Date: September 30, 2009 (Wed.) 15：15～20：00
Venue:
(Schedule)
15:15 JR Takatori Station（Kobe）
15:20 Departure(by walk）
15:30-17:30 Takatori Community Center http://www.tcc117.org
18:00-20:00 「Sogenren」（Mongolian Restaurant http://www.ehappy-t.jp/shop_info.php?b=b001&shop_id=1002394
Presentation:
Si Qin Fu(Assistant Professor, Global Collaboration Cenber, Osaka University)
This was the first field trip of Initiative 4. While this was a small gathering, it was a positive opportunity that brought home once again the importance of “getting out of the university.”
The first place we visited was the Takatori Community Center, a network of NPOs located within the premises of the Takatori Catholic Church, including “Radio FMYY” and “Multilanguage Center FACIL.” Group representative Shizuyo Yoshitomi guided participants as she and FMYY’s Junichi Hibino answered various questions about ongoing activities, which have confronted and overcome an array of problems in the 15 years since the Great Kanto Earthquake.
The area where the church is located is highly multicultural. In addition to a large original population of zainichi Koreans (descendents of those who were forcibly moved to Japan from the Korean peninsula before and during WWII), the area has also attracted many people from South America seeking work, such as Brazilians of Japanese descent, as well as refugees from places such as Vietnam. While many parts of the Takatori Catholic Church were destroyed by fire when this district was ravaged by the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, it nonetheless developed into a base for earthquake disaster reconstruction efforts headed by the church’s priests.
The church was already acting as a support center for foreigners prior to the earthquake, and recognized the importance of making connections with local communities and of developing those communities. They explained that when the earthquake hit, it turned everyone into victims, with the effect of dissolving the barrier between the “locals” and the “outsiders”; from abstractions such as “Japanese” and “Vietnamese,” people became Ms. and Mr. “so-and-so,” individuals with a recognizable identity. With the shift in 1999 from the earthquake itself to efforts focused on multicultural coexistence, an increasing awareness developed of the importance of building connections with the local community. The lesson of the earthquake, that minorities and the weak can be consciously and unconsciously completely excluded during a state of emergency, has prompted efforts focusing on the need to make these people “visible” in an everyday context, in order to avoid this type of situation from reoccurring. In particular, these efforts emphasize multicultural community development of a kind which, through the use of radio, overcomes differences in nationality and race. In respecting different languages and cultures, however, this radio also takes care to teach its listeners about the language and culture of Japan, the country in which they are now living. The efforts have also resulted in changes in the way that the local government is administered, and have received recognition from local shop owners. Mr. Hibino repeated how important the connection with the local community is, noting that without it, efforts become isolated and close-minded. Along with expressions of admiration and praise, the GCOE members also recalled their own field work, and wondered what kind of latent regional potential it is that keeps efforts like this going.
In the latter half of the seminar, there was a talk in a yurt by Dr. Si Qinfu about the Mongolian view of nature and cosmology, which starts from the yurt, and this was also a valuable experience. The meaning of the yurt colors (white of the earth and blue of the sky), the names and meaning of its various parts, and the transitional changes in the time and season of its use, are all elements that are extremely dense with meaning. Yurts are very deeply connected with the Mongolian nomadic lifestyle, and for the nomadic Mongol people, they are a cultural contact point with the gods and with nature, and an extremely fundamental part of Mongolian daily life. The expression Dr. Si uses to describe the yurt, “creating a place inside a flow, a place not tied to any location,” is very suggestive in thinking about people who live in the globalized, fluid world of today.
In a conversation that stretched from his own career to his recent studies in Siberia, to the status of Russian literature and ethnography, Dr. Si situated deep questions from his experience in the field based on a research standpoint, leaving a deep impression on all of us.
(Shuhei Kimura)