Art Life Faith Podcast

This is the Art Life Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

I’m excited to announce to you that we just released a new book, Consolations of a Christian by Japanese writer Kanzo Uchimura. Written in 1893, it has never before been translated into English, which is surprising because this is the book that made Uchimura famous, instantly becoming a bestseller and launching his career as a writer. Here’s some backstory for this book. In 1890, the Emperor of Japan issued an Imperial Rescript on Education. Kanzo Uchimura was at that time a teacher in one of the top schools in the country, but he did not bow deeply enough to the Emperor’s signature on the document, for as a Christian, he saw this as a kind of idolatry. However, his fellow faculty members saw this as a huge sign of disrespect, and the press saw it as an act of treason. His name and face were plastered on newspapers across the country. He was fired from his job. His friends distanced themselves from him. He fell into deep poverty. And from all the stress, he got really, really sick, even to the point of death. While his wife was caring for him, she too got very sick, and then she died. This was especially crushing because they were newlyweds, having been married little more than a year.

Uchimura hit rock bottom in his life, but rather than giving up, he cried out to God in ink, brush, and paper, capturing the minds and hearts of so many with his uniquely Japanese understanding of the Bible. And his book came out during a time when Christian books were mostly just translated Western authors. This book is fascinating for many reasons, but I can tell you from personal experience that I was greatly encouraged working on this project, and so I know it can be a great consolation and comfort to you as well, and anyone going through a difficult time in their life.

Let me say a quick word about the translator. Chris Born is a longtime friend of our Grace City Church community here in Tokyo. First, he came for a year to work on his doctoral thesis on Uchimura, and during that time he and his family poured into the church community, helping with many of the ministries. Then he returned to the States, where he’s the Associate Professor of Japanese and Asian Studies at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. But he recently came back to Japan for post-doctoral research and to write a number of books including this one. Again, he and his family poured into the community, and even his oldest daughter worked with us as an intern, giving piano concerts, leading worship with her playing and singing, and helping out in so many ways. They go back to America this month, and we’re very sorry to see them go. They will be missed.

Let me also say a word about the cover designer, created by the immensely talented Emma Grace von Fange, one of the interns who worked with us this summer. She did such a beautiful job getting inspiration from the text and making it appealing while also giving a sense of what we find inside. It’s a very attractive cover and really a work of art. I’m so grateful for her hard work on this project.

Recently we had the launch day, and one of the church members threw a dinner party for the event. So I took a few minutes to sit down with a translator just before the party to invite all of you into the celebration. Here’s our conversation.

So today is the launch day of Consolations of a Christian by Kanzo Uchimura, translated by Christopher Born, who is sitting right next to me. Thank you so much for being with us tonight.

Thanks for having me, Roger. This is awesome.

Yeah, so we are meeting in a friend’s home downtown Tokyo. We’re going to have a launch party tonight. Some of us are already here preparing the food, and others are going to be arriving soon. You’re probably going to hear some doorbell ringing…

So pull up a chair and hang out with us.

I’m just so thankful that it’s finally out in the world as of today, July 13, 2026.

Wow. Unbelievable.

A lot of time has gone into this, hasn’t it?

Yes, from your own kind encouragement for me to follow through and get it done from about 10 years ago when I started it to bringing it to completion just now. It’s been quite a journey, but exciting to be part of it and also be working so closely with an amazing team. Really, you assembled a wonderful cover designer, and you’ve done so much of the editing.

She was great.

She was fantastic, and you put it together so quickly. I mean, you really have a lot of talent behind this project. You just made it pop and shine. I’m grateful.

I really like that about putting out books. It’s not just about the writer writing solo in a solitary room somewhere, but there are a lot of people who are part of the whole project and are excited for it when it comes out.

That’s right. It’s a big production team.

Yeah. So, how did you get into this project? Why did you translate this book?

So that’s a great story for me. I’ve been studying Uchimura since about 2009. When I was working at a seminary, and I was able to take courses while I was working there as like staff. I took a course called Christianity in East Asia because that was always interesting to me. And when I did my master’s in East Asian studies, we covered some tangential aspects about Christianity in the Meiji period and how it influenced social movements, how there was a big missions movement that helped grow women’s education and the YMCA, things like that, but we never focused on Japanese Christian thinkers. So this course was the first time I was exposed to an actual Japanese Christian thinker who not only originated a number of writings but also had his own theological perceptions from a Japanese perspective that he wanted to add to sort of global Christianity. And he really thought that if Japan learned about Jesus and became more Christian, it would be a light to the world. So I thought that was an interesting entryway.

Okay, so using Western years, when are we talking about?

Uchimura lived from 1861 to 1930. He became a Christian around 1873 when he went off to Sapporo Agricultural College, which is now University of Hokkaido, one of the larger state schools. And when he became a Christian, he realized monotheism was the answer to a lot of his problems because he had such a strong religiosity as a kid and would bow to every shrine and every temple. And as he got older as a student, he really still held on to those beliefs. But when monotheism was presented to him, he really didn’t want to become a Christian. He was sort of pressured into it, but he went along with it primarily because he said, well, there’s only one God I need to worship, then I don’t need to worry about all the other gods. So that I thought was interesting because Japanese are famously known for having 8 million gods or something like that.

Okay, so for those who don’t know their Japanese history, this is like the very beginnings of Protestant church planting in Japan.

Yes.

So he’s one of the first of modern Christians.

That’s right. Christianity was banned from about 1609 to 1872. In the interim, in 1859, there was some missions activity but it was kind of underground. Uchimura was a part of the early generation of the different bands. There’s the Sapporo Band and the Yokohama Band and the Kumamoto Band in Kyushu. So these were sort of early Christian groupings. Uchimura was from up north. But yeah, he was active in the 1890s when he came back to Japan. He had studied abroad in America in the 1880s and sort of grew. He was always good at English, but he went to, Amherst College and then went off to Hartford Seminary before realizing—

Near Boston.

Near Boston, yes. Northeast. In the book, you’ll see a lot of references to northeastern literature and sort of abolitionist thinkers. He loved them.

Yeah, actually that was fun for me because I grew up near Boston, so a lot of the things he’s mentioning only people in Boston know. Like Mount Monadnock, a mountain I climbed with my dad.

Does it look like Fuji?

Well, it stands on its own and it is kind of conical, but it’s really short. It’s not a very tall mountain at all. It’s more like a tall hill.

There you go. So even better comparison to how much more grandeur Fuji has, which he keeps referring to. But yeah, he loved the northeast. In his other book that was written in English called How I Became a Christian, or Diary of a Japanese Convert, he talks about his experiences in the northeast.

How can you explain why Uchimura is important? Why should we care? That was a long time ago.

As one of Japan’s earliest modern Christians—I mean, his collected works are 40 volumes. He was an important thinker for the time period. Not only did he write in a Christian vernacular of the time, he attracted a number of future authors who would become aware of Christianity, at least in terms of their own understanding of the world. Even if they didn’t become Christians, they embraced a partially Christian worldview or romantic worldview. So from a literary perspective, which is what my main focus of my academic work was on how he’s an important literary figure, but I knew that he was an important Christian figure. And for Japanese theologians in general, anybody who’s going to seminary knows who Uchimura is and has read him. Now, the reason this book is important is everyone suffers, right? Everyone has a hard time. We get sick. Our wives get sick. People die. People we love are gone in an instant. We don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like. We can lose our job. We can get canceled because of the things we say and do. Even if we’re speaking the truth, we get punished for it.

Mm-hmm.

