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Interviewers/Authors: Ayane Maekawa, Hina Yamanaka, Ryo Nakatsuji

Mr. Kunihiro Tokumaru, the representative director of the non-profit Frontier Association, is considered a pioneer of regional planning for Ukyo Ward and, at one time, served as a member on several committees in the ward focused on development of the area. 

― Where are you from and how long have you lived in Ukyo Ward?

Mr. Tokumaru: I am from Sakyo Ward, and I moved to Ukyo Ward when I was in the second year of junior high school.

― What were you doing before you founded the Frontier Association?

Mr. Tokumaru: I was self-employed and engaged in motor sports as a hobby.

― What is the origin of the name Frontier Association?

Mr. Tokumaru:  It has the meaning of pioneering the future. It can also mean contributing to people who have given us support.

― Why did you choose Ukyo Ward to establish the Frontier Association?

Mr. Tokumaru: Before we established the association, I built a facility for people in Ukyo Ward to hold sports events. Then, I wanted to do more besides enjoying sports events and decided to get involved with environmental conservation activities. So, I asked my friends to join me, and we decided to establish the current Frontier Association. 

― What kind of activities have you been involved in at the Frontier Association?

Mr. Tokumaru: We are engaged in a variety of community-based activities which can only be done by us. We helped establish a place called MACHIKO in the Ukyo Ward Office to provide a place for local people to come together and contribute to community building.

― What is the most important thing for the Frontier Association?

Mr. Tokumaru: It has been more than 20 years since the association was established, so the purpose of its activities has changed little by little. We are now focusing on building a society centered on children and how to pass on various things to those who will be shouldering the future.

― Are you only doing activities with the children in Ukyo Ward?

Mr. Tokumaru: For now, we are only active in Ukyo Ward. By doing so, we can give dedicated support to children in this area.

― Then, what kind of specific activities does Frontier Association offer?

Mr. Tokumaru: There is an activity in which about 50 children can experience Japanese drumming at a local shrine. This activity is a valuable experience as it helps them learn more about Japanese culture. Also, along with the child, the whole family usually comes, so it is a good opportunity to bring many people to one place and have fun together.

― What is most rewarding regarding your work at the Frontier Association?

Mr. Tokumaru: It is to hear the children cheering and laughing.

― I heard that you have been abroad several times. In your travels, have you experienced similar activities to those you are doing at Frontier Association?

Mr. Tokumaru: I first travelled abroad more than 20 years ago, and I felt there was a significant difference in the degree of poverty in many countries. It was completely different from Japan.

― What are the goals of the Frontier Association?

Mr. Tokumaru: It is to convey to everyone the importance of continuing onwards toward the future.

― What do you like about Ukyo Ward?

Mr. Tokumaru: Ukyo Ward is a place where culture and art are nearby and within walking distance. I like that aspect of the area.

 ― Do you have a favorite place in Ukyo Ward?

Mr. Tokumaru: Arashiyama in winter. It is not crowded and is beautiful even when it snows.

― How do think Ukyo Ward is special and different from other wards in Kyoto?

Mr. Tokumaru: Frontier Association is based in Uzumasa, and I feel that the level of contact with residents is extremely high.

― What should Ukyo Ward do to improve the area?

Mr. Tokumaru: There are many east and west roads, but few that run north and south, so I think the city should add more north and south roads. 

― Please describe Ukyo Ward in one word.

Mr. Tokumaru: History. There are a few World Heritage Sites nearby that offer a lot of historical culture.

 ― Finally, do you have a message for KUFS students, please?

Mr. Tokumaru: Don’t just end your student life inside the school. Talk to people in your community and make a lot of good connections.

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Interviewers/Authors: Niklaus Weigelt, Ryota Harada

Stephen Gill was born in North Yorkshire, England in 1953 and graduated from London University in 1979 with a degree in Japanese language and literature. He has been living in North-West Kyoto for 26 years, and at present, teaches courses in English language and haiku in English literature at Kyoto University, as well as comparative culture and haiku in English literature at Ryukoku University. Furthermore, Stephen is a leading light in the Hailstone Haiku Circle, Kansai’s only English language haiku society, which has an international membership and meets on a regular basis. He also has a very strong publishing record, including poems, articles, books, and translations, and has had twenty of his scripts broadcast by BBC Radio. Stephen remains active in the arts, giving talks about haiku, as well as holding ike’ishi (生け石), ‘live-stone’ arrangement art installations, of which he has held over twenty to date. Additionally, he is very passionate about environmental protection and helps run the nature conservation volunteer NPO, People Together for Mt. Ogura, which seeks to restore to beauty the place famed for waka near Arashiyama.

