Kyoko Okumoto
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do?
“My name is Kyoko Okumoto, and I’m a full-time professor at Osaka Jogakuin University, a small women’s university in Osaka, Japan. I teach Peace and Conflict Studies and Conflict Transformation. Over the years, I’ve become really frustrated with Japanese politics and how Japan does not really look at its historical responsibility or at the historical trauma and harm it caused the East Asia/Pacific region. Japan really has, instead, a victim mentality. We have our ups and our downs, of course; there were certain decades where people were looking closely at Japan’s past and its historical responsibility. Yet, around the beginning of the 21st Century, Japan started receiving backlash, and the political Right became stronger. So I, as a Japanese person, was really frustrated; I wanted to do something about it all – I really wanted outsiders to also pressure Japanese politicians. That’s one of the reasons why I started the Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding Institute: NARPI.
NARPI is a network of civil society members, NGOs, and universities in the Northeast Asia region, and we have steering committee members from South Korea, Japan, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. Even though I list the committee members by country of origin, we don’t really use countries to identify our members. Instead, we try to use the cities they come from because we don’t want to emphasise national boundaries. We already have so many divisions created by national identities and so on, which is why I try to use a lot of arts-based approaches in my work.”
Can you explain to us more about NARPI? What kind of things do you focus on?
“NARPI is a network of people practicing peacebuilding in different parts of Northeast Asia. We have an annual summer training every year in different parts of the region. Last year, in 2024, it was held in Minamata and Miyazaki [Japan]. In 2023, it was in Terelj [Mongolia]. Our two-week trainings usually hold sixty or seventy people from all over the region with all ages and generations present. We also host those of Northeast Asian identity from outside the region and people who are interested in the lasting impacts of Northeast Asian historical conflicts.
Each week consists of three or four courses with each course lasting five days. All participants must choose one course per week, and they take that course from morning until evening throughout the entire week. Even though we hold annual training sessions at different sites within the region every year, we have quite a lot of repeat attendees come back because they want to travel to the new place and because we’re always offering new courses. We always offer an introductory course, but then we also have courses on peace education, climate and environmental justice, and even sexuality and trauma healing. The participants also, on some days, participate in a field trip in order to apply their theories in communities and learn from the resources on the field trips.
Once, for example, we went to a small island called Okunoshima during our training based in Hiroshima in 2012. This island was where the Japanese military created a secret poison gas during World War II. The remains of the factories are still there even though the island is now famous for its wild rabbits. At the time, I was walking together in the museum about the poison gas production with this participant from a city near Shanghai. He was crying silently behind his sunglasses, because he knew someone who had been affected accidentally by this poison gas many years later, since the Japanese army buried it when they left. So, there are still ongoing problems that arise, you see.
This other time, in 2014, we were preparing for a field trip to the Nanjing Massacre Museum. During the evening session the night before, we asked participants what questions they wanted to bring to the museum the next day. One Chinese university student responded and asked how we could all protect our Japanese friends in the Nanjing Massacre Museum. It was really unexpected. Of course, at the museum, everybody is expected to learn about what happened – the fact of the barbarism of the Japanese imperial military against the people in Nanjing. But the way museums can illustrate this is sometimes quite harsh. Sometimes people feel, especially when it comes to the younger Japanese generations who don’t know anything about the massacre, really shocked and hurt which can shut down dialogue. So, this student was already expecting that to be a possibility.
So, yes, conflicts arise. But, at the same time, something unexpectedly positive also arises. It’s important that we see, actually, the pain of ongoing situations that we are responsible for – even indirectly. That’s what conflict transformation is really all about – colliding with each other in friendly ways. We have to learn that we need to train that process. In the end, reconciliation isn’t guaranteed, of course not, but that’s the kind of experiences we aim to nurture at NARPI. “
Why arts, culture, and conflict transformation? In your experience with NARPI, what kinds of experiences have been successful?
“Once, we had this junior high school history teacher who came to NARPI as a participant, and his English, according to him, wasn’t very good. At a certain point, he was really frustrated with the language of instruction and, despite being a really nice person, was complaining. He said, humbly, that he couldn’t continue anymore and that he couldn’t speak English well enough; it was all too much for him.
