“What makes me come alive”

What is your first priority? What makes you come alive?

Five years ago I happened to get an inspiring book titled The Artist’s Way. The book said, “you can do what you really wanted to do.” I was moved by its strong message, because I had always put “what I had to do” ahead of “what I wanted to do.”

The book told me how to recover my original sense of integrity through awakening my inner creativity. According to the book, we all have an artist sleeping within us. The artist represents our own inner creativity. By spending quality time with the inner artist, we can listen to our honest voice telling us what we really want.

I accepted this advice and kept paying my special attention to my inner artist. I’ve finally realized what I really wanted to do: I AM eager to change the structure of this stupid world.

Do you remember how you felt on the 20th of March 2003 when the American and British armies invaded into Iraque ignoring UN resolution. I was so furious because even in the 21st century our humankind learnt nothing from the history and such brutal nonsense was repeated. At the same time I was so frustrated because we couldn’t stop the Iraq war in spite of our world-wide protest against the war.

I was so desperate to create a new system to make any brutal war, conflicts and genocide impossible. To do it, I needed to change myself first. I wanted to become a well-experienced independent person. So I quit my job as a teacher and went to UK. There I joined peace parades and traveled to several European cities by myself. I met many people of many nationalities and saw many things I had never seen before.

It was in 2005 that my political interest was suddenly connected with my artistic impulse. One day I joined a workshop held at a modern art museum in Tokyo. A Swiss book designer was invited as an instructor and gave our participants a homework to make our own original books in a free style. I made three kinds of book art works at home.

I made the first piece by pasting two same paperbacks of Nietzsche’s work, Ecce Home, back to back. Using a method of “cut and past” I made printed letters of the paperbacks jump out of the two-dimentional space of the text into the three-dimentional space of our reality. In the second piece I made use of George Orwell's famous dystopia novel 1984 as its basic material. Contrary to a dark view of the world in the original text, however, my work has a funny and warm atmosphere, which shows its determined resistance against a controlled society of "Big Brother" depicted in the novel.

In the last piece I folded a big poster which I got in a demo held in London. On the poster there are two pictures of little victims of the Iraq war: one is a young girl who lost her legs by a cluster bomb and the other is a baby lapped with dirty rag as if he were a rubbish. The last book tries to reveal the fact that our humanity has no future if our society never stop killing and wounding our children in wars because children always represent our future and hope.

I packed my philosophical and political views into these three pieces. While making these works, I was really feeling I was full of active creativity. I never forget deep satisfaction and freedom I felt when I completed them.

This was a starting point of my present creative activity. Since then I have continued many artistic activities including live performances and guerilla actions. I call myself a punk activist artist.

On the other side, I am greatly interested in the fusion between art and science. I always imagine that human beings cooperate with non-human beings such as supercomputers and some new creatures to overcome social problems. And I always dream our humanity develop infinite possibility of human brains by help of artificial intelligence. I create works of art to make my dream a reality.

Recently what Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung called “synchronicity” has been frequently happening. Now I believe that my encounter with the Toastmasters club is also an important part of the same process. The more creative I am, the deeper insight the world gives me. That’s why I enjoy my artistic activity, that makes me come really alive!

(This is based on a script of my icebreaking speech given on 16th October 2008.)