― Can you tell me what first brought you to Kyoto, and why you chose to live in Saga?

Mr. Gill: I got married to a Japanese, and we were living and working in London for about ten years. Eventually, she wanted to return to Japan. I found a teaching job in Osaka and because I had lived here before for one year, I knew that Ukyo-ku was a nice and quiet area. Additionally, I could connect with my university campus in Osaka. Then, in 1995, we started looking for a place to live from which we would make a new life here in Japan.

― When did you first become interested in Haiku, and how did you become involved with the Hailstone Haiku Circle?

Mr. Gill: It started when I was around 18 years old and studying at Oxford University. I had already travelled out across land to India during the ‘hippy days’ when many young people decided to drop out of education. I was very unsettled and went up to a Tibetan monastery in Scotland. I went there because I was interested in Tibetan culture. In the monastery’s library there was an assortment of oriental books. One of them was the Penguin Classics translation of Matsuo Basho, the great haiku poet who travelled to the north of Japan. That resonated with me because I had been travelling a little and I had also been writing a little. When I found Basho in 1972 it completely changed the way I looked at the world. I focused on nature as a place to find solace and a sort of stability as I travelled and moved through life, still restless, young, and learning. I eventually went back to university where I studied Japanese language and literature. That knowledge allowed me to read the original Basho in Japanese.

― Do you think the Haiku of today are very different compared to early works? If so, how?

Mr. Gill: Haiku wasn’t a term until Masaoka Shiki started to use it in the Meiji period. The old term, for example, used by Basho in the Edo period was ‘hokku’. Hokku means ‘the starting verse’. A hokku began a sequence written by a whole group of poets, participating in linked verse. It all changes with Shiki, where a haiku, this new term, can stand out and be put on its own. After Shiki, we come to contemporary Japanese and the growth of haiku in North America particularly, and in Britain to a lesser extent. I fit in somewhere towards the end of that curve.

The basic idea of haiku is the same. It should be brief, it should be about nature, and if possible, have a reference to a season. However, immediately after Shiki’s death there evolved a breakaway group which proposed that haiku could be free without seasonal references and not adhering to the 5-7-5 structure. The group of poets around me in Kansai still emphasize seasonality due to Kyoto being a centre of seasonal festivals and traditional attitudes. Nevertheless, our contemporary haiku are a bit different from Basho’s. The basic inspiration remains the same but how we are living today and what we are writing about has changed. There should always be some sort of newness about haiku. It is always moving forward.

― I read that you used to work as an artist in Ukyo-ku creating ‘live-stone’ installations. Can you tell me more about this work, please?

Mr. Gill: When I was a little boy my dad was working near the Scottish-English border. We’d often go to rivers or beaches with lots of stones. I’d pick up stones and display them on a windowsill in my bedroom. When I was much older, I still had that habit. One day, I went to a London University symposium, or conference, at which there was a Shinto expert called Kamata Toji. During the presentation he blew on an iwabue, a roughstone flute. Toji Kamata and I started talking after his presentation. I invited him back to my flat in London and showed him my stones. He was so impressed by some of my paired stones, that he told me we would hold an exhibition when I next went to Japan. Suddenly, when I got to Japan aged 42, I had my first exhibition in a gallery in Tokyo. I exhibited the stones I had found as pairs and people loved it. One thing led to another, I got offers and began to be something of an installation artist. I love to use stones in their natural forms. I just find stones as they really exist and I put with them my haiku on the wall, sometimes with photos, and I also add sounds. It allows for a sort of meditative walkaround with a story. Live-stones is a direct translation. In Japanese it is called ike’ishi.

― I have also heard that you are very active in environmental protection. Can you tell me more about this and the ‘People Together for Mt. Ogura’ group you belong to, please?

Mr. Gill: In 2003, I took some students to Mt. Ogura where we cleared away rubbish such as abandoned sofas, sewing machines, and television sets. I put it all in my van and displayed it at an exhibition at a gallery I had scheduled. The gallery owner was a bit horrified because it wasn’t quite what she was expecting. I covered the floor with the rubbish together with fallen leaves to represent the state in which we found it. On the walls, I put wonderful pictures of Mt. Ogura to show its natural beauty and I mixed my own poetry with some classical allusions to the literature which that mountain embodies. As a poet, I decided I needed to do something and invited some of the head priests of nearby temples along the foot of the mountain. Two of them showed great interest and in due course we spawned a little movement. After about two years, Kyoto City started supporting us because they realized that there was quite a bit of momentum. We also started working with volunteer centers at universities who regularly send students to learn about environmental problems and help clean the mountain. Later, we also started to get into other forms of conservation such as maintaining the bamboo forest fences.

