Based in Hiroshima, the general incorporated association My Japan works to pass Japanese cultural tradition and the appeal of its regions on to the next generation. Its representative director is Lisa Mimura. A festival staged in a shrine, a walk up a mountain at dawn, a brush-making workshop: her work looks, at first, unusually broad. Yet all of it comes from a single aim — to turn culture from something stored away into an occasion that can be touched, and to hand it over. My Japan is the vehicle she built to do this.

From a Brush-Making House in Kumano

Lisa Mimura was born in Kumano, a town in Hiroshima Prefecture, into a family that makes the Kumano brush. Her family’s workshop, Bunkōdō, has been making brushes for more than a century. Selecting the hair, binding it, setting the base, shaping the tip: to her as a child, the movements of the craftsmen’s hands were not something remarkable but simply part of daily life.

Those who grow up beside a family trade do not always take up its value at once. Mimura came to feel the weight of the tradition after she left Japan. As a student she studied English and went abroad, and there she came up against two facts: that the name Hiroshima was known around the world more than she had expected, and that the image attached to it rested almost entirely on a single point, the atomic bomb. The town’s mornings, its mountains, its food, the handwork carried on there: from a distance, almost none of it was visible.

The same pattern held for the tradition at her feet. Kumano brushes, too, were known by name, yet few people ever held one or touched the craft behind it. To be known is not the same as to be touched. After university she first joined a cosmetics trading company as a salesperson, and later returned to the family business, taking part in brush sales and product development. There she arrived at a conviction: a culture is not kept alive by guarding it alone; it passes to the next generation only as the number of people who engage with it grows. That conviction became the starting point for My Japan.

Lisa pointing to her own baby-hair brush (taimōfude)

My Japan, the Vehicle

In 2018, Mimura established the general incorporated association My Japan, though the work itself had begun around 2012. Its role, as she defined it, was to connect the keepers of Japanese culture and regional tradition with the people who want them: to create chances to touch the culture that Japan’s long-held spirit has produced, and to carry it to the next generation. Rather than shut tradition away behind glass, she sought to place it into the hands of those who wish to touch it. For someone raised in a brush-making house, this was a natural idea.

My Japan’s activities appear, at first, to spread in many directions: cultural promotion, festivals staged in shrines, the making of tourism experiences, tree-planting workshops that link cities with rural areas, the upkeep of mountain trails, and talks on community-building. But these are not separate ventures set side by side. They are one principle applied to different settings — that a region’s history and nature should be offered not as something to consume, but as something to take part in. The breadth is not scatter; it is the reach of a single idea.

Turning a Morning into an Experience

That principle takes its clearest form in Asageshiki, the early-morning tour My Japan runs. Setting out on foot from Hiroshima Station, participants climb Mount Futaba at dawn, visit old shrines such as the Toshogu and the Inari, and take breakfast at the summit. Amid a view that reaches as far as Miyajima, tea is served in the open air. The name folds together asage, the morning meal, and the morning landscape, with the intent of turning the hour of dawn itself into an experience. Its theme, “Another face of Hiroshima,” is also Mimura’s own answer to the question she first felt abroad.

There is a reason the tour begins so early. Hiroshima offered little to do in the morning, and many travelers left without staying overnight. A morning tour encourages an evening’s stay, adding one more night to the town. Part of the tour’s revenue goes toward conserving Mount Futaba, so that visiting becomes a form of tending the land. Tourism turns from something passed through into something one takes part in. This exchange is what My Japan attempts, again and again.

A Return to the Brush

Having widened My Japan’s work outward to all of Hiroshima and to Japanese culture as a whole, Mimura is now returning to where she began: the brush. As a My Japan project, at Bunkōdō, her family’s workshop, she is preparing a place of experience for visitors from abroad. They tour the workshop, watch the craftsmen’s hands up close, make a brush of their own, and then face the paper with it. From brushmaking to calligraphy, it is time received not by looking, but by moving one’s hands.

Here the brush shifts from a product to be sold into an experience made together. The Kumano handwork that could once be seen only from a distance is reproduced, once, in the visitor’s own hands. To make visible what could not be seen from abroad, and to turn what was only a name into something that can be touched: what My Japan has aimed at across all its work comes together in the most personal place of all, the brushes of her own family’s house.