Uchimura suffered for telling the truth as he saw it, and he was willing to take that on and be that lightning rod in a society that was quickly becoming anti-Western and anti-Christian. And especially in the mid-1880s when he was still in America, there was a big turn toward emperor worship and connecting the state to religion in a very strong way, and in the 1890s when the Imperial Rescript on Education came out and later the 1891 Constitution, they really pointed to the emperor as the Confucian father of the nation that everyone must worship and obey. And Uchimura’s like, “Look, I respect the emperor as much as the next guy. He is my sovereign, but I’m not going to bow down and worship him in that way.” And as a result, that made him become persona non grata. That turned him into an anti-patriot to like the worst of the worst, the most disloyal of the disloyal, and of course in a Confucian samurai heritage worldview, that’s terrible. Disloyalty is the worst thing, right? So Uchimura suffered as a result of his own public intellectual beliefs, and then as a result, he lost everything, and part of losing everything meant he had to reinvent himself, and so he became an author as part of that process.

One of my favorite parts of the book is in the afterword where he’s talking about when he was writing the book and an American missionary, came in and said, so Mr. Uchimura, what are you working on? And he’s like, well, I’m writing this book. And he’s like, oh, what are you translating? He’s like, no, I’m not translating. I’m writing it, my own words. And the missionary was, was surprised and like, how can you be doing that? I mean, because Christianity came from the West, what right do you have as a Japanese to write? That was the attitude of the time.

Yeah, it was a very culturally bound enterprise, reproducing Western culture, civilizing the world, so to speak. And many Westerners didn’t think Japan was civilized. They had no idea how civilized it was.

Yeah. And you were explaining to me earlier how he was trying to figure out what it means to be Japanese and be Christian because there wasn’t—

It’s an identity issue.

There wasn’t any literature at that time. They were only looking at translated Western literature. And so he was kind of delving into this to try to figure it out, right?

That’s right. When he did become a Christian, the amount of stuff they had at Hokkaido University or Sapporo Agricultural College was so small. The amount of things they had to work with were so small. They were just some tracts, a few— they had a Western Bible, they had some parts of the Bible translated that was still in process, and they had things from many different denominations, so they didn’t know what was what and which one to ally with. And he became a Christian through the Methodists, but in Sapporo you had a Methodist church and an Episcopal church, and he wanted to work with both, and sort of create an independent Japanese church in Sapporo, but there was really no way to do that. They had to make it up themselves. And when the Western missionaries who they borrowed money from got wind of this, they were like, “You have to give us all our money back because you’re not part of us anymore.” So they scrimped and saved and did everything they could to pay it back. So there is this sense that independence, Japanese theology from a Japanese perspective became his life’s work.

So Uchimura is part of the birth of the church in Japan. So to me, as a missionary here, it’s especiallyinteresting. This is the first time ever that this book is in English.

That’s right.

I mean, it was published in 1893.

Yes.

And it’s incredibly important to missionaries today, and yet there’s never been an English version. And you translated it from classical Japanese.

That’s right.

So it’s really difficult Japanese.

It’s really difficult. It’s a long process of learning to be able to parse all that out. There is a modern translation now, but the original I thought was best to go from and take it from Uchimura’s own words.

It uses a lot of characters that aren’t used anymore. You showed me your manuscript, which is a work of art, by the way, all your notes around all of his, all the earlier published version, but like, I don’t even know what to call that. I mean, just various characters that are…

Yeah, kyujitai. Most Japanese don’t read it. I was talking to some students earlier today at a campus here, just kind of explaining that this book’s coming out and what it’s about, and I think maybe one or two knew who Uchimura was, and they knew about this fukeijiken or this incident of disloyalty to the emperor, or lesè-majesté as they call it, but they said they’d never read him, and when I mentioned it’s all written in this kind of really classical style Japanese, they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t really read that.” Yeah, I imagine not. He’s still unknown, so we can also help people understand that you can get a modern Japanese translation too, but I think Americans especially who want to know more about Japan at that time and about sort of authentic Japanese Christians and just from the perspective of a very sensitive soul who loves God and is searching for answers to his pain.

Right, that’s what I love about this book. He’s not afraid to basically be cry out to God, Why are you allowing these things things? And trying to search for the answers as a Japanese person, not trying to look for pat answers, but asking in his context, really what’s going on, how can I apply to it? And it’s just so interesting?

Right? Because one of the most important questions any human being will ever ask is, who is Jesus Christ and why does he matter?

Right.

And Uchimura knew who he was and why he mattered, but in the midst of this sort of dark doldrums of the soul why Jesus really mattered wasn’t just a nice, you know, it’ll all be okay someday, and just being a Christian makes everything all right. No, it’s like, Lord, you are my God, and I’m imploring you to give me an answer and give me strength and understanding to get through this situation.

Okay, so now you touched on this briefly. It’s called Consolations of a Christian. Why is this book important to people who may have little interest in Japan?

Sure, well, it certainly is full of what we call classical allusions to both Japanese literature, nature, history, and culture that are written for a Japanese audience. So he wasn’t writing it for us. So as a foreigner looking in on that, we can get a glimpse on the conversation which Uchimura is having with his own people about Christianity.

And with himself.

And of course with himself, and with God, and all the other little demonic voices that are harassing him.

You know, one of the things I thought was really interesting about the book, you’ve mentioned to me in conversation just how there’s a number of places where he lists scripture verses, but he doesn’t print it out.

That’s right.

And you said it was your idea that perhaps it was because he was wanting people to open the Bible for the first time. Most of the people who read this book were not Christians.

That’s right.

Because he wanted people who didn’t know anything about Christianity, very few did at that time, to read this and become interested in the God of the Bible. And he really makes that clear at the end of the book, right? Especially on the last two pages. “We looked at different answers throughout this book, but it’s clear the Bible is going to offer these answers that you really are searching for. God has those answers. Don’t stop until you find those answers.” That kind of thing.

That’s right. All of his literature points back to that. He doesn’t waver on that one bit. And in fact, he devoted his life to becoming a journalist for a while. He wrote for the Yorozu Choho for about 5 years, which was kind of like a New York Post or a LA Times kind of magazine, a little bit sensationalist but very political. He was the English language editor of that for a number of years until he decided to quit that and start his own work, which was called Seisho no Kenkyu (the Study of the Bible). And it was a magazine that he put out, which was all his own reading, parsing, interpreting the Bible and applying it to daily life.

To the general public, right? Not only to churches or Christians, but to everybody?

A lot of people were reading this even if they weren’t Christian. They were curious. Consolations of a Christian was a bestseller. And then as a result, he became hired as a journalist, then those copies of Yorozu Joho were also circulating, and then Seishun no Kinkyu as well. So, he really did use the words that he wrote as a way of reaching people in an evangelical way and pushing them to look at the Bible. That’s what all his life was about.

Well, this book was very meaningful for me. The fact that he, in the lowest point in his life, that he would turn to writing, crying to God, and trying to bring the nation along with him to cry out to God. He didn’t fall into despair, but he gave that anguish to God.

Yes.

And that’s just such an important message for all of humanity.

Yes.

You know, anywhere in the world, we all suffer.

That’s right.

And the fact that he writes a whole book addressing that and trying to help us turn to God through that is so important.

Yeah, because the Bible says God draws near to those who are suffering, and we suffer with Christ. But Christ was there with him in that suffering. In that moment, he knew it, but he had to put that anguish towards and use it for something. And that’s what’s really cool. He never wasted the experiences he had. He says it’s not my autobiography, but it’s a record of an authentic person who’s trying to struggle with being Christian. I think that’s gorgeous.