― What are some things you think make Ukyo-ku special, or different from other wards in Kyoto? Please give an example(s)?

Mr. Gill: When looking for a house in 1995, my wife and I were walking around Saga thinking about whether this would be a nice place to live. We got talking to a kind farmer who introduced us to a local estate agent. Two weeks later, we found our place in Saga. After living in London for ten years, we fell in love with living surrounded by rice fields, ponds, and bamboo groves. Compared to other wards in Kyoto, Saga in Ukyo-ku is very spacious and feels open. From the top of the rice fields, ten minutes from where I live, I can even see the mountains of Yoshino in the south of Nara on very clear days. Furthermore, I like hiking and the trails here are much less crowded compared to Higashiyama and Kitayama for example.

― What is your own favorite thing about Ukyo-ku? Why?

Mr. Gill: It is less commercial and very quiet, especially in the evenings. Sometimes I wish the restaurants were open a little bit longer but overall, the quietness is something I very much enjoy. Something else that I quite like is that there are a lot of wildflowers year-round that I can always pick and arrange in a jam jar.

― Which historical or famous sites in Ukyo-ku do you think other people would find the most interesting or special? Why?

Mr. Gill: There are seven Kofun Period burial mounds in Kitasaga. They are probably from the family that came over to help with irrigation, sericulture and other continental techniques to help the Japanese modernize in the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th centuries. Those kofun used to have clumps of trees on them, very similar to the tumuli in my own country. I feel really at home there. It’s a very special, ancient landscape. Some of the rice fields in that area were handcrafted well before the Heian-kyo period.

― What is your personal favorite place in Ukyo-ku? Why do you like it?

Mr. Gill: I really like the nature in and around the Kiyotaki River Valley, especially the stretches outside of Kiyotaki Village. It is a perfect place to cool down during the hot summer. The temperature around Kiyotaki hardly ever goes above 30 degrees, even if it is 36 degrees in the city.

― Is there anything you would like to change or improve about Ukyo-ku? Please give an example(s)?

Mr. Gill: One of the things I’d like to see changed is the illegal dumping of garbage in nature. We started our activities in 2003 and as an NPO in 2006. It used to be tens of tons of rubbish, and we’ve been able to reduce it to less than one ton, maybe not even that, scattered in very inaccessible places. Nevertheless, every time I go on a rubbish patrol along the Tokai Shizen Hodo, which is of course walked by foreign tourists, there are people, most likely from smaller companies, who bring little trucks and instead of paying to have their garbage recycled and separated, just dump it off the road on the backside of Mt. Ogura and other spots around Saga. Now, only volunteer groups clean up these places. It has gotten much better over the last fifteen years, but the problem still goes on. Kyoto City has supported our NPO with equipment and is taking care of the disposal of the gathered rubbish. However, more needs to be done to prevent the illegal dumping in the first place.

Another thing I would like to see changed is the protection of more rice fields. We have a real treasure of an area in Saga but the only protected rice fields at the moment are the ones around the seven kofun (burial mounds) in Kitasaga. Saga used to be a much more open place with lots of rice fields and thatched houses. There are still some rice field areas in Saga, and Kyoto city should quickly look again at the pockets of rice fields and thatched houses, the original landscape of Saga, and introduce preservation orders to protect these places.

― If you could describe Ukyo-ku in one word, what would it be?

Mr. Gill: In my opinion, the word that best describes Ukyo-ku is “kaihokan.” It is a Japanese word that describes the feeling of openness or release. This is what I love about Saga. It has to do the with the way the land is, but it is also just a spiritual quality that Saga has.

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Interviewers/Authors: Ai Umeda, Chihiro Okajima

Takatoshi Tsutsui is from Ukyo Ward and is currently a fourth-year student at Ritsumeikan University’s College of Social Sciences. Ritsumeikan University has students from many other prefectures in Japan, which allows local students there to have a number of new encounters with people from outside the Kyoto area. He is currently studying sociology, with a main focus on the declining birthrate in Japan and parent-child relationships, in his graduation seminar. He is also engaged in a variety of different activities outside the university.

― We read in an article of an interview you gave to the Ukyo Fan Club Network that you have experienced working at a lot of different part-time jobs. Which of these do you think impacted on you the most?  

