Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Today, I’m excited to share with you a project that our team has been working on for quite some time now. Our new children’s book, The Tsunami Violin, comes out on November 24, 2025.

Back in 2020, I wrote my first children’s book called “Pippy the Piano and the Very Big Wave”. Based on a true story, it tells how a church finds their beloved piano upside down and covered in mud and debris. But rather than throw it out, they decide to spend the enormous amounts of time and money necessary to fix it, and they give the piano new life. And even today, the church continues to tell this story through the many concerts they host there.

Now we are releasing our second children’s book, which this time tells the story about a violin. A young tree protects her town from the cold and harsh ocean winds. But when the tsunami comes, everything is washed away: family, friends, town. She’s lost everything, but then a master craftsman comes, a violin maker from Tokyo, and transforms her into something beautiful. Through her music and through her story, she brings encouragement and healing to all who hear it, a story of hope out of despair, life out of death, and new beginnings. Like Pippy the Piano, this book too is based on a true story. I’m fortunate to know Nakazawa-sensei, the violin maker, and also to have had the privilege of being involved in quite a few concerts with that violin.

It’s such a powerful story of redemption that I had to get it out there. This is a story worth telling. In this episode, I have a conversation with some of the members of our team who made this book possible, the beginnings of the book and the process along the way, and especially with the very talented Holly Rose Wallace, whose images and illustrations so powerfully tell this story.

So anyway, I know you’re going to love the book, and I hope this conversation into some of the background will help you enjoy it even more.

Well, today we are excited to share with all of you about this project we’ve been working on for quite some time now called The Tsunami Violin. And we have a number of us who are key players in getting this project together with us on the podcast. Can you all introduce yourselves one by one? Maybe Diane, you served as the project manager for this. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yes, I’m Diane Bakelaar, and I live in Nagoya, Japan. My husband and I run an arts ministry through an art gallery and meet people through the art gallery. I served as the project manager for this book.

Awesome. Now, most importantly, Holly Rose Wallace as the illustrator. Can you introduce yourself?

I don’t know about most important, but I’m Holly. I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. I did about a two-year internship in Nagoya, Japan, working with Diane and Peter Bakelaar, and then working on this project with Roger and others. This is my first illustration project, so it was really exciting to get to add this to my resume and work with the team on this project. But I’m a self-taught illustrator, and I’ve always loved the arts, so this is an exciting project for me.

Awesome. And, Verity, you’re on this call. Can you tell us your role in this project?

Hi, I’m Verity. I’m a London-based illustrator and designer specializing in book design. And I’m also preparing to move to Tokyo next year to work with Community Arts Tokyo as an arts missionary.

Very cool. Last but not least, we also have Tsumugu Misugi on the call. Can you introduce yourself?

Yeah. Hello. My name is Tsumugu. I’m a violinist and a composer living in Japan. I write music and record for Japanese animation and Korean dramas and things like that. I was happy and so privileged to be able to play on the tsunami violin with Roger a couple of years ago.

Now, in the introduction to this episode, I’ve given a little summary of what this book is about. But really to capture the essence of it, I wanted all of us here together because I think there’s something really special about this project, in how it all came together. There were many pieces. It wasn’t like I wrote this story and then passed it on to Holly to illustrate and then published it, but there were so many moving parts. And as each part came in, it made the book all that much more special. So why don’t we just start right at the beginning? So, Tsumugu, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you were first introduced to the tsunami violin?

I served as a volunteer in Ishinomaki from 2012 and went back every summer until 2016. And so I had first-hand experience helping with relief work. And then I went to the States for college, and then I decided to move to Japan after college to pursue my work. And that was when I reconnected with Roger. And within the first, I think, maybe three months of me moving back to Japan, Roger was like, “Hey, there’s this project where we want to give about 10 concerts in Japan, and it would be awesome if you could play on this tsunami violin.” And that was the first time I had heard of the violin, but it’s very famous here in Japan, and I was very honored to be asked to play on the violin.

Yeah, I had gotten to know it at previous concerts, and then there was this church, a group of churches actually, up in Iwaki, who asked us to come and give concerts on the violin. And it really wasn’t until that time that it came together. I was like, “this is an amazing story to be told.” I mean, everywhere the violin goes, it doesn’t just give a concert, but its story is an essential part of that concert. Just bringing that hope, bringing that idea that there’s life out of death, that all things can be redeemed, even when you’re in the pit of despair. And to continually bring that violin into any crowd of people, really, it spoke, it said something. And I was like, “How can we tell this to more people, not just those at the concerts. What would that look like?” And that was when the idea came forth about making a children’s book. Now, of course, I am not a visual artist. I don’t have the means to do that, but it just so happened that God provided Holly at just the right time to begin having this conversation. Holly, what do you remember about those early conversations about this book?

