Hi everyone, my name is Ko Hayakawa.
After Mr. Ito's brilliant speech, I'm a little bit nervous but thanks for coming.
(applause)
As mentioned before, I've been doing community activity in the foot of Mt.Tsukuba.
The area of foot of Mt.Tsukuba is a really interesting place,
but I think it's hard for you to have an image.
What I'm doing here is the Preservation and Activation of an old house called "Yanaka-House".
I think, when people hear the words "heritage or old building preservation",
maybe you think it's too restricted, formal
or it's a job of educational committee or job of old people.
Today, I'd like to provide some ideas
to break your image about the things like cultural heritage or historical viewings.
How many people are living in Tsukuba now?
Ok, almost everyone.
What kind of image do you have for Tsukuba?
Science academic city,
Robot,
the town of Tsukuba Express,
or the town of University of Tsukuba
Do you know Tsukuba is called a town of bread?
So there are many bakeries here.
Or some elder people may say it's a town of Tsukuba Expo.
Before I entered the University of Tsukuba, it's called "inaccessible islands",
it was really tough to get to Tsukuba at that time.
By the way almost all of those images are about the science academic city, Tsukuba.
But when we talk about the old Tsukuba city in Kanji, the old historical towns,
Do you have any idea, except Mt.Tsukuba?
I guess many people have no idea about Tsukuba city, except Mt.Tsukuba.
Classifying with the new Tsukuba in Hiragana,
the old Tsukuba in Kanji has a lot of impressive landscape, history and tradition.
There are some towns which are listed in national important heritages.
There are old streets with houses of clay made storehouses.
We can track the history to the Man-yo era and that creates the beautiful landscapes.
That is the foot of Mt.Tsukuba.
By the way, now let me talk about myself.
My favorite foods is...
McDonalds!!
Especially I love Teriyaki Burgur.
(laugh)
The clothes I'm wearing now are...
UNIQLO.
What I want to say is,
when I was born, the old landscapes, traditional stuffs have already disappeared.
I grow up in the roadside town,
like those streets with supermarkets and people did shopping in the mall.
This is an effect of "Globalization" I think.
The global interchanging of human, things, information and money standardize people's minds, hobby and preference.
The Globalization makes the stream of human transportation becomes bigger and bigger.
And this makes people can create relationships with society only through their consumption.
European-American culture has been accepted and old tradition has been eliminated.
This is the phenomenon we have seen in Globalization.
At least for my generation, the society was already full of the globalization effect
and I love McDonalds since I was a child.
Based on this social background, I met Tsukuba in Kanji as a study subject in university.
When I met the landscape at first time, what I felt is...
"Nostalgic but New"
It's old but really new for us.
It was the first feeling that I was attracted by this area.
And this feeling let me start to do the community activity in this area.
The Hojo area was the center of politics and economy in the old Tsukuba, Tsukuba in Kanji.
In 1970s, it was a really flourishing town.
But when I started my research, it was already deserted like this.
What I did here is to create a community center using the old rice store's storage house.
I created new ice cream brand of famous Hojo rice.
I founded a student community to help local people in festival days,
and drink Sake and make rice balls with old local women.
This picture is the community center I said,
we serves coffee and created new ice cream here.
So, what if we communicate with local people in minds of "Nostalgic but New"?
For local people, they just spend their lives as usual.
Then through the communication with young people,
they found that "Common is New." (The common stuff for them is actually really NEW for young people.)
It was the first awareness for them.
It is because local people have never thought their lives are special or new,
it was so hard for them to aware the difference with young people.
So after our activity to those local communities,
finally the local people find that their lives are common but new for young people.
And that made our activities more easily.
At the time I thought I would like to create some interfaces between "Nostalgic but new" and "Common is New",
I met this old house, the old Yanaka-House.
This house was built in 1938 by a local businessman.
The house was empty for about 40 years and when the owner has changed, people decided to clean up this house.
So the students who were doing local activities are also involved in this.
Yanaka-house is a kind of interesting house.
It's old Japanese house but like this,
there is a sofa on Tatami or it is modern style but it has a Japanese garden.