So I hope many of you who are listening to this will download this book, either buy the paperback, buy the hardcover, buy the ebook, go get the Kindle. It’s such a blessing that you’ve done this. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for working with me and giving me the opportunity.

Yeah, so I guess we better get this party started.

Let’s enjoy this gathering around this table in many ways similar to what Uchimura would have done.

All right, so thank you for talking with us now.

Thank you. Thanks so much.

You’ve been listening to the Art Life Faith Podcast. You can pick up a copy of Consolations of a Christian by Kanzo Uchimura wherever you buy your books online. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne!” We’ll see you next time.

This is the Art Life Faith Podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

I’m excited to announce to you that we just released a new book, Consolations of a Christian, by Japanese writer Kanzo Uchimura. Written in 1893, it has never before been translated into English, which is surprising because this is the book that made Uchimura famous, instantly becoming a bestseller and launching his career as a writer. Here’s some backstory for this book. In 1890, the Emperor of Japan issued an Imperial Rescript on Education. Kanzo Uchimura was at that time a teacher in one of the top schools in the country, but he did not bow deeply enough to the Emperor’s signature on the document, for as a Christian, he saw this as a kind of idolatry. However, his fellow faculty members saw this as a huge sign of disrespect, and the press saw it as an act of treason. His name and face were plastered on newspapers across the country. He was fired from his job. His friends distanced themselves from him. He fell into deep poverty. And from all the stress, he got really, really sick, even to the point of death. While his wife was caring for him, she too got very sick, and then she died. This was especially crushing because they were newlyweds, having been married little more than a year.

Uchimura hit rock bottom in his life, but rather than giving up, he cried out to God in ink, brush, and paper, capturing the minds and hearts of so many with his uniquely Japanese understanding of the Bible. And his book came out during a time when Christian books were mostly just translated Western authors. This book is fascinating for many reasons, but I can tell you from personal experience that I was greatly encouraged working on this project, and so I know it can be a great consolation and comfort to you as well, and anyone going through a difficult time in their life.

Let me say a quick word about the translator. Chris Born is a longtime friend of our Grace City Church community here in Tokyo. First, he came for a year to work on his doctoral thesis on Uchimura, and during that time he and his family poured into the church community, helping with many of the ministries. Then he returned to the States, where he’s the Associate Professor of Japanese and Asian Studies at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. But he recently came back to Japan for post-doctoral research and to write a number of books including this one. Again, he and his family poured into the community, and even his oldest daughter worked with us as an intern, giving piano concerts, leading worship with her playing and singing, and helping out in so many ways. They go back to America this month, and we’re very sorry to see them go. They will be missed.

Let me also say a word about the cover designer, created by the immensely talented Emma Grace von Fange, one of the interns who worked with us this summer. She did such a beautiful job getting inspiration from the text and making it appealing while also giving a sense of what we find inside. It’s a very attractive cover and really a work of art. I’m so grateful for her hard work on this project.

Recently we had the launch day, and one of the church members threw a dinner party for the event. So I took a few minutes to sit down with a translator just before the party to invite all of you into the celebration. Here’s our conversation.

So today is the launch day of Consolations of a Christian by Kanzo Uchimura, translated by Christopher Born, who is sitting right next to me. Thank you so much for being with us tonight.

Thanks for having me, Roger. This is awesome.

Yeah, so we are meeting in a friend’s home downtown Tokyo. We’re going to have a launch party tonight. Some of us are already here preparing the food, and others are going to be arriving soon. You’re probably going to hear some doorbell ringing…

So pull up a chair and hang out with us.

I’m just so thankful that it’s finally out in the world as of today, July 13, 2026.

Wow. Unbelievable.

A lot of time has gone into this, hasn’t it?

Yes, from your own kind encouragement for me to follow through and get it done from about 10 years ago when I started it to bringing it to completion just now. It’s been quite a journey, but exciting to be part of it and also be working so closely with an amazing team. Really, you assembled a wonderful cover designer, and you’ve done so much of the editing.

She was great.

She was fantastic, and you put it together so quickly. I mean, you really have a lot of talent behind this project. You just made it pop and shine. I’m grateful.

I really like that about putting out books. It’s not just about the writer writing solo in a solitary room somewhere, but there are a lot of people who are part of the whole project and are excited for it when it comes out.

That’s right. It’s a big production team.

Yeah. So, how did you get into this project? Why did you translate this book?

So that’s a great story for me. I’ve been studying Uchimura since about 2009. When I was working at a seminary, and I was able to take courses while I was working there as like staff. I took a course called Christianity in East Asia because that was always interesting to me. And when I did my master’s in East Asian studies, we covered some tangential aspects about Christianity in the Meiji period and how it influenced social movements, how there was a big missions movement that helped grow women’s education and the YMCA, things like that, but we never focused on Japanese Christian thinkers. So this course was the first time I was exposed to an actual Japanese Christian thinker who not only originated a number of writings but also had his own theological perceptions from a Japanese perspective that he wanted to add to sort of global Christianity. And he really thought that if Japan learned about Jesus and became more Christian, it would be a light to the world. So I thought that was an interesting entryway.

Okay, so using Western years, when are we talking about?

Uchimura lived from 1861 to 1930. He became a Christian around 1873 when he went off to Sapporo Agricultural College, which is now University of Hokkaido, one of the larger state schools. And when he became a Christian, he realized monotheism was the answer to a lot of his problems because he had such a strong religiosity as a kid and would bow to every shrine and every temple. And as he got older as a student, he really still held on to those beliefs. But when monotheism was presented to him, he really didn’t want to become a Christian. He was sort of pressured into it, but he went along with it primarily because he said, well, there’s only one God I need to worship, then I don’t need to worry about all the other gods. So that I thought was interesting because Japanese are famously known for having 8 million gods or something like that.

Okay, so for those who don’t know their Japanese history, this is like the very beginnings of Protestant church planting in Japan.

Yes.

So he’s one of the first of modern Christians.

That’s right. Christianity was banned from about 1609 to 1872. In the interim, in 1859, there was some missions activity but it was kind of underground. Uchimura was a part of the early generation of the different bands. There’s the Sapporo Band and the Yokohama Band and the Kumamoto Band in Kyushu. So these were sort of early Christian groupings. Uchimura was from up north. But yeah, he was active in the 1890s when he came back to Japan. He had studied abroad in America in the 1880s and sort of grew. He was always good at English, but he went to, Amherst College and then went off to Hartford Seminary before realizing—

Near Boston.

Near Boston, yes. Northeast. In the book, you’ll see a lot of references to northeastern literature and sort of abolitionist thinkers. He loved them.

Yeah, actually that was fun for me because I grew up near Boston, so a lot of the things he’s mentioning only people in Boston know. Like Mount Monadnock, a mountain I climbed with my dad.

Does it look like Fuji?

Well, it stands on its own and it is kind of conical, but it’s really short. It’s not a very tall mountain at all. It’s more like a tall hill.

There you go. So even better comparison to how much more grandeur Fuji has, which he keeps referring to. But yeah, he loved the northeast. In his other book that was written in English called How I Became a Christian, or Diary of a Japanese Convert, he talks about his experiences in the northeast.

How can you explain why Uchimura is important? Why should we care? That was a long time ago.

