Tsukiyo to Syonen, will be restarting its web media “Miraiken” from spring 2020. During this time, we would like to feel the breeze that blows towards the sphere of the future through the words of artists.
Compared to 10 years ago, we are constantly being chased by information that is fervent in both speed and quantity. It is as if thousands and tens of thousands of ‘me,’ ‘right here,’ and ‘right now’ are filling up even the tiniest spaces of this room. How long have we been feeling this oppressive sense of suffocation?
In 2011, the big earthquake and the explosion of the nuclear plant shook the only world I believed in. Are art and music effective means of expression in this world? I started asking artists around me ‘What are some things you’d like to preserve for the future, a hundred years from now?’
The words that they expressed for the future, certainly had a significant impact on me. To think of the future, is to have hope for the future. It is to shift your imagination towards somewhere other than ‘right here,’ ‘right now.’ We long to connect our thoughts with the distant future where we do not exist.
‘Miraiken,’ meaning ‘the sphere of the future,’ is a word by Kenji Miyazawa (Japanese novelist and poet of children’s literature).
For the Students / Kenji MIyazawa
To the students in middle school,
Do you not feel the breeze blowing from,
This dashing sphere of your future,
The breeze so transparent and clean,
It is a light beam sent upon,
A determined breeze of the south.
Do you wish to be forced and led by this era,
To be submissive like slaves.
To speak only from the documents of history and geology of today,
From our ancestors to us,
People have seen all beliefs and special traits as,
Mere results of misunderstandings,
And even now, science is subject to ignorance,
Guaranteeing us only suicide and despair.
And so, instead, students,
Create another era that is new and right,
Students,
When the navy-colored horizon line swells and rises,
Do you wish to sink yourself inside it?
You must, for this horizon,
Be the mountains that come in all shapes.
The universe continues to change through us,
To say that someone is more than the other,
Or whose job is what,
How is there any time to say such things?
New poets,
From the clouds, from light, and from storms,
Acquire transparent energy,
And hint to the people and Earth on what to incline towards.
The Copernicus of the new era,
Free this galaxy,
From the overly oppressive laws of gravitation.
All kinds of agricultural labor,
That are done as if by impulses,
Should, by cold and transparent analysis,
With its indigo blue-colored shadows,
Be raised to become a field of dance.
The Marx of the new era,
Change the structure of this world, moved by these blind impulses,
Into something wonderful and beautiful.
The Darwin of the new era,
Even board an Oriental Challenger that calmly observes,
Reach beyond the galaxy system as well,
To show us geography that is transparent, in-depth and right,
And a revised and expanded version of biology.
Roughly based on statistics,
Out of you students, there must be at least a thousand geniuses,
Those of you with the makings to be one should indulge in bringing them out.
The tide, the breeze…
You must use up all the powers of nature,
And make efforts to shape a new nature.
Oh, students, right now,
Do you not feel the breeze blowing from this dashing sphere of your future,
The breeze is so transparent.
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