I remember the first time that I met you, I was showing you some of my work, and you looked really excited. You’re like, I have an idea for my next children’s book, and I’ve been looking for an illustrator. And you asked if I do that. I was like, “Well, I haven’t, but it’s always been a dream of mine.” And so it was this perfect partnership of you needed an illustrator, and I wanted to illustrate. It all came together from there.

It started first with the two of us working on this project, but then I think things really got special when we brought in Anna, who isn’t on this call, and Diane to be part of the process as well. Actually, Diane, just before we started recording, you said something about that, just the idea of having more people involved in the project somehow made it better.

Yes, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea, the wisdom of the group, and how it’s statistically shown that when people as a group, when they’re working together well, they can make better decisions than an individual, even if that individual is an expert in the area. I certainly saw that with this project. Everybody was bringing their strengths to the table, and everyone in the group was able to listen and not hold on to their parts so tightly that they weren’t able to hear suggestions and improvements. That was really impressive to me how everyone was very humble and very willing to work together, and it just made the project so much better.

Yeah, I really enjoyed our times together. Once every two weeks or so, we all had our roles. Mine was officially words. Holly was images. Verity was, I think, everything artistic.

Not at first…

At first, what was your role?

At first, I was thinking when I came in that I’d be taking on a design role of doing stuff with how the text looked and how the cover looked. Then my input grew from there, for sure.

Yeah, it sure did. It was fun to see this project be born out of our time together. The idea was, how do we tell this story in the best possible way? What words do we use? What images? Are there things we can do with the text? Maybe we should add a frame here or take one out here. To be talking about that creatively as a group was some of the magic of this project, I think.

Yeah, definitely. I think the first ever meeting we had about this project, Diane was there on Zoom, we were sitting on the floor in this apartment which had no furniture, which is why we were sitting on the floor. But we were going through some of the sketches that Holly had done and some of the writing and stuff. For a while, I’d been working in the creative industries. In the creative industries, I definitely feel like your role gets isolated from the rest of the creative process, particularly as a designer, where you do your thing that you’re told to do, but you don’t have any input in how the rest of a creative project, a book, for example, looks like. I was coming from that into this project where we were all like, you were asking my opinion on the text and stuff, and I was a little bit worried about stepping on your toes. That was a really special moment for me. It was, I think, maybe my first week or two in Japan. I was like, Oh, this is something different here. What the team is doing here is different. It was a good moment.

Yeah, it was. Anna said you can’t publish a book without a cat in it. And that was just so much better. So we had this cat, and there’s this yellow bird that flies through the scenes and came to represent the Holy Spirit flying through and having a presence all throughout the story. And I think we were just having fun with it. It wasn’t just about practical things, but about what we can creatively do that would be fun, not just for us, but for the reader as well.

For me, I feel like it is something that’s natural to the creative process, but I feel like it came together in quite a non-linear way. I remember we brought in the idea of the music as in the images of music in the text, not right at the beginning, one of the opening paragraphs of the book is about the music of nature that the tree hears, which obviously it’s a book called the Tsunami Violin, so it makes sense to have those musical images. But it wasn’t something that we came up with until we talked through the project a little bit, and then we started thinking about how we could bring in those images and make it flow more cohesively.

Yeah, it became a theme throughout the whole book. It was actually someone else who wasn’t on this call who came up with an idea. They said, “One of the special things about children’s books is when phrases are repeated over and over.” It has a special power when you’re reading a children’s illustrated book. And I was like, oh, that’s like choruses in songs, right? I mean, you sing the verse and then the chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and the chorus keeps getting repeated. And I think that’s one of the beauties of this book now. It didn’t start that way at all, but to have this repeating course of the music of the town. In fact, we have it on the back cover here, “The rhythm of the waves, the song of the birds, the whistling of the wind, and the hum of the town,” She has it in the beginning, and then she loses it because of the tsunami. And then how does she get that back? And it’s through the work of this master craftsman, this violin maker who makes her into this beautiful thing that she didn’t know was possible. Through her music and through her story, the people are hearing the music of her town again.