Kept Alive by Hand

Running through all of Lisa Mimura’s work is one quiet conviction about how things are kept. A culture only guarded and displayed grows thin. It passes onward in proportion to the number of people who touch it, make it, and use it. At a festival, on the morning mountain, in the brush workshop, what she does through My Japan is the same: to offer, and to hand over.

A brush is not a tool for looking at. Only when it is held and moved does it become writing. Hiroshima, and the tradition of Kumano, are the same: they endure when they are received into the hand. What Mimura is building, through the vehicle of My Japan, one occasion at a time, is the chance for that receiving to happen.

A R K portrait by Artist G!

Lisa Mimura was also drawn by Artist G! for A R K — an archive of portraits, each drawn freehand in one continuous line, kept for a future intelligence that will ask what it is to be human. Read more about the artist in Human Light: Artist G: From the Neuroscience of Bias to the Architecture of Presence.

photo: Mariko.A/ StudioTales

Nishimoto Kazutami, who runs the photography school Yūbijuku, spent many years working with images from the side that presents them, long before he taught anyone to make them. After graduating from Kanazawa College of Art, he worked in advertising and the record industry in Tokyo, then set out on his own as an art director. He created album covers for many of Japan’s defining musicians, including CHAGE&ASKA, B’z, THE ALFEE, Koji Kikkawa and Koji Tamaki, and is known as one of the most prolific record-jacket designers in the country. In 1995 he published MIND, a collection drawn from that work.

Because he had handled so many photographs, he understood the weight of a single one. It was the sense, on the design floor, that a satisfying photograph was hard to come by that led him to start taking pictures himself. Yūbijuku, which he opened in 1997, grew out of that.

A Chance Photograph Is Not Skill

At the core of Yūbijuku lies one clear idea: a chance photograph, one that comes from pressing the shutter without thought, is not skill. A good picture taken by luck leaves no guarantee that the same thing can be taken again. It leads only to wasted time and a stream of work whose quality never settles.

What Nishimoto teaches is not where to shoot from, but how to shoot. The camera is only a tool; what needs training is the mind. Look closely, picture what a given approach will produce, and try it. It is after moving back and forth between observation and practice, many times over, that a steady form of expression begins to grow, what might be called a stable individuality. Yūbijuku is known as a photography school unlike any other because it keeps this order intact.

Solving the Assignment as a Group

At Yūbijuku, students work through each assignment in groups. Given the same theme, every team arrives at a different way of shooting, and the results carry the individuality of each person plainly. Seeing how others solve the problem widens one’s own range of expression. Rather than drilling technique first, the school creates a space where sensibility can move. The breadth of expression and the habit of observation that supports it grow together.

Nishimoto says that while photographs can be skilled or unskilled, there is no good or bad. A conventional, proper photograph and a good photograph, one that catches the viewer’s feeling in an instant, are not the same thing. So students spend their time not tracing the right answer, but sharpening the way they themselves see.

Nishimoto Kimiko, His Mother, as Proof

The most widely known demonstration of what this method cultivates was his mother, Kimiko (1928–2025). At seventy-two she entered her son’s school as its oldest member, in the third cohort. It was the first time she had ever held a camera.

The humorous self-portraits that became her signature came from a Yūbijuku assignment: photographing yourself, with all its amusement and embarrassment. They were not accidents. She would look closely at what she wanted to photograph, picture it in flight, or, with two birds, imagine a parent and child out walking, and settle on the colors that would suit before she shot. The computer frightened her at first, but with repetition her hands remembered. She would try things on layers, erase them, add them again. Repeating without fear was what made her expression steady.

Part of that process has been published in an Adobe tutorial. A single New Year’s card image is built by layering the base photograph over a background frame shot at the same angle, erasing what is unwanted, compositing in the birds, and finally placing the text. It is a record of constructed work, the opposite of a chance photograph. The process can be followed in Lightroom and Photoshop techniques by the 88-year-old photographer Nishimoto Kimiko (Adobe, in Japanese).

Her work spread beyond Japan, and hundreds of thousands came to wait for each update on Instagram. It was through talking with her companions, she once said, that the things she wanted to photograph kept multiplying, one “let’s try that next” after another. Photography brought people with it. Until she passed away in June 2025 at ninety-seven, the way she took pleasure in it never changed.

