Hisashi Urashima’s Northern Lights

In the Hokkaido newspaper Kachimai, Hisashi Urashima, principal of the Joy English Academy in Obihiro, explains how, in the 1980s and 1990s, he commissioned and published the interviews that were collected in Willie Jones’s Out of Our Hands, published by City of Words in 2022.

In Out of Our Hands Willie Jones describes how he and Hisashi Urashima first met, and the research trips they undertook in rural Hokkaido. The ‘bright-eyed, boyish founder and principal of a local language school’, was also the publisher and editor of Northern Lights, a magazine advertised on the masthead as ‘the land of the pioneers’ (tonden-hei, the soldier pioneers sent by the Meiji government to colonise Hokkaido). Willie Jones mentioned to Hisashi Urashima that he had bought, in a Sapporo coffee shop, some pots made by a Mr Sakata.

‘It turned out,’ Willie continued, ‘that Mr Urashima was a friend of Mr Sakata; there and then he gave me a piece of paper and a pencil and asked me to write my impression of Sakata’s work for the next issue of his magazine. For the next dozen years, the magazine published articles about craftsmen and craftswomen living in Hokkaido that Mr Urashima commissioned from me.’

The article in Kachimai reports that, since the publication of Out of Our Hands, Hisashi Urashima has tracked down all but a few of the craftsmen and women featured in the book and given them copies of the book. They include the poet Norio Tokita and the ceramicist Masayoshi Sakata, subject of the first profile in Out of Our Hands. ‘I really want people to read about the lives of Hokkaido’s artisans,’ Urashima-san tells the interviewer. He notes that this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the English Academy in Obihiro. You can read more in the soon-to-be-available first issue of the relaunched Northern Lights.