I think that was another thing that I found quite exciting about working on The Tsunami Violin. I’ve never done a kid’s book before. Community Arts is not like a publishing house that specializes in children’s books. But it was quite exciting to just be like, “Well, let’s figure out how to do this,” exploring all of these ideas. I guess, I think for me, coming into that, I felt like I was breaking new ground creatively, having to think outside of the box that I find it easy to put myself in, having to think more broadly about what could I do and what can we do as a team.

Two creative challenges that I remember: the one in particular was when the violin maker looks into the box and visually how to do that and how poor Holly was trying so hard to do this.

Yeah, we really messed her up.

But anyway, and I think that is an example of where the group working together really helped. The page, I think, is very successful looking. But boy, that was a lot of hard work. Then the other aspect was because this is both in English and Japanese and how when it’s translated into Japanese, the words are longer, takes that much more space. Then again, having to adjust visually for creating more room. Anyway, there are just a lot of challenges along the way.

Holly, what do you think about all that as the illustrator of this book?

It’s all true! It was hard, but it’s all part of the creative process, is the back and forth and trying to work out how to make it look best. I think for me, it was a challenge because I wouldn’t really consider myself a digital artist, primarily. That’s not really my preferred medium. So this was a new experience for me in that sense. I had done digital work before, but I have very little experience and all self-taught. So that was one learning curve for me. And then the theme of the book being with a violin, but she starts out as a tree. For me, that was another challenge because I haven’t spent much time drawing trees. And so I’m like, Okay, I need to figure out the anatomy of a tree, and not just any tree, but specifically a Japanese pine. So there was a lot of back and forth trying to figure out what style to use and how to translate that into a children’s style. And then when she becomes the violin, coming up with that character design was a lot of fun for me. I had to watch a documentary on how violins are created because that was another thing. I don’t usually draw violins for fun. So that was another challenge to overcome, but it’s so much fun to do. And I think the cat, too, was a lot of fun to incorporate. And I went back and forth a lot with thoughts and ideas of how to design the cat and the bird. But I think what I finally came down to was just designing the cat to look like my cat, especially since I was living in Japan at the time, and my cat was back in America. So it was a fun way to feel connected to my cat.

My favorite is at the back when the cat is actually playing the violin.

It’s like one of my favorite scenes in the whole book.

That was one of my favorites to draw.

Actually, to the right of the cat is a young man that looks like Tsumugu to me. I don’t know, Holly, if you were actually looking at a picture of Tsumugu at the time, but it looks really like him. So that makes me happy.

Your moment of fame, Tsumugu.

Yes, just happy to make a cameo in the book.

Yeah, you’re not getting any commission for this, by the way. We’re just using your image.

That’s fine. I give full consent.

How generous. Actually, one of the things that I really like that you did, Holly, is the illustration of the tsunami. And that was something that we went back and forth on quite a lot. But there’s a scene in the book where the tsunami first appears, and it’s quite scary. I’m holding up a picture for these guys. It’s supposed to be quite a scary moment of this huge wave towering on the horizon. We went back and forth a lot on how to… First of all, how to make it look scary, but also should this tsunami be sentient? Should it be anthropomorphic the way that the tree and the violin are? We ended up settling on a design that references the Great Wave, the Hokusai famous woodprint. I think that it’s a really effective image as a result because it’s a very clear reference. The image in the Great Wave is also tsunami, I think. But then I think it’s interesting to how that connects people who aren’t as familiar with Japan and with Japanese culture because it’s such an internationally recognized image. I was speaking in front of a church on Sunday and I showed them the cover. People came up to me at the end and they were like, Oh, yeah, the wave. We reused the image in a composite with some other illustrations on the cover. And people were like, Oh, yeah, the wave is really cool. They remembered the connection with the great wave. And I feel like it’s just an interesting way of how you can connect with different audiences through those visual references.

Yeah, I agree. I’m so glad that people recognized it and saw that that was the inspiration. That panel was so challenging because I didn’t want to do a direct copy of the Hokusai wave, but I definitely wanted to draw inspiration from it. And it’s also the angle that it’s at, the wave is coming right at you. And I think that adds to make it scarier, make it more frightening for readers because it’s like, Oh, the wave is coming directly at me, off the page in a sense. But typically when you see illustrations of waves, like when I was looking for references, there are no pictures of waves coming directly at you. It’s always at some angle. And so that was something that took a lot of time to figure out, Okay, how do I interpret this into a visual representation of just this? But I’m really happy with how it turned out and happy for all of your guys’ input.

When I’ve shown that image to beta readers, they’re like, wow. I mean, wow. They were just speechless because it’s just so effective. But my favorite image is the one where you only did the two big eyes, where she’s at the low point of her life. She’s lost everything, and now she’s been cut up, and she’s thrown in this box, and doesn’t know where she’s going. The way you’re able to express all of that in just the two eyes, I think, is so effective. When I’ve been showing it to people, that’s always the page I show first. Like, look at these eyes. They’re like, oh, it’s just so cool. In this whole medium of children’s illustrated art, how you’re not trying to be literal. You can through the medium, through the language of children’s art, you can tell something in different ways. I think just looking at the eyes tells the whole story.

That’s so funny that’s your favorite page because that was the easiest one to do. That was one of the things in the character design for me that it’s so important, the eyes, because that’s what people are going to look at the most and what’s really going to bring the character to life. So I spent a lot of time trying to design those eyes and the eyelashes specifically, I was inspired by the F hole on the violin, so you could see that on the eyelashes of the character. But I thought that that was a fun little thing to add.

Holly, I was wondering about the colors that you chose. I love the colors in the book. Just what was your hope or thinking behind how you chose your colors?

I feel like it was really a team effort choosing the colors. But then, of course, some of the colors just come naturally. Because this is based on a true story, I was pulling colors a lot from just the reference images, but then trying to brighten them to make it more visually pleasing and more exciting for children. And all readers. But it was really interesting how naturally a palette came to be. It was a lot of browns and blues and greens, and just looking at them all side by side, it was like, yeah, there’s definitely a clear palette. But that came about really naturally, which was cool.

Yeah.

I have the actual physical book with me now, and the colors feel very alive. So it’s really nice to see it. Very vibrant.

Nice. Can I talk a bit about the audience? I find it really interesting that you picked a children’s book as the medium to publish this because people who are older than teenagers would have experienced or would have seen the tsunami. But children, the target audience for this book, are people who’ve never experienced. They haven’t seen the tsunami.

They weren’t alive when it happened.

Yeah, exactly. I think it’s so interesting that you picked children to spread this story and this message. I feel like it’s a good way for them to learn about the tsunami as well as the aftermath of what happened. Also, especially for international audiences, I feel like it might be something that is so far away and so detached from them, but there’s still such a powerful story in the aftermath of it.

Yeah, the violin maker, he met with the Emperor himself, and the Emperor said, “Oh, I’m so glad that you’re doing this because people are going to forget, and they need to remember what happened.” And that is essentially what his project, the violin, tsunami violin, continues to do, and that’s what we’re trying to do through this.

I was telling one of my Japanese friends that this was in the middle of the project, and I’m working on this project. She’s Japanese, and she had no idea about the tsunami violin. She didn’t know what it was. So I explained the story. She just looked at me and said, This is such an important story. This is part of our history. We’ve got to keep it alive. That was her reaction to the whole thing.

I think that it’s interesting. Perhaps we haven’t talked about this as a group, but it’s interesting to think about how this being a real event that really shapes people’s lives, all of the tragedy. And also, I feel like shapes the Japanese consciousness as well. I feel like it’s very much something in the minds and hearts of Japanese people. When we think about going through such a traumatic event, even as children, when children go through traumatic events, then there is this process of not being able to go back to what you were before. So experiencing something that is irreversible and coming out of that as a changed person. And that’s what happens to the tsunami violin is that the story is of her, not like she’s able to go back to the way she was when she was a happy and innocent child, but that she goes through something and she becomes something beautiful and something recognized by other people, but that she’s not able to go back to the way that she was. I feel like that’s actually a realistic view of trauma. I think that that’s quite a good thing to acknowledge, even for children, that just because you go through something doesn’t mean that you’re irreversibly broken, but that you can become something else.

Yeah, so good. I think we better end our time here. Thank you all so much for sharing with me and with our listeners. It’s just really a special project. We are excited to be able to launch it to all of you on November 24, and I hope that you’ll be able to pass it on to your friends as well. This story of redemption in a way that I think can reach audiences in any culture, any country, is just so important and we need to be repeating this story to others as well.

You’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith podcast. The Tsunami Violin is available for sale on November 24 wherever you buy your books online. Please pick up a copy for yourselves and tell your family and friends about it as well. In fact, maybe it will also make a great Christmas present. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne!” We’ll see you next time.