What Remains Is the Way of Seeing

When Kimiko died, Kazutami wrote only a few words: it had been a photographic life of twenty-five years, and he was truly grateful. There is nothing showy in them. What remains is simply the fact that one person went on photographing, without faltering, from seventy-two to ninety-seven.

What Yūbijuku hands on is not a single well-made photograph. It is the way of seeing itself: looking closely, picturing, and trying. As long as the one who photographs is alive, it keeps working within them. Not waiting for chance, but cultivating one’s own way of seeing. What Nishimoto Kazutami has shown over many years is a quiet, dependable method for exactly that.

Interview and text by Mariko A., Studio Tales

Born in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima, Daichi Monden never left this land. Nearly forty years in television, and the years since he founded his own company. While so many set their sights on the capital, Monden stayed, and made the times where people gathered in this city. Yet the truest shape of his work shows not in the crowds themselves, but in what appears once they have gone — what remained after the festival ended, after the broadcast fell silent.

Two hundred thousand people, and what came after

In 1987, Monden launched the Hiroshima Castle Autumn Festival as its producer. Two hundred thousand people over two days. But what he really raised was not an attendance figure — it was a question: let us make the water of the castle moat clean again. In those years the moat was murky, and it smelled. What began as a mere festival slogan went on to move the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the City of Hiroshima, and was realized as engineering work that drew a channel from the Ōta River. A festival lasts two days. The clear water of the moat remained long after.

The event ends; it takes root in the city

This pattern returns again and again in Monden’s work. The first Hiroshima Food Festival, which he launched in 2005, drew 780,000 people over two days, and it continues to this day. The castle moat sightseeing boats he ran alongside it as an experiment later became an official program of the City of Hiroshima. It was the same in television. There was After-School Bulletin, hosted by Hideyuki Nakayama; there was Weekly Papa Time, which ran for twelve years and reached a peak rating of 33.1 percent. KENJIN, the late-night program he started in 1997, became a place where a young Hiroyuki Ariyoshi gathered his strength, and its in-house band, fronted by Kōji Kikkawa, reached variety shows across the country. What Monden made looked like one-time events, yet much of it stayed on — inside the city, and inside its people.

A conviction he named “chihōryoku”

Why Hiroshima? Monden has crystallized his answer in a single phrase: chihōryoku, the power of the local. In the regions, he holds, lie seeds of success more within reach than any in Tokyo — by population, he reckons, the odds of becoming the best in Hiroshima are roughly five times those in the capital. The regions are not a place to give up on; they are a place to win. That conviction is what has kept him in Hiroshima all along.

“Bringing the regions to life through film” became his life’s work. Itoshi no Hinagon, shot entirely in Saijō, Hiroshima, on the theme of municipal mergers; Yuki-onna (Snow Woman), invited to the Tokyo International Film Festival; and Labyrinth of Cinema, the final film of director Nobuhiko Obayashi. To make seven nationally released films while living in Hiroshima was, in its way, an attempt to turn the land and its people into something that stays: film.

And now — at EarthMotion

In 2018, Monden founded EarthMotion, Inc. The stage moved from a broadcaster to his own company, but the core of what he does did not change. The tool in his hands now is the moving image. Building on the craft of picture-making he honed in film, EarthMotion produces brand movies for companies, music videos, wedding records, cinematic portraits of people — all of it, in the end, the work of keeping a moment in a form you can return to, again and again. Just as a festival once left clean water behind and a program once raised the people who worked on it, Monden now records the people and the hours of Hiroshima through video, the most direct means of keeping there is.

The weekly kagura performances he began in 2014 at the Hiroshima Prefectural Culture Center still light up every Wednesday evening, more than a decade on. Monden has also spoken to younger generations about “how to seize a dream” at local universities, beginning with Hiroshima University of Economics. To keep, and to hand on. Even in the form of a company, that outline has not changed in the slightest.

On his profile, Monden writes plainly: from Hatsukaichi, a local producer who would love to bring Hiroshima to life through the power of the local. True to the man who calls himself someone who does what he says, what he has built up in Hiroshima is not the programs, the films, or the festivals, but the memory that people were truly here. Daichi Monden goes on doing the work of keeping that memory — now at a place called EarthMotion, in the form of the moving image — in the same city he has never left.