As one of Japan’s earliest modern Christians—I mean, his collected works are 40 volumes. He was an important thinker for the time period. Not only did he write in a Christian vernacular of the time, he attracted a number of future authors who would become aware of Christianity, at least in terms of their own understanding of the world. Even if they didn’t become Christians, they embraced a partially Christian worldview or romantic worldview. So from a literary perspective, which is what my main focus of my academic work was on how he’s an important literary figure, but I knew that he was an important Christian figure. And for Japanese theologians in general, anybody who’s going to seminary knows who Uchimura is and has read him. Now, the reason this book is important is everyone suffers, right? Everyone has a hard time. We get sick. Our wives get sick. People die. People we love are gone in an instant. We don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like. We can lose our job. We can get canceled because of the things we say and do. Even if we’re speaking the truth, we get punished for it.

Mm-hmm.

Uchimura suffered for telling the truth as he saw it, and he was willing to take that on and be that lightning rod in a society that was quickly becoming anti-Western and anti-Christian. And especially in the mid-1880s when he was still in America, there was a big turn toward emperor worship and connecting the state to religion in a very strong way, and in the 1890s when the Imperial Rescript on Education came out and later the 1891 Constitution, they really pointed to the emperor as the Confucian father of the nation that everyone must worship and obey. And Uchimura’s like, “Look, I respect the emperor as much as the next guy. He is my sovereign, but I’m not going to bow down and worship him in that way.” And as a result, that made him become persona non grata. That turned him into an anti-patriot to like the worst of the worst, the most disloyal of the disloyal, and of course in a Confucian samurai heritage worldview, that’s terrible. Disloyalty is the worst thing, right? So Uchimura suffered as a result of his own public intellectual beliefs, and then as a result, he lost everything, and part of losing everything meant he had to reinvent himself, and so he became an author as part of that process.

One of my favorite parts of the book is in the afterword where he’s talking about when he was writing the book and an American missionary, came in and said, so Mr. Uchimura, what are you working on? And he’s like, well, I’m writing this book. And he’s like, oh, what are you translating? He’s like, no, I’m not translating. I’m writing it, my own words. And the missionary was, was surprised and like, how can you be doing that? I mean, because Christianity came from the West, what right do you have as a Japanese to write? That was the attitude of the time.

Yeah, it was a very culturally bound enterprise, reproducing Western culture, civilizing the world, so to speak. And many Westerners didn’t think Japan was civilized. They had no idea how civilized it was.

Yeah. And you were explaining to me earlier how he was trying to figure out what it means to be Japanese and be Christian because there wasn’t—

It’s an identity issue.

There wasn’t any literature at that time. They were only looking at translated Western literature. And so he was kind of delving into this to try to figure it out, right?

That’s right. When he did become a Christian, the amount of stuff they had at Hokkaido University or Sapporo Agricultural College was so small. The amount of things they had to work with were so small. They were just some tracts, a few— they had a Western Bible, they had some parts of the Bible translated that was still in process, and they had things from many different denominations, so they didn’t know what was what and which one to ally with. And he became a Christian through the Methodists, but in Sapporo you had a Methodist church and an Episcopal church, and he wanted to work with both, and sort of create an independent Japanese church in Sapporo, but there was really no way to do that. They had to make it up themselves. And when the Western missionaries who they borrowed money from got wind of this, they were like, “You have to give us all our money back because you’re not part of us anymore.” So they scrimped and saved and did everything they could to pay it back. So there is this sense that independence, Japanese theology from a Japanese perspective became his life’s work.

So Uchimura is part of the birth of the church in Japan. So to me, as a missionary here, it’s especiallyinteresting. This is the first time ever that this book is in English.

That’s right.

I mean, it was published in 1893.

Yes.

And it’s incredibly important to missionaries today, and yet there’s never been an English version. And you translated it from classical Japanese.

That’s right.

So it’s really difficult Japanese.

It’s really difficult. It’s a long process of learning to be able to parse all that out. There is a modern translation now, but the original I thought was best to go from and take it from Uchimura’s own words.

It uses a lot of characters that aren’t used anymore. You showed me your manuscript, which is a work of art, by the way, all your notes around all of his, all the earlier published version, but like, I don’t even know what to call that. I mean, just various characters that are…

Yeah, kyujitai. Most Japanese don’t read it. I was talking to some students earlier today at a campus here, just kind of explaining that this book’s coming out and what it’s about, and I think maybe one or two knew who Uchimura was, and they knew about this fukeijiken or this incident of disloyalty to the emperor, or lesè-majesté as they call it, but they said they’d never read him, and when I mentioned it’s all written in this kind of really classical style Japanese, they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t really read that.” Yeah, I imagine not. He’s still unknown, so we can also help people understand that you can get a modern Japanese translation too, but I think Americans especially who want to know more about Japan at that time and about sort of authentic Japanese Christians and just from the perspective of a very sensitive soul who loves God and is searching for answers to his pain.

Right, that’s what I love about this book. He’s not afraid to basically be cry out to God, Why are you allowing these things things? And trying to search for the answers as a Japanese person, not trying to look for pat answers, but asking in his context, really what’s going on, how can I apply to it? And it’s just so interesting?

Right? Because one of the most important questions any human being will ever ask is, who is Jesus Christ and why does he matter?

Right.

And Uchimura knew who he was and why he mattered, but in the midst of this sort of dark doldrums of the soul why Jesus really mattered wasn’t just a nice, you know, it’ll all be okay someday, and just being a Christian makes everything all right. No, it’s like, Lord, you are my God, and I’m imploring you to give me an answer and give me strength and understanding to get through this situation.

Okay, so now you touched on this briefly. It’s called Consolations of a Christian. Why is this book important to people who may have little interest in Japan?

Sure, well, it certainly is full of what we call classical allusions to both Japanese literature, nature, history, and culture that are written for a Japanese audience. So he wasn’t writing it for us. So as a foreigner looking in on that, we can get a glimpse on the conversation which Uchimura is having with his own people about Christianity.

And with himself.

And of course with himself, and with God, and all the other little demonic voices that are harassing him.

You know, one of the things I thought was really interesting about the book, you’ve mentioned to me in conversation just how there’s a number of places where he lists scripture verses, but he doesn’t print it out.

That’s right.

And you said it was your idea that perhaps it was because he was wanting people to open the Bible for the first time. Most of the people who read this book were not Christians.

That’s right.

Because he wanted people who didn’t know anything about Christianity, very few did at that time, to read this and become interested in the God of the Bible. And he really makes that clear at the end of the book, right? Especially on the last two pages. “We looked at different answers throughout this book, but it’s clear the Bible is going to offer these answers that you really are searching for. God has those answers. Don’t stop until you find those answers.” That kind of thing.

That’s right. All of his literature points back to that. He doesn’t waver on that one bit. And in fact, he devoted his life to becoming a journalist for a while. He wrote for the Yorozu Choho for about 5 years, which was kind of like a New York Post or a LA Times kind of magazine, a little bit sensationalist but very political. He was the English language editor of that for a number of years until he decided to quit that and start his own work, which was called Seisho no Kenkyu, the Study of the Bible. And it was a magazine that he put out, which was all his own reading, parsing, interpreting the Bible and applying it to daily life.

To the general public, right? Not only to churches or Christians, but to everybody?

A lot of people were reading this even if they weren’t Christian. They were curious. Consolations of a Christian was a bestseller. And then as a result, he became hired as a journalist, then those copies of Yorozu Joho were also circulating, and then Seishun no Kinkyu as well. So, he really did use the words that he wrote as a way of reaching people in an evangelical way and pushing them to look at the Bible. That’s what all his life was about.

Well, this book was very meaningful for me. The fact that he, in the lowest point in his life, that he would turn to writing, crying to God, and trying to bring the nation along with him to cry out to God. He didn’t fall into despair, but he gave that anguish to God.

Yes.

And that’s just such an important message for all of humanity.

Yes.

