In an interview in the Hokkaido newspaper Kashima, Hisashi Urashima, principal of the Joy English Academy in Obihiro and editor of the magazine Northern Lights, 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). The articles won an award from the Soroptimist Foundation. (See also “Craftsmen of Hokkaido” )
In Out of Our Hands, Willie Jones describes how he met Hisashi Urashima, and the research trips they undertook in rural Hokkaido. Mr Urashima, he says, introduced himself after a talk in Obahiro where Willie mentioned that he had bought, in a Sapporo coffee shop, some pots that had been made by a Mr Sakata, who lived in Obihiro.
This “bright-eyed, boyish founder and principal of a local language school,” Willie wrote, “was also the publisher and editor of Northern Lights, described on the masthead as ‘the land of the pioneers’ (tonden-hei, soldier pioneers sent by the Meiji government to Hokkaido to colonise what was regarded as unclaimed land…).”
“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 the majority of the craftsmen and women featured in the book to give them copies of it. 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. And, he says, he is setting about reviving Northern Lights to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the English Academy in Obihiro.
cityofwords.net 