Links

EarthMotion, Inc. — Hiroshima, Japan
Website: https://www.earthmotion.net/
Contact: info@earthmotion.net
Instagram: @daichihiroshima
Facebook: facebook.com/daichi.monden
X (Twitter): @pokopenmon

PHOTO: Mariko.A/STUDIO TALES

In Yokogawa, an old quarter of Hiroshima, a three-story townhouse has been given a second life. Its rooms — renovated, yet still holding the grain of the old building — are where Karin Noda works, under the name Yokogawa Guild. Born in Hatsukaichi, she trained in ceramics and later wrote essays before she arrived at the material that would hold her: cloth. A kimono long asleep at the back of a drawer becomes a bag, becomes a coat, and once again passes its days in someone’s hands.

Story Wear

Re:ADY B, the brand of SETOUCHI MIRAI DESIGN Inc., where Noda is representative director, calls this idea Story Wear. You wear the remade cloth together with all the time it has already carried, and because every kimono and obi is different, no two pieces are ever the same. Her ambition, though, reaches further than reuse. She means to change how the kimono itself is seen — to bring it out of the drawer and the formal occasion, past the old rules about who may wear what, and back into ordinary life, carried and used and lived with.

The Hands Behind the Cloth

The makers, too, are part of the cloth, in places that go unseen. The sewing, and the unpicking of each kimono thread by thread, are carried out across eleven Type B employment-support workshops in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima, Mihara and Fukuyama. Regardless of disability or gender, fair pay is given for the work done — the one thing Noda has refused to give up. Among the core members who sustain the brand are women raising children. A garment, in her hands, becomes a way for work itself to be shared more fairly.

A Craft You Can Carry

The MIKOSHI Series is emblematic. Its handles are made with the chasing techniques handed down in the kazari metalwork of Hiroshima butsudan, the traditional Buddhist altars of the region. Created with the long-established Yoshida Butsudan Kanagu Seisakusho, the brass fittings are meant to be polished and cared for by their owner; as they age, they can be taken off, re-polished, and brought back to shine. A traditional Japanese craft you can carry with you. The MIKOSHI Bag received a Gold award at the London Design Awards 2026 — the first time a Japanese company had been chosen in its category. The same thinking runs through the rest of the work: obi remade into clutch bags that can be worn eight ways or more, card cases, jackets and long coats cut from inherited kimono, each one unrepeatable.

The Building, and What Comes Next

Yokogawa Guild is more than a workshop. The old townhouse now holds several small ventures under one roof, and Noda plans to open its ground floor as a shop, so that the pieces can be met in the same place they are made. Her work has been taken up by national programs for founders and carried abroad, but its center of gravity stays here — in a building that, like the cloth she remakes, has been given another life.

Whether You Will or Will Not

The company’s philosophy is to create design that changes lives. Noda’s own motto is quiet and clear: not whether you can or cannot, but whether you will or will not.
In a single piece of cloth, the time of those who wove it, wore it, and let it go has quietly gathered. Karin Noda’s work keeps that time from being thrown away. For the things thought to have outlived their purpose, and for the hands long overlooked, she makes a place to belong. In the cloth, there are people.

Where to Find Re:ADY B

Online store: readyb.store
Instagram: @ethical_ready.b
SETOUCHI MIRAI DESIGN Inc.: sfdesign.co.jp
Photography: Mariko Akimoto / Studio Tales

Long before “multimedia artist” became a job title anyone could claim, OOF — born Jaïs Elalouf — was already doing the thing itself: mixing sound, image, text, and other people’s attention into something that could only exist live, in a room, for the length of a show. He started DJing in 1992. Three decades later, the pseudonyms have multiplied — Zzouf, Lunivers, JAÏS, and now simply OOF — but the underlying instinct hasn’t changed: take fragments that don’t obviously belong together and make them cohere, just long enough for an audience to feel it.

A DVJ before the word existed

OOF’s core practice is Cinémix — an audiovisual performance format he built around mixing music, film footage, and dialogue live, without a script deciding where any of it lands. Les Inrocks described the result as a mix “perfectly settled,” where “images, sound and dialogs amaze instantly.” He has taken the show to more than 40 countries and performed it over 500 times, from festival stages like Montreux and Burning Man to the Grand Palais in Paris, where he and his band performed as part of the “Solutions COP21” event — an evening built around the same electro-documentary project that produced his 2016 EP as JAÏS, “Infinie Expansion.”