That afternoon, we did an activity called “lukasa.” In this exercise, we have a big sheet of paper upon which I draw a basic storyline. Here is a mountainside. Here is a river. Here is an ocean. This one fishing village over here is poorer than that other agricultural village over there. And so on and so forth. So, first, what participants have to do is create the scenery – from the mountains to the ocean and the villages. They have all sorts of clay and yarn and can even go out and get some leaves, rocks, or water to work with. It’s all very creative and they have to interact with each other. Because it’s such a huge sheet of paper, people naturally take parts. You know, I would take care of this mountainside while you take care of that village, for example. In the end, everyone ends up having such a strong attachment to the mountainside or villages they’ve painstakingly created by hand.
Now, this guy, he was the most talkative participant during this particular exercise. He was suddenly so fluent in English, and he was explaining all about his village that he was really happy about creating. I really thought, wow, this is a completely different person! Where he was once complaining about the language, he was now the most vocal and also using different channels of communication and different parts of his body to communicate effectively. I think exercises like this enable people to open up differently. By focusing solely on verbal discourse, we start to block ourselves at a certain point. But, by opening up other possibilities and other channels of communication, this creates spaces for creativity – for making something new together. Joint artistic projects like this are really helpful, I think.
I try to encourage people to maximise their potential as much as possible. There are often so many shy people at first because, especially in Northeast Asia, creativity and open self-expression are styles of education that we’re not very much used to. Especially in Mainland China, Japan, and Korea, there’s always been a tradition of lecture-style education. Some people may be trained to debate and open dialogues, but we don’t really know how to open up. This is partly because our societies are filled with so much competition and comparison. You always have to compare yourself with other people and you have to be better than them in order to survive in this harsh world. You always have to prove yourself. In this world, I think that their bodies and their minds become rigid. For conflict transformation to work, you really have to open yourself up. Doing something while talking at the same time or forgetting about talking while moving your body helps to enable them to get more used to that feeling. It’s the feeling that it’s OK to be yourself. It’s OK to just relax, and it’s OK to make mistakes. That’s how I think different kinds of arts-based approaches work effectively. The first thing is to really create a safe space.”
What is one piece of content that profoundly impacted the way you view and/or work in this field?
“In 1996, I was studying for my master’s degree in Peace Studies in England. Originally, I was an English literature major in Japan, so I wanted to go to England – the land of Shakespeare – but, at the time, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to continue in English literature. I wanted to do something ‘more useful’ for the people, for my community. So, I ended up on this Peace Studies scholarship to a university in the English countryside.
Alongside my Peace Studies major, there were other different majors in security, diplomacy, international relations, and so on. I don’t know why, but I happened to take this course on security. When I went into the classroom, I was surrounded by a dozen or so different people, and many of them came from military backgrounds in different parts of the world – from Asia to Africa and Europe. They were speaking a language I did not speak nor understand. Of course, they were speaking English, but I couldn’t really communicate with them at times. I felt so out of place. The lecturer was proudly discussing this strategy and that strategy when certain things happen. I remember, on the walls of the classroom, there were photos and posters of so many military aircrafts and airplanes all lined up.
That’s when I realised what was different. The language in this class was so different from any of my other ones that I felt like these people were really lacking something. Seriously, they didn’t have something important. They were only talking about raw materials or how to ship and transport those materials to certain places in order to prepare for war in the “name of defence”. It really didn’t make sense to me. If it were to happen to me now, maybe I would have understood that they believed in “peace through security” while I believed in “security through peace”. But, at the time, I was a young, passionate, and peace-loving scholar. I was really shocked.
The world needs literature, that’s what I learned. Literature was the thing they didn’t know. They lacked this very important human factor about themselves; they didn’t know about human beings. That ended up as a huge motivation for me. This shocking experience made me think about what we need in this life to create peace. And that’s the arts. It’s creativity. You know, creativity is everything. In order to make some breakthrough or open a new path forward toward the next level of thinking and emotions, you need creativity more than anything else.”