You know, anywhere in the world, we all suffer.

That’s right.

And the fact that he writes a whole book addressing that and trying to help us turn to God through that is so important.

Yeah, because the Bible says God draws near to those who are suffering, and we suffer with Christ. But Christ was there with him in that suffering. In that moment, he knew it, but he had to put that anguish towards and use it for something. And that’s what’s really cool. He never wasted the experiences he had. He says it’s not my autobiography, but it’s a record of an authentic person who’s trying to struggle with being Christian. I think that’s gorgeous.

So I hope many of you who are listening to this will download this book, either buy the paperback, buy the hardcover, buy the ebook, go get the Kindle. It’s such a blessing that you’ve done this. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for working with me and giving me the opportunity.

Yeah, so I guess we better get this party started.

Let’s enjoy this gathering around this table in many ways similar to what Uchimura would have done.

All right, so thank you for talking with us now.

Thank you. Thanks so much.

You’ve been listening to the Art Life Faith Podcast. You can pick up a copy of Consolations of a Christian by Kanzo Uchimura wherever you buy your books online. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne!” We’ll see you next time.

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

We are recording live from the JCAMM conference in downtown Tokyo with the theme of “The Beauty of Japan・The Beauty of Heaven.” It’s a week-long conference from Friday, May 22 to Wednesday, May 27, 2026, where we are talking about the arts of Japan, the beauty of Japan, and how that helps us worship God. We’ve had so many amazing guests this week, and now I have the privilege of sitting down with one of our key presenters, a band like no other I’ve ever seen in the world called IziBongo. They sing not only in the various languages of the world, but they use the various instruments of the world and the various styles and genres of the world so people can see what it looks like for the nations to praise God and how that can lead us all in praise of God. So I wanted to sit down with them and have a conversation.

I’ve also asked Akira Mori to sit down with us. He is our MC for the conference, and he’s a longtime friend and partner. We got to know each other very well through the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. He’s the pastor of Global Mission Chapel in Iwaki, Japan, not too far south of the nuclear power plants in Fukushima. And his amazing church was one of the key centers for relief work for all of Tohoku. Through the years, we’ve gotten to know each other better, and I’ve so appreciated not just his encouragement and the way he leads especially movements of prayer in Japan but the way he’s encouraged me personally and for his friendship. And so I invited him to be the MC for this conference and also to be with us for this podcast episode. So thank you, all of you, for being here.

Why don’t we start with a quick introduction? Please tell me who are you and where this name IziBongo came from. It’s kind of an interesting name.

Sure, Izibongo is a Zulu word which means praises intoned in honor of a person. It’s a kind of praise poetry. This is a second generation of the group itself, originally called the Wycliffe World Music Band, which came from Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Not as catchy…

Yeah…, which came from Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Okay, so what do you do? Why did you form IziBongo?

Originally, the Wycliffe World Music Band was meant to be an illustrative form of the music of the world and to promote Bible translation. That was one of the hopes for the people who organized it. We would go to Christian music festivals and perform there to show how the nations would worship or do their songs.

I might add that originally it was an ad hoc group of students in a particular class learning about some of these principles of music and worship around the world. The leader of that class was our mentor, Tom Avery. He would gather the students and throw instruments at them and say, “Sing this and let’s play this.” And so it was just to appreciate the worship around the world. This developed out of that educational starting point to more of a worship focus and whatever it is today.

Another point that Tom would make when teaching us these songs was that music is not a universal language, it’s a universal phenomenon. But different peoples have different ways of singing. We think we might understand what they’re singing about. We might make a judgment if we hear another culture’s music and say, “That’s demonic,” or, “You could not praise God with that music.” But he was teaching us that we need to understand when we go into cultures their music systems. We can’t just go in and say, “No, you have to sing it this way.”

And to follow up on that is the focus of outsider-insider, an outsider trying to understand from the insiders, “What does this mean to you? What is the content?” because as outsiders, we can really miss it and not understand what’s actually being expressed. So we have terms. We say etic and emic, outsider/insider perspectives, that we talk about in our courses and our learning.

Help us to see what this looks like a little bit more concretely. What countries, what groups are you representing, and what kinds of instruments are you playing?

Well, I’m playing about 3 or 4 instruments here. One is a charango from Bolivia, which I bought on the River Walk in San Antonio from a real live player. I’m also playing a Moroccan oud, which we use for other instruments as well. We don’t carry 50 instruments, we carry about 10. And I’m playing a Greek bouzouki, but I’m using that to represent music from other parts of the world as well if the instrument sounds similar to the sounds. So again, we’re approximating all these. We’re never being exactly authentic. We are just Americans. We’re not trying to pretend that we’re something else. But we love the sounds of the world and the praises that they lift up. So we want to approximate those sounds so that you will learn to appreciate their music. As for the countries that we actually sing songs from, we could give a list if you’d like.

We do some from South America, so there’s Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia…Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo…

Nigeria…

Egypt…

Tunisia, Papua New Guinea, Bhutan, South Korea…We don’t have a Japanese song yet.

Okay, well, we’ll have to fix that.

Exactly! We’re working on it.

So tell me more about why you do this. What is your purpose in singing these different styles—using different instruments, different languages, representing different countries?

Well, for myself, and I think for my wife as well, we were worship leaders in a local church and trying to find the most relevant ways to help people worship in our culture. It was mostly not a mixed culture. It was mostly just a normal American church in Texas, but still we had to wrestle with contemporary versus older styles and who was there and what kind of music they liked. In the South it’s a little more Baptist hymnal kind of songs, which I wasn’t that familiar with. So you always have to learn and find out from the congregation that you’re worshiping with, what helps them express their heart, because that’s really what a worship leader is trying to do, just help the people worship from their heart. So that was where we started, and when we ran into Tom and he was doing that in the jungles of Brazil, it sounded radically different, of course. So we learned from him how to approximate that sound so that we could present it.

So the first time we performed this kind of music, we thought we were just going to give people an educational experience and say, this is what your brothers and sisters sound like over in Africa, or this is what they say to God in their songs. The people that heard us in Memphis, Tennessee, on that very first trip were crying. They said, “This is a kind of worship that we’ve never experienced before.” It wasn’t necessarily something they could participate in, but it was like when you look up at the stars and go, “Wow, God, that’s amazing.” And you get a glimpse of the worship that God is preparing for himself across the world. And it does increase your love for your brothers and sisters. So we wanted to give more people that kind of understanding and that kind of love for brothers and sisters that they’ve never met, maybe an experience that would have them want to pray for those brothers and sisters. And so when we go to a mission conference, we hope, too, that it opens people’s eyes to understand that we want to encourage authentic ethnic worship and not just press our Western songs onto others.

I was just going to say one word, beauty. Well, I’ll say a few more words than just that. We have a colleague who decades ago said, why would God have created birds that only sing one song? And so we think about the diversity of artistic communication and think about the beauty of how we can all be different and have different artistic expression, but that it can be unified in the worship of our Creator, and to learn to appreciate that, but also know that it’s perfectly great to have those styles and songs and ways that you can sing and worship that come really from a deep place in your heart. So, we want to get into what that is in each culture to lead people to that place of beauty.

It makes me think also the necessity that we feel of presenting things with authentic instrumentation as much as possible and with some costuming. It’s not like we’re not trying to appropriate someone else’s culture. We’re trying to represent so that you will have a deeper appreciation of those—the beauty, not just the sound, but the beauty of those cultures in their expression of worship.