Across roughly 70 films — mash-ups, animated shorts, documentaries — he has treated the moving image as raw material rather than a finished product. Commissions have come from institutions with almost nothing in common with each other: Le Forum des Images, the aviation group Safran, the Maison Rouge museum, the National Film Board of Canada (a large-scale projection mapped onto a 50-meter church using Norman McLaren’s footage), and in 2019, France’s National Audiovisual Institute (INA), for a project on the origins of electronic music made in duo with J.B. Dunckel of AIR. As an associate artist at Le Centquatre in Paris, he also produced the “Nuits Ouf,” large-format night events, and conceived “Dance Conscious,” a video project aimed squarely at the machinery of consumer capitalism — industrial food waste, fossil fuel dependency, the quiet guilt of getting on a plane.

A Tokyo and Kyoto chapter

OOF’s connection to Japanese art is not a recent interest. In his twenties, he spent time working as a DJ in Tokyo and Kyoto — a period that, by his own account, gave him a lasting familiarity with Japanese artists. It shows up on his own shelves: among the psychedelic and outsider-art volumes he keeps close at hand is “100 Posters of Tadanori Yokoo,” a collection dedicated to the celebrated Japanese graphic artist, whose hallucinatory, boundary-crossing posters helped define Japanese psychedelic and pop art from the 1960s onward. It reads, in hindsight, like an obvious point of kinship — Yokoo built a visual language out of colliding references in more or less the same way OOF builds a set. The connection continued professionally: in 2004, when the Cinémix album was released in Japan, OOF returned for a dedicated Japan tour.

A collector who built an archive of the overlooked

Parallel to his music and video work, OOF has spent decades assembling one of the more significant private collections of psychedelic art — more than 8,000 pieces. It is not a passive collection. He has curated roughly 60 exhibitions drawing from it, at venues including the Biennale de Lyon, La Grande Halle de la Villette, New York’s Outsider Art Fair, and the LSD75 festival in Basel. In 2017 he launched Psychedelic.fr to give the movement a dedicated home online. His work in this space also lives on lucydelic.com, alongside shop.lucydelic.com and psychedelick.com. He is now working to build the Psychedelic Art Center, a future permanent home that would house the collection inside immersive spaces of his own design — the Cinémix instinct applied to a museum rather than a stage.

He also founded Ping Pong, a music PR agency, in 1998 — a business that has represented Ninja Tune, among others, for some fifteen years. It sits a little oddly next to the rest of his work until you notice the pattern: whether the medium is a nightclub set, a gallery wall, or a press campaign, OOF’s role keeps landing in the same place — the person who makes sure something gets seen, heard, or understood, and usually by connecting things that arrived separately.

A discography built on aliases

His recorded work spans roughly fifteen mixtapes under the Acid Test series, the album Cinémix (Universal), and a string of alter egos: Zzouf, a breakbeat project released on Tru Thoughts in 2004; Lunivers, whose 2013 single “Happy Route” became a Radio Nova playlist fixture; and his most recent name, simply OOF, aimed in a more musical direction than his earlier audiovisual work. Télérama has called him “certainly the finest specialist in psychedelia in France.”

Be the Change

His most ambitious current project, “Be the Change,” is a transmedia film built around a single question put to roughly 80 people around the world: what is, in your view, the solution to changing the world? It is, in miniature, the same working method that runs through everything else he makes — gather what other people are willing to give, and build the container that lets it be seen.

Why this matters for Human Light

Human Light exists to record the presence of people who are living and working right now, before that presence gets smoothed into something generic. OOF’s work is, almost literally, about resisting that smoothing — collecting the art movements, footage, and voices that official culture tends to file away as marginal, and insisting they still have something to say. A man who has spent thirty years mixing other people’s fragments into something legible is, in his own way, already doing what this archive is trying to do.

photo: Mariko.A/ StudioTales

Before he was an artist, Artist G studied the brain. Born in Lebanon in 1971, he holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and for years he taught cognitive science and art theory at a university in Beirut — a position from which he watched, at close range, how the mind constructs bias, category, and belief long before a person is aware of choosing anything at all. It is not a background artists usually claim. But it is the key that unlocks almost everything Artist G has made since.