It's hybrid house of Japanese and European style.
I felt maybe we could do some interesting stuff here so we decided to clean it up.
While the cleaning, I guess people think cleaning is not fun, not easy,
but this cleaning actually let us find a lot of interesting stuffs.
For example, this is Hibachi (Japanese fire bowl).
There are many hibachis here.
This means that because at that time there were not heating stoves,
we can imagine they put those hibachis near the foot of guests.
And this is Hot Water Bottle.
Maybe people use this to get warm.
Those old stuff could let us know the sense of lives at that times.
Although we asked professionals to repair some important parts of house,
basically we reconstructed the house by ourselves.
This is a picture that we repair the wall imitating other professionals.
And in this house there are lots of sliding doors, we took those out, washed and dried it.
The guy here said it's like an art. Anyway this is part of our activities.
It's hard to see but when we clean the corridor of the Yanaka-house, we used rice bran.
The reason why we used rice bran is the oil of rice bran is really useful to clean up the corridor, it can makes corridor glossy.
When I, I mean my generation, was born, vacuum cleaner was already appeared.
But the local people said this was really common for cleaning in their lives.
The rice bran was come from rice stores or farmers because they don't need it.
This means that in the old days, the society had a recycling and sustainable system.
Therefore, we can get the essence of living in the modern lives through the contact to old day's lifestyles and tradition.
Touching to old lifestyles would provide us "new" as a person living in modern lives.
Besides, the house also has a garden.
The garden also reminds us a lot of essence.
Especially for me, I found that I really didn't know flower names or tree names.
So I could just recognize that there were a lot of flowers and trees.
But after one year cleaning, I could say "oh, this is fragrant olive" or "this is white Magnolia liliiflora".
Maybe it's a common knowledge.
But for me knowing names of flowers and trees was really fresh experience and kind of culture shock.
So after we finished cleaning up, we started to gather people.
This is the picture of creating texture crafts and the right one is Origami letter's class.
This is also one of the communication activities of young people and local old people.
In addition, in Yanaka-House, we love to eat.
We use the kitchen in the house and make dinner together.
I think it's really rare for us to eat with people not family or not friends.
But here, we can eat together without caring about generation, sex, or even with people you met first time.
It was the atmosphere I never experienced before.
We also did some BBQ, baked sweet potato.
The local ladies sometimes cook some dishes for us.
It's red beans rice, and their original rice, cucumber pickles, maybe you can't imagine but it's very very delicious.
It's just daily meals for local people.
And this is Kenchin-chowder, which they must eat in viewing the full moon time.
But for me, I've never do this as usual custom, so at the first time I did this,
I finally understood how people spend full moon days in tradition or how to make a cucumber pickles.
Maybe it's common but it was new for me.
I think we would never have those experiences without the Yanaka-House.
After we finished the cleaning up, we started the guide tour to tell the stories of Yanaka-House.
To tell other local people or people in whole Tsukuba city that there is a brilliant building, heritage and cultural resources.
We also change the house into a theater and held a play and contemporary dancing show.
Through those experiences, we found that we can change the meaning of a place and create new values.
In conclusion, what we want to reconstruct is not difficult thing.
One is the building, the old-Yanaka-House.
The second is lifestyles, which alive in local community and we got this through eating with local people.
The third is new human relationships among any generation, sex, and region.
Finally, I want to say that, in this segmented and globalized society,
what we really want to reconstitute is the feeling of owning your lives by yourselves.
We did this on purpose and sometimes we just found it unexpectedly.
Yanaka-House is the place that "Nostalgic but new" and "Common is new" come across.
And this sense, "Nostalgic but new", will make people reconsider cultural heritage or resources.
It even could create new values for us.
Especially for young people, next time when you walk around Tsukuba, or your hometown, please reconsider that place in a fresh eye.
I guess there are some new discovers and some possibilities in our unpredictable days.
That's my feeling in daily activities.
It's small stuffs but maybe I can find something important for Tsukuba or even for global society.
Thank you for your listening!