I’m glad you all are talking about this because that was one of my next questions is like, why is this important? You know, when I first came to Japan, the first thing that people wanted me and my wife to do is, as musicians, help with worship. And there’s basically two choices you can do. Contemporary or you can do traditional. One or the other. If you play organ and piano, well that’s traditional. If you use the guitar, well then that’s going to be contemporary. Those are the only two choices, so choose. If you go back and forth between the two, then that’s blended, a little of both. So to hear what you all do is so far outside people’s expectations of what worship can be. And that message, I feel, is especially needed in Japan.

I would love Mori-Sensei to comment on that. Have you heard anything like this in Japan, this group?

No. That’s it.

And is it important then for Japan?

Absolutely. Japanese people like to feel safe, I guess, and don’t want to be criticized. Therefore, they try to conform to whatever is the mainstream, whether it’s a small group of 3, 4, 5 or a bigger group of 50–100. But that’s what I sense, and that’s what I find in myself from the past. So, especially when you think about the Christian church. The gospel was brought by typically Caucasian Western missionaries, and I don’t think they had any other way than to just do what they were used to. And without being intentional, I believe a kind of very clear line between Christians and non-Christian Japanese was drawn. When I was a teenager and a church member, the pastor said secular songs shouldn’t be sung, not even for yourself when you’re alone. So there was a very clear line, and I think in every church it was the same. And if you dare to play jazz or, rock was not so much in Japan in those days, then you were looked at as unspiritual, not a good Christian. So naturally, for those reasons, the Japanese ethnic or original music was separated from the church.

It is still very much the same, I think. Therefore, it’s very difficult to take different styles of music and even ethnic music into the church. We don’t have any group like IziBongo. I don’t know if any other countries do either, but it is great riches brought to the church.

You know, when I first came to Japan, I was in language school that first year. We made friends with a clarinetist, and she was feeling turmoil about being in the church because the church told her she couldn’t play. She was a professional clarinet player, but they would not allow her to play clarinet in church because that was not appropriate for Christian worship. But, they said, you can play the piano because we need someone to play the piano. She was like, but I’m not a keyboardist and don’t play the piano very well, and it was hard for her to worship while playing the piano. When we came in, they asked us as missionaries to come give a concert, and we invited her to join us. There were tears in her eyes because that was the first time anyone in the church had ever heard her play the clarinet, which was her heart language. And I was like, wow, well, maybe it’s just this church.

Well, then we went and were helping to plant another church out in Chiba, where we met a pastor whose son played the saxophone. And it was the same story. He invited his son to play saxophone once in worship, and the church members got so upset. Saxophone is not appropriate for worship, they said. It sounds worldly. It sounds like jazz, you know. And we’ve come across stories like that over and over again.

And I want to tell you one more. Sorry I’m talking so much! But there’s this other story when we met this koto player. She was featured in one of our videos during the conference. I think I’ve shared this in a past podcast episode, but we invited her to come and play koto in worship. That’s a traditional Japanese harp, and it was so beautiful. We loved it, but there were so many people upset afterwards. And there were so many meetings afterwards, not the kind of meetings that you really want to have happen, you know, like with the pastor and the elders. Okay, this person’s upset, and they felt like it was connecting to the non-Christian culture in Japan. They said, “You can’t use the koto in worship. You were distracting me from worship. I was not able to worship God because you had the koto there.”

And, you know, the way—I’ve shared this with some of you before—the way that we were able to bring healing to that situation is when they realized how she was able to worship God through her heart language, through the koto, it drew them in and they were able to worship God by seeing how she was worshiping God. It wasn’t a gimmick, you know, it wasn’t like we’re trying to force something on the church, but that this is how she worshiped, and they were able to worship through her. It was that relational key that made all the difference.

Um, can I ask you a question?

Sure.

That was your experience in the beginning. Is that still very much the same in the Japanese churches?

I do sometimes continue to hear stories, yeah…

This is my subjective, biased opinion, but around 20 years ago, God raised a young man and gave him song after song. An authentic Japanese young man, producing Japanese praise songs, worship songs, and they did some gatherings using yukatas and guitars on the stage, dancing and singing. And those worship songs created by those people, they have quite rapidly spread all across Japan.

Oh, wow. I’d like to hear them.

Yes. Oh, you know him. Taka. His songs, I believe, have changed the atmosphere of Japanese churches. Nagasawa Takafumi wrote that famous song, “Sono Hi Zen Sekai Ga” (“On That Day”). He started out as a worship leader in his father’s church. Now, he’s the senior pastor. But he was invited as a worship leader to a church in a different place, totally different place, and the pastor, as the congregation sang that song, proudly said to Taka, “Don’t you think this is an awesome song?” He didn’t know that Taka wrote that song, and Taka did not tell him. But today, more instruments are naturally taken into church services. Different styles are tolerated. Not every church, but, by and large, so many churches are resembling Western American churches, worship band in front and leading songs with guitars and drums and bass guitars and keyboard. And it’s spreading. And I just think that change has been happening. But still though, not Japanese authentic instruments or styles.

Yeah, that’s still pretty rare.

Yeah, because of the schism that happened, right in the beginning, the Christians somehow feel that those instruments are not theirs. And to me, that’s okay if Christians don’t play any koto or shakuhachi. Of course, they’re greatly considered by Christians to be a special genre of instrument.

Generally. Yeah, Cathy?

That’s one thing that seems to happen when we play. We had an experience in Singapore. A Japanese gal came up and talked to me afterwards and said, “This makes me want to go home and find what is unique from my culture that I can offer to God. It makes me want to go home and find or make something unique from my culture. And so, I think that IziBongo sometimes has that effect when we show what other cultures are doing.

Yeah, I also wanted to ask you all, I know that like sometimes I hear this word “appropriation” in the States, because you are not from those cultures, because you are Americans doing that music. If someone was to come at you and say, “Hey, that’s not appropriate for you to be doing that,” how would you respond to them?

Well, it depends who it’s coming from, I think, is where we start. We have never had anyone come to us from those nations with a problem with us. In fact, all we’ve ever heard is appreciation that we at least attempted to sing in their language. And again, we don’t do it perfectly. We had one experience up at Prairie Bible College where we played a First Nations song, a Native American song, and there was one young gentleman there who was a young man from the First Nations, and he was so excited. He wanted to sing the song. It was very simple, so he wanted to lead it. It was so amazing to him that he could do that. And almost immediately, we got strong pushback from a missionary couple who’d been there for 30 years working with First Nations peoples who felt like that was very inappropriate for the church. So let me say it this way: What we do is not try to impose on the church what you should do. What we’re doing is saying praise is happening all over the world, not always on Sunday morning. In fact, most of this wouldn’t be in Sunday morning worship, but it’s worship. Some of it’s on the streets of Brazil, a samba. And it was a Christian song sung on the streets of Carnaval. I mean, that’s not Sunday morning. So again, what we’re presenting is just the various expressions of praise. Whether they fit on Sunday morning in the church, your pastor and your worship leaders need to work that out. And we shouldn’t be judging them. They’re the ones who are to guide and guard the flock. So pray for your pastors that they might have vision even when they have reservations.

I would say it’s also not only praise, but Scripture memory songs, storytelling, telling of Bible stories, and historical things. So there are other ways to use the music.

And the use of the music that we do when we perform are based on relationships that we have with the communities themselves, either through a Bible translation project or actual one-on-one. So, we have gotten permission to do these songs according to the communities that we’ve come in contact with.

And I’ll say that coming back to the U.S. from West Africa and starting to hear this word appropriation, I was a little bit shocked because I was like, oh, what does that mean? You know, I had to say, what does that actually mean? Because to be in West Africa or in that particular culture, you dress with the cloth and you learn their songs and they are thrilled that you are learning their language and wearing their clothes. So appropriation is not about using these things for our own benefit, but it’s about lifting up and respecting that culture.