In 2009, he published Can One Man Save the (Art) World?, a book that marked his shift from studying cognition to intervening in the institutions that shape it. A year later came Mr. Obaidi and the FAIR SKIES® Corporation, which took the neuroscience of racial bias and set it directly against the closed logic of conceptual art — not as illustration, but as confrontation. The gesture was already unmistakable: Artist G was less interested in making objects than in making the mechanisms of looking, judging, and valuing visible.

By 2013 he had left the university altogether to work on art full-time. What followed reads less like a conventional exhibition history and more like a two-decade experiment in where the artwork actually resides — and who gets to be part of it.

A career built on other people’s presence

In 2011, invited to the 54th Venice Biennale as curator and commissioner of the Lebanon Pavilion, Artist G created institutional void in the Arsenale — a direct address to Yves Klein’s legacy, and to the empty space at the center of art’s own institutions. It was a rehearsal for the questions he would spend the next decade asking more insistently: who is allowed to be seen, and on whose terms.

The Better World Project, begun in 2013 across Europe and the Gulf states, gathered portraits and interviews from ordinary people rather than public figures — a project he later extended, in 2014, into a Palestine Edition timed to the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. That same year, working with GulfLabor.org’s “52 Weeks” campaign, he began Signing with Light, a performance-photography project confronting the labor conditions of the migrant workers building the Gulf’s new museum cities — the people whose hands raise the institutions that rarely raise them in return.

The pattern continues in Life Uninterrupted (Italy, 2017), where participants contributed objects, words, and gestures that Artist G rendered as semiotraces — symbolic marks turning an entire room into a shared, authored narrative. Across every project, the same premise holds: the finished object is not the point. The person who steps into the work, and what they choose to leave there, is.

A project bound for space

Since 2020, Artist G has worked under the A R K project — space-bound, quite literally, in intent. Its recent chapter, Power Portraits for Healing, is a series of portraits framed as instruments of emotional and physical well-being, later minted as large-scale mosaic NFTs and auctioned for charitable and institutional causes. Artist G describes the project’s ultimate gesture in strikingly literal terms: the portraits, encoded directly into synthetic DNA, sealed inside a capsule small enough to fit in the palm of a hand — with a trace of each participant’s DNA held within it in a capsule no larger than a fingertip — destined eventually for deep space, following in the footsteps of the Voyager missions and the Golden Records they carry. It’s a symbolic act of sending humanity’s record of resilience — its willingness to be healed, and to be seen — beyond the reach of any single institution or archive on Earth. It is a strange and moving extension of the same impulse that drove his earliest neuroscience-inflected work: the record of a life, or a wound, or a moment of contact, does not have to disappear.

In a 2021 interview with Cittadellarte, Artist G put the purpose of A R K plainly: it is “an archive project intended for the future advent of an artificial intelligence that will ask itself, What is it to be human?”

Now based in Paris and increasingly active online as “A R K by G!” (@theartistGR), Artist G continues a practice that has moved through Beirut, the Gulf, Rome, and Venice without ever quite settling into a single medium — photography, writing, performance, and what he calls meta-artistic intervention all serve the same end.

Why this matters for Human Light

Human Light exists to record the presence of people who are living, right now, before that presence is smoothed into an image the way generative AI increasingly smooths every face into something else. Artist G’s own trajectory — from a scientist mapping how the brain fabricates bias, to an artist who insists that the people in front of the camera are co-authors, not subjects — is an unusually precise mirror of that concern. He does not just document presence. He has spent two decades building structures, from Venice to deep space, designed to make sure it cannot be erased, simplified, or owned by anyone but the person who lived it.

A R K portrait: Lisa Mimura

Each A R K portrait is drawn freehand in one continuous line — a short act of attention held between two people for as long as the sitting takes. Lisa Mimura, founder of My Japan in Hiroshima, was featured in Human Light: Lisa Mimura, My Japan — Kept Alive by Hand.

Photo: Mariko.A / StudioTales

Thursday afternoon, March 26, 2026.

65 rue des Grands Moulins, Paris 13th arrondissement. That day, the halls of INALCO — the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations — were filled with Japanese from morning on. The Journée du Japon, the annual event organised by the student association Dejima. Koto, taiko, calligraphy, matcha — people who love Japanese culture, friends of performers, families and curious visitors of all ages, gathering in the building for one day.

