle lone pine tree left standing after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku.

From Indonesia, a young man from Aceh, named Pardi, engaged in staging children’s theater performances to narrate the very sensitive topics of the Sumatra earthquake and a long-running civil war that lasted up until that time in Indonesia. He coordinated an activity conducted by three children support organizations. Another young Indonesian person, Noera, created a whole new dish based on Japanese and Indonesian cuisines and served it at a food booth, seeking to bridge the boundary between two cultures by appealing to the palate. As such, there were as many as 60 activities conducted over a three-year period.

Behind all these projects was a sense of urgency that Kesennuma and Aceh both needed to do something to pass on the tsunami experiences to the next generation. As time goes by, local people’s memories of the disasters become more distant and post-tsunami generations are growing in numbers. “For example, we told them that they would be able to not only conduct interviews and preserve memories in writings but also produce outputs in the form of community art,” said Mr. Watanabe. “A woman who acted as a volunteer leader in the latter part of the project later landed a job at Aceh Tsunami Museum. She has since organized a variety of programs, coordinated a livestream session between Kesennuma and Aceh, and invited us to a tsunami symposium when we made our trip to Aceh the last time. I was very grateful and happy.” Without doubt, community art activities have brought about some kind of change in Aceh people’s behavior.

Moreover, Mr. Watanabe also noted that they were looking to empower young people. “There is this young generation who experienced tsunami in their childhood, received a flood of support from overseas, witnessed an end to the civil war, and saw a transition from war to peace. And then there is another generation who were born after all that and knows only peaceful times. Just like Japan’s post-war baby-boomers did, those young Indonesians who know a little bit about the country’s recent past have become the first ones playing a leading role in Aceh’s reconstruction efforts from the tsunami-caused devastation and civil war. They think of social change and are quite conscious of doing their part in society,” he said. “I feel that this project probably served as an impetus for a generation of young Indonesians with a lot of potential to demonstrate their abilities. I am saying this because after gaining a lot of experiences from our project, some of them have begun to take on leadership roles by planning various activities or launching their own organizations. One of them has become a filmmaker producing a film about the Sumatra earthquake.” Clearly, the project has been able to yield a lot of outcomes thanks in part to the Toyota Foundation’s grant.

Ms. Nakagawa concurred; initially, children in Aceh said they could not do that, she recalled. “But by the end of the project, they told me that they were glad they took part in it. It was very satisfying to hear that,” she said.

The successful outcomes of the first project in fiscal 2017 eventually led to the launch of the second grant project in fiscal 2020.

Mr. Watanabe has grown more confident about positive outcomes of the cultural exchange activities. “For Indonesian technical trainees, I think Kesennuma has become a more comfortable place than other areas,” he said.

If some of these young Indonesians fall in love with Kesennuma and decide to settle down, that would be yet another driving force for revitalizing the city. If that happens, this project would have far greater significance.

Generally speaking, cultural and language barriers make foreigners feel frustrated because they are unable to communicate their thoughts in full, particularly in initial stages of living overseas. Local people’s efforts to better understand how foreign residents feel would be the key to their long-term settlement. “It seems that Indonesian people are comparing notes with one another about how welcoming and friendly Kesennuma people are to foreign technical trainees,” Ms. Nakagawa said.

The Laboratory for Global Dialogue already has its 2024 spring project underway. “We are thinking of holding an art workshop in the local shopping street which has long sustained this fishing community. It is home to a wide range of age-old stores from a liquor shop to a Japanese tea retailer, a Kimono seller to an earthenware store supplying dishware to fishing vessels,” said Ms. Nakagawa. “Many of these businesses are not doing so well these days, but they have a long enough history. I think it will be interesting if we visit these stores with young Japanese people and foreign technical trainees, listen to what store owners have to say, and do something together.”

According to Mr. Watanabe, children in Aceh received a flood of support from overseas, including aid supplies from Japan, following the Sumatra earthquake. Those Indonesian children have grown up and this time, as college students and working adults, have offered support to exchanges between Indonesian children and Japanese elementary school children who survived the Great East Japan Earthquake. There is an growing cycle of mutual support among different generations between the two disaster-hit communities.

But still today, foreign technical trainees are often seen as a mere inflow of labor force from abroad. How to embrace them as members of the same local community, not just as workers, is an important question posed to the people of the host nation. In that sense, these two grant-awarded projects have led to learning experiences for both Japan and Indonesia, enabled local communities to connect directly across the border, and opened the possibility of members of diverse backgrounds living together in the same community.