We are almost out of time, but I want to give Mori Sensei the last word. So, think about what you’re going to say. Let me just say that I’ve been moved by talking with all of you, you know, outside this interview, the stories you’ve told me about how people respond saying, wow, I had no idea I could worship God in that way through my culture, through my art, and how it’s encouraging them, empowering them really. You are empowering the nations to say, God has given you these gifts to worship him, and it’s just such an important message. Thank you so much for the time and money you’ve spent to come all the way to Japan to share this with us. We really appreciate it. Mori Sensei, do you have any final comments?

Well, thank you very much. I’m so honored. Change is happening in the Japanese churches. It’s not only negative. In one church, 45 minutes away from Tokyo, they started using enka. Enka is very secular, many love songs. They were the songs church members’ husbands especially loved. So they invited the husbands and did a couples’ night. They served beer and they sang enka. And the people loved it. Actually, the wives loved it too. So, some changes are happening. Also, Japanese instruments—koto, shakuhachi, shamisen—are not widely used in the churches. I think that’s because nowadays Japanese people have grown up without those instruments nearby. But those who have, they should be invited to the churches to perform and make them feel at home. Still, the Japanese churches are very much under the control of pastors. So these gatherings would be excellent for the Japanese pastors to know and come attend, listen to, hear the stories. That’s probably the challenge for the near future.

Thank you. Thank you so much, all of you. I really appreciate it. God bless you.

You’ve been listening to the Art Life Faith Podcast. To watch the video of this podcast or many other videos from the conference, please go to our website: www.communityarts.jp. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne.” We’ll see you next time.

Next week, May 22-27, 2026, is our worship and arts conference “The Beauty of Japan・The Beauty of Heaven”. This five-day event is the biggest we have ever put on. Hundreds will join us here in downtown Tokyo with easy access to all the beautiful art and culture of our city. We will have over 30 presenters with short talks, testimonies, music, films, discussions, networking, prayer walks and activities around the city, an art gallery, and so much more. In this event, we celebrate all the nations being united across different languages and cultures to worship God together, and the taste of that we are receiving even now here in Japan.

Even if you can’t be here, please pray for us, that God would do a mighty work here, leading people in worship, growing his kingdom, and building deeper connections between churches and ministries.

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

This episode, I had the honor of sitting down with Haijin and Makoto Fujimura to celebrate the launch of their new book, “Beauty and Justice: Creating A Life of Abundance and Courage”. Haijin is the founder and managing partner of Shim & Associates Law Firm. She is also the founder of Embers International, developing the programs and partnerships to protect, restore, and empower the victims of injustice.

Mako is well-known as an artist, writer, and speaker, who has also had a big influence on my life and on the ministries of Community Arts Tokyo. Mako was kind enough to sit down with me after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster here in Japan, and listen to my heart, and suggest that I start this arts organization. So he is not only a long-time friend of this ministry, but one of the people who help it to get started in the first place.

In this conversation, Haijin and Mako urge us to not lose sight of the new creation, where the pursuit of beauty is an important part of true restoration, that working for justice is a working toward that perfect shalom that God has promised to bring into the world.

After our conversation, they led one of our Art, Life, Faith events. So many people came from outside our usual networks, and all of us there received renewed inspiration to go out into the city and make a difference, to make the vision presented in the talk a reality in our communities. This combination of justice and beauty is so important, and if you want to know more about it you can read their book and watch the event we recorded, which is now on YouTube.

Now, here’s our conversation.

I’m sitting here with Haejin and Mako Fujimura for an event we’re doing tonight celebrating the release of their new book, Beauty x Justice. Thank you both for being here and being willing to talk with me.

Absolutely, excited to be here.

Thank you for having us.

So, this topic is really interesting to me. This is the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. We believe that art isn’t just something that’s meant to be decorative or something if you have time to do, but it really affects every part of our lives and can change societies and people. And so to be able to talk about justice and what that looks like, I think is really fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about this book?

This book is a result of Mako bugging me for months to do something that I wanted to do but was kind of putting aside. So I’m really glad that he encouraged me to write this book together. This book shares with the world what it means to understand beauty in the context of justice and vice versa, because we believe that beauty and justice are essentially two sides of the same coin. Of the Gospel. We need both beauty and justice, not as parallels but as an integrated whole, to have the kind of shalom that God intended us to have from the very beginning that we have lost.

Thankfully, God not only gave us beauty, but God is beauty. God not only commanded every single one of us to seek justice, not just to lawyers or advocates, but he himself is also justice, right? So when we think about beauty and justice coming together, we kind of wanted to share a little bit about our life as a married couple, because essentially all my life, even way before I met Mako, or before we wrote this book together.

I have been working through justice to pursue beauty, and Mako has all his life, as just an incredibly anointed artist, been pursuing justice. And when we got together, we were able to really name it, and we started to share that message with other people in the context of exhibitions, speaking engagements, team-building occasions. And then we really felt like we needed to share this with a wider public. So that’s when we decided to write this book.

Yeah, it’s great. I feel like in some ways justice doesn’t have a very good image right now, just for various reasons. I guess I had forgotten how many times justice comes up in the Old Testament, and it’s always with this good image. God isn’t just just, but through it he gives a picture of shalom and what we are all really yearning for, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, justice is beautiful when it is fully manifested, and that’s always been God’s vision for the world. And yet we have created this tainted version of, or at least a version that we do not know the definition of what justice is. We talk about it all the time, but if you pursue asking the deeper question of what do you think justice is, not many people can answer it. We all know when something is lacking, you know, when we know justice is needed. But one of the things that I discovered in our journey together is that I have been speaking about beauty for all my life, it seems. I’ve written several books on it and have tried to help people understand why beauty is needed and essential for our lives. As an artist, as you noted, Roger, that many times the reaction that I get, well, that’s a nice thing to do, you know, when you have extra money or space and time. But especially for the church, it’s very hard to have a conversation where it is assumed that beauty is fundamentally not only necessary, but it is the most important characteristic of God’s presence in our lives.

So it’s just a constant battle to help people understand that what I call utilitarian pragmatism has taken over all of our lives, not just the church, but our cultures. We tend to reduce the complexity of reality into simple false binaries so we can have a so-called understanding of it and have to take a position on it and create culture war-like rhetoric. And all of that comes out of this very simple premise that if God is beauty, and if God is love, then all things should flow out of that reality, including the church, including what we call the gospel, the good news, has to be filled with the abundance and extravagance of God’s love, has to feel like this is too good to be true. We will experience something that is so out of box, and extraordinary that we don’t have words to explain what that is. It just happens that when you experience true justice, not just restoration, you know, not just somebody who has been jailed wrongly is able to be released — that’s the first step in seeking justice — but when that person who has been trapped in whatever the circumstances because of injustice is able to see themselves as beautiful, that’s when the restoration of the whole person becomes real, not just that person but the whole community.

And when you see that at work through Haejin’s work with Embers International, which she co-founded many years ago, we get to see actual examples of somebody who has gone through this very difficult process of restoration, and in their being, they hold this godly presence of beauty and justice together. And that’s when I, as an artist, I point to that reality and say, there is beauty here that I have been longing for as an artist to create, manifest into my work. And I continue to do that, but it really is that radical and that simple.

I was thinking about how you’re saying that people realizing what is justice for them, to realize their own beauty and to be able to see it. Mako, I think I’ve heard you say before how beauty can help us, artwork can help us kind of see, not just see, but experience the world in new ways. Like, I was thinking of To Kill a Mockingbird, to be able to go in someone else’s skin and walk around it for a little while.