À 15 heures, Stéphane Ferrandez et le Gang du Zabuton sont entrés dans l'auditorium.

The first thing they did was not rearrange the chairs.
They placed a single cushion at the centre of the stage. That was all.
When Stéphane began to speak, something shifted in the room.

This year, four performers received their rakugo names.
Gattchiri Zabuton (Alain Marras), Kosumosu Zabuton (Émeline Aelig), Shôjiki Zabuton (Alexandre Cyprien-Scerri), and Kiryoku Zabuton (Mycki-kun).

The stories are adapted by Sandrine Garbuglia, who transforms the group’s translations into full French-language rakugo scripts.
Rakugo lives and ends on that one cushion. Armed with only a fan and a small cloth, the storyteller plays multiple characters alone, shifts scenes, weaves laughter and silence. No set, no lighting design. All that is needed is a voice, a body, and someone to listen.

In Paris, before a room full of people drawn together by their love of Japan — French performers bringing a classical Japanese art to life. The scene had something of a quiet miracle about it.

The rakugo master Tatekawa Danshi once said:

Rakugo is the affirmation of human karma.

In a corner of Paris, a group of French performers are keeping that affirmation alive.

And it shows in everything Stéphane does.

To learn more about Le Gang du Zabuton, please see our first article here:
https://humanlight.world/en/sharing-the-spirit-of-rakugo-le-gang-du-zabuton/

Photography & text: Mariko Akimoto / Studio Tales

À quelques minutes de la station Saint-Paul, au 17 rue François Miron dans le 4ème arrondissement de Paris, un grand portail cochère ouvre sur une cour. Au-delà, une galerie.
Rare Gallery Paris 4.
Le panneau est modeste. Mais à l'intérieur, trois espaces répartis sur deux étages abritent des peintures, des photographies, des sculptures — et parfois de la musique. Doucement, ou avec énergie, ils entourent quiconque entre.
La personne qui a construit cet espace, et qui le maintient en fonctionnement, est Wilson Claude Balda.


Il se présente comme un “ militant culturel ”.”
Né en Bretagne, d'origines éthiopienne et béninoise, il a étudié à Brest et à New York avant de se tourner vers quelque chose ni académique ni corporatif : la culture vivante parisienne. Il a produit et animé des émissions de télévision sur France O, France 4 et Bastille TV. Il publie un magazine bimestriel distribué nationalement. Il photographie, compose, découvre des musiciens et les met en scène. À la galerie, il accroche les œuvres d'artistes du Japon, de Chine, du Sénégal, du Maroc et d'Iran aux côtés de celles de France — avec un égal respect pour chacune.
L'ampleur de ce qu'une personne peut porter est, au premier abord, tout simplement surprenante.

Sa philosophie tient en une seule phrase.
“Prive le cerveau d'oxygène, et il meurt. Prive-le de culture — idem.”
Ce n'est pas de la rhétorique. Pour lui, partager la culture n'est pas un divertissement. C'est quelque chose qui s'apparente plus à maintenir les gens en vie.
Rare Gallery Paris 4 est un espace d'exposition, une salle de concert intimiste, une salle de projection, un lieu de conversation et de rencontre. Il l'appelle “ un laboratoire des succès futurs ”. L'expérience continue aujourd'hui.

Il se promène dans le Marais en kilt écossais, reconnaissable de loin.
Bretagne. Éthiopie. Bénin. New York. Paris — plusieurs lieux et cultures portés dans un seul corps, debout sur les pavés de Paris, tenant la porte ouverte.
“Si vous avez une idée, envoyez un email rapide. Rencontrons-nous.”
Cette ligne sur son site web est peut-être la description la plus honnête de ce qu'est cette galerie.

Photographie : Mariko Akimoto

La lumière d'un conteur

“Paris est ma ville.”

Il le dit simplement, sans cérémonie. Et en marchant aux côtés de David Beaulieu dans les rues de Paris, on comprend exactement ce qu'il veut dire.

David est un acteur français basé à Paris. Formé au Cours Florent, l'une des écoles d'art dramatique les plus réputées de France, il est monté sur scène pour la première fois à l'âge de 16 ans et a joué jusqu'à 28 ans. La vie l'a ensuite mené vers la musique, l'écriture de chansons, le journalisme et les affaires, mais l'attrait de l'expression ne l'a jamais quitté. À 60 ans, il est revenu au théâtre. Il a notamment joué dans AKA (2023) et Esprit d'hiver (2022).