Mr. Tsutsui: At the French restaurant where I worked for about two years, I improved my ability to communicate with people I met for the first time. When I first started working there, I was not good at making conversation with customers, so I tried to avoid this by working behind the scenes (such as washing dishes) instead of serving customers. However, the chef encouraged me to start talking more with the clientele, and soon I found it more fun to do. After that, I started to communicate more using my own initiative. In addition to the ability to communicate, I began to acquire the ability to observe people at the same time, and thereafter was able to provide services and conversation that best met the customer needs.

― We have also heard that you have been active as a shonenhodo-in¹ (community youth police volunteer) in the Ukyo Ward area. What made you want to become a shonenhodo-in?

Mr. Tsutsui: My mother was a shonenhodo-in, and I started it when she invited me.

― What do you have to do as a shonenhodo-in?

Mr. Tsutsui: I help with learning support at local schools, as well as some extracurricular activities. Unfortunately, all our activities are currently suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

―What did you pay most attention to when you were working as a shonenhodo-in?

Mr. Tsutsui: I was very careful not to lose focus just because they were children, as kids often take notice of the behavior and words of adults. While it is important to explain things logically to children, it is also important to show them through actions because there are many things that cannot be understood by words alone. For example, for handwashing, I demonstrate by washing my own hands first, and then encourage them to do the same. In addition, the way to explain differs depending on the age of the child, so the way of communicating also differs between children in the lower grades and those in the upper grades. In order for children to communicate well with each other, I would ask the children in the upper grades to teach those in the lower grades. Giving them a role with responsibility usually makes them happy, because they believe they are being asked to be reliable, and they will want to do a good job. However, such guidance needs to be consistent. If there is a difference in the content of instruction, children don’t know who to believe. Therefore, it is necessary for the adults involved to agree with each other on the approach first. On occasions, I might have a disagreement with my mother, who is also a shonenhodo-in, but we usually try to thoroughly discuss it and come to an understanding.

― Besides the shonenhodo-in work, we believe you are engaged in another community activity. Could you tell us more about this, please?

Mr. Tsutsui: At present, I’m helping the younger students at my university find jobs through connecting with EN-COURAGE, a career support NPO. Generally, they tend to focus on simply getting a job. However, I believe getting a job does not have to be merely a stepping stone in life, but can also be a greater connection between the present and the future. I try to support them in developing this attitude by clarifying their own purpose in life.

― Can you please tell us what you like best about Ukyo Ward?

Mr. Tsutsui: Ukyo Ward is a nice mix of nature, countryside and city, where you can see different facets of life in the towns, but also hidden attractions. Among these is Keihoku Town, which has very rich nature and is my favorite place.

― Which historical or famous places in Ukyo do you think people would find particularly interesting or special?

Mr. Tsutsui: Arashiyama is in Ukyo Ward, right? How about Togetsukyo Bridge? It is a great place if you are a movie lover as it is often used as a location in movies, and many tourists visit there.

― Is there anything about Ukyo Ward you would like to see change or improved upon?

Mr. Tsutsui: Ukyo Ward is a very convenient place to live, but one of the things I think could be improved is some aspects of personal safety concerning elementary school students. In addition, traffic congestion caused by the increase in tourists should be addressed. In particular, city buses, which are also used by tourists, are a means of transportation for locals as well, and the effects of bus delays cannot be ignored. For example, even if the bus was late on my way to school and I was late for class, it was not treated as a public transportation delay. In order to reduce this, I think it might be necessary to disperse the concentration of tourists and create a flow of tourists to other areas of Ukyo Ward. However, currently of course, the number of tourists has decreased dramatically due to the spread of the Covid19 virus.

― Do you know anything about Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and Gaidai Nishi High School?

Mr. Tsutsui: My relationship with Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and Gaidai Nishi High School dates back to my elementary school days. I often participated in sporting events for elementary school students held by the students of Kyoto University of Foreign Studies at that time. I had the impression that they were very active in building relationships and other community activities. At Gaidai Nishi High School, the baseball club was strong, and I often saw the members of the baseball club running out in the streets.

― Is there anything more you want to know about Kyoto University of Foreign Studies and Gaidai Nishi High School?

Mr. Tsutsui: Before entering Ritsumeikan University, I often heard their names in Ukyo Ward, but after entering university, I didn’t often hear about them that often anymore. I was surprised by the gap because I had the impression that Kyoto University of Foreign Studies was pretty active in contributing to the local community. Actually, I want many people to know more about this university because I have been familiar with it most of my life.

Note

1. Shonenhodo-in (community youth police volunteer): A person commissioned by the Chief of Police to engage in various delinquency prevention activities in the community.