For example, in December I was giving a bunch of organ concerts around Japan. That usually happens at Christmas time, right? One of the pieces I was playing is one of my favorites by Maurice Durufle, a late French Romantic composer, called “Come, Creator Spirit.” And in it, in the middle of the work, there is this incredible dissonance and brokenness that just — it breaks your heart. And yet that isn’t the end. It starts with creation and gets to this breaking, and then he brings us beyond it to a hope, to a life where things can be glorious and rejoicing. And every time I play it — it’s a 20-minute piece, it’s a pretty long piece— to be able to celebrate what God is doing, it’s like I’m experiencing again and again through the artwork this truth. And so in a way, I think that’s like what you’re talking about.

I think we forget to ask the question, what is the essence of all things, right? So what’s the essence of creating arts? What is the essence of justice? What is the essence of humanity? I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t think I was ever asked to think about the essence of things. It’s more of what is the quote-unquote the definition of it, what is going on, what is it, rather than what is the essence behind what we can just comprehend and observe on the surface. Because it’s a really hard question. You have to be willing to slow down to answer this question, right? You have to be willing to admit that we come with a lot of assumptions and biases. Otherwise, we cannot really get to the essence of things. So I think that, of course the industrialization, the pragmatism and individualism and all of those kind of things that in and of itself are not bad, but has kind of trained humanity to seek what is easy. Because we also have deep down in our hearts the lust for certainty, because uncertainty is so uncomfortable and it feels so risky and dangerous. But to think about the essence of beauty, arts, and justice and humanity, you have to be willing to be on the edge of the uncertainty and face the reality that there are things that we can’t quite comprehend. So, for example, we cannot comprehend God, right? If somebody says, I understand God, probably very little, if at all.

Exactly.

But then we also know that God exists and God is love. We understand to a certain extent, and we get to experience the glimpses of his essence through beauty, especially through beautiful relationships when justice is in play. But I think we have to be willing, and especially the body of Christ, to be willing to really long for that essence of things.

Yeah, I think it helps too, that vision that you’re giving, that we can’t give up talking about it because we forget exactly what we’re searching for, what we’re yearning for. The image of what justice is can be so shaped by the news and the comfort of our situation in our part of the world, whatever it is. But to be able to keep giving people a vision for, like you do in the book, for the new creation. This is what we’re working toward and how to help people see it just coming out from a lot of different angles. It was really helpful.

Art and music has a capacity to do exactly that, to invoke this vista that most people have forgotten to look up to. And because we are so stressed and traumatized sometimes by realities of brokenness around us and within us, that we no longer actually lose the capacity to use our senses to listen well or to see something that is so beautiful that it’s mind-boggling and complex. And yet it is utterly needed for not just to seek the beauty, but to understand that as a standard of who we are as human beings is not built for this world in the sense that we get locked into our presuppositions and we get locked into what the media tells us. So we get locked into what the digital framework defines as reality. Our senses are such amazing instruments. When we behold something or when we truly do the hard work of deep listening, something happens where our brain rewires itself to regain that understanding of love at the heart of all complexities and chaos. And just like you mentioned in this music that you played, there’s this great tension in all beauty, and you can really try to find an answer that clarifies, or very much be certain that, you know, this is it, this is the good news of the Gospel, I want to give it to you, which is a fine notion, except that the mystery of the gospel, what Paul talks about, the mysterion, you know, the mystery of the gospel is far bigger than we think it is.

And the more you understand it, the less you understand, but the more you understand it, the more that you are in awe of God’s presence. And art can give us that experience. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be Christian art because all human beings are created in the image of God, and however fallen we are, we have evidences throughout history of people who are horrible human beings, but they created amazing art that we can see, and as a viewer, we can glorify God with. So that kind of reality has always been part of human experience. And by the way, the church was the greatest patron to create this. And yet we have in recent times, because of pragmatic, utility and efficiency and industrial way that we began to measure what is good and successful, we lost sight of the transcendence and mystery of what human beings are capable of.

Thank you for reminding us of it in this book. We so need to keep hearing that message.

I think we better stop there to get ready for the event tonight. But I am really looking forward to tonight. I’ve been getting a lot of emails. There’s going to be a lot of people here really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. So thank you so much for sharing this time with us.

Thank you, Roger.

Thank you.

You’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. You can continue the conversation by picking up your own copy of Beauty x Justice, available wherever you buy your books. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne!” We’ll see you next time.

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

Let me take a moment to invite you to our upcoming conference, May 22-27, 2026, just one month away, here in downtown Tokyo with easy access to all the beautiful art and culture of our city. During our time together, we will offer many short presentations, talks, and performances to lead us in worship through the heart art languages of Japan, all around the theme of “The Beauty of Japan, The Beauty of Heaven.” Every session will include discussion times to get to know the people around you, to encourage networking, and to inspire and encourage one another. We will also have an art gallery with plenty of space to display and distribute materials. We will also host unique activities we are calling “Worship in the City,” enabling people to worship God outside the walls of our building and through the art and culture of Tokyo.

This gathering has space for up to 200 people. This is not just a conference, it is an experience. You have to come to know what I’m talking about. I know it’s going to change your life. God has already blessed tremendously through the preparations for this event, and we can’t wait to see what he already has in store.

We are hosting this event specifically over Pentecost weekend to celebrate the things to come, when all the nations will be united across their different languages and different cultures and different arts in worshiping God together. Hear me on this. We will not be speaking one language or sharing one culture, but God delights in the diversity of the cultures and calling us to worship together. So, come spend Pentecost weekend with us here in Tokyo! We look forward to having you.

Well, this episode I had the privilege of having a conversation with Alexandra Hudson, or Lexi, the author of “The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.” A number of weeks ago, she was passing through Tokyo on vacation with her family when she was gracious enough to sit down with me and talk about the various themes in her book and then lead an Art Life Faith event right afterward.

One of the things that came up during our conversation was about “porching.” Porch is not usually used as a verb, but Lexi talks about it in her book. She and I share a mutual friend, Joanna Taft, director of the Harrison Center for the Arts in Indianapolis, who invites people onto her porch every week to just share their lives with one another. And through this Art Life Faith event, we realized that that is exactly what these gatherings are. We gather around a table, have a meal together, and get to know each other. This time, three visitors came who I had never met before. And then they came again to gatherings we had in the weeks that followed. This porching was a wonderful opportunity to invite people into our community, and it was wonderful to have Lexi and her family spend that time with us as well. I’m glad I get to share this conversation with all of you.

Welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast, and I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, tonight we have the privilege of talking with Alexandra Hudson, who was passing through with her family on vacation, and so we got to arrange an Art Life Faith event happening right after our conversation. So I wanted to introduce her to all of you. So thank you, Alexandra, for being on the show.

Thanks for your hospitality. Great to be with you and Abi tonight and excited for the conversation.

We just met, so I’m not quite sure how to introduce you. Can you introduce yourself?

Yeah, I am passionate about ideas and storytelling and how they can make our lives richer and better. I love history and philosophy, and I wrote a book called “The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.” It’s about how to flourish across deep differences, which is the most urgent question of our day in our era of hyper-partisanship, of extremism, of despair, of loneliness. But it’s also a timeless fundamental human question: How do we peacefully coexist amidst competing visions of the good? That’s what I explore my book.

Well, it’s an interesting book title because civility, when I try to translate it into Japanese in my head, I’m not quite sure which word to use.

Oh, interesting. What are the options?