Il se déplace dans Paris avec une aisance discrète. Sur les quais de la Seine, à la Galerie Vivienne, dans les galeries du Marais — il appartient. Non pas en visiteur, mais comme quelqu'un pour qui la ville est tout simplement chez lui.

Pour David, l'art n'est pas une décoration. C'est une conversation. Il entre dans les expositions comme d'autres entrent dans un café familier - naturellement, sans hésitation.

Lorsqu'on lui demande quelle lumière il chérit le plus dans sa vie, il répond sans hésitation :
“L'amour, bien sûr. Je veux dire l'amour — et être aimé.”

Et qu’est-ce qui l’a le plus changé :
“Peut-être la perte de mon premier bébé, à l'âge d'un mois.”

Certaines lumières naissent de l'obscurité. Derrière la facilité et la chaleur se cache un homme façonné par la vie réelle — ses joies comme ses pertes.

Pour ce qui est du jeu d'acteur — qu'il se sente plus vivant sur scène ou à l'écran :
“Les deux. C'est toujours agir, avec quelques différences certes.”

Par un après-midi ensoleillé le long de la Seine, Notre-Dame s'élevant au loin, la ville s'immobilise un instant.
C'est le Paris que David connaît. Et dans ce Paris, il est bien vivant.

site web : https://davidbeaulieu.fr/

Photographie par Mariko / Studio Tales

Chihiro Nakamura n'a jamais étudié auprès d'un maître.

Pourtant, dès l'enfance, dès qu'un pinceau touchait du papier, quelque chose s'animait en elle. Année après année, les travaux réalisés pour les devoirs scolaires et les projets d'été ont été récompensés par des prix - non pas parce qu'elle avait été formée, mais parce que la sensibilité était simplement là, en attente.

Une carrière dans le design s'en est suivie. Mais lorsque le moment est venu de s'exprimer en tant qu'artiste de sa propre voix, il n'a jamais été question de savoir à quoi cela ressemblerait. Le pinceau a toujours été le sien.

Aujourd'hui, son travail est centré sur une chose à laquelle elle croit profondément : la beauté doit être vécue, et pas seulement admirée. Kimono, écharpes, sacs, éventails pliants - elle fait de ces objets sa toile, intégrant sa calligraphie et sa peinture à l'encre dans le tissu de la vie quotidienne. À travers sa propre marque, elle construit une vision de l'esthétique japonaise comme quelque chose à porter, à transporter et à ressentir - et elle est prête à apporter cette vision au monde.

Pour elle, la création n'est pas un acte paisible. Elle le décrit comme un état de tension extrême : tenir l'intention tout en restant aussi proche que possible de l'inconscient. Comme un pratiquant d'arts martiaux face à un adversaire, elle se tient devant le papier avec tout ce qu'il y a de calme et tout ce qui est en jeu. Ce n'est pas une partie de plaisir, dit-elle. C'est une prise de conscience.

L'ampleur de son travail correspond à la profondeur de son engagement. Lors de l'inauguration d'un jardin japonais dans la Principauté de Monaco, ses œuvres ont été accueillies avec un respect qui ne l'a jamais quittée - un moment de reconnaissance entre les cultures qu'elle n'a jamais oublié. À Fukuoka, on lui a confié un étage entier d'un hôtel nouvellement ouvert et on lui a demandé de le remplir de sens. Elle a réalisé une quarantaine d'œuvres dans des chambres, un restaurant, un salon de thé, un hall d'entrée et un lieu de retraite privé, ne décorant pas un espace mais lui donnant une âme.

Elle n'a pas fini.

Elle souhaite donner du mouvement à ses œuvres grâce à la technologie numérique et explorer de nouvelles dimensions avec des matériaux autres que l'encre. Mais au cœur de tout cela demeure la même conviction : l'esthétique japonaise s'inscrit dans le flux de la vie moderne, et il y a des gens partout, bien au-delà de ces rivages, qui attendent de le sentir.

Pour elle, le pinceau n'a jamais été un simple outil. Il a toujours été la façon la plus honnête qu'elle connaisse d'être en vie.

instagram : chihiro_kimono819

Texte et photographie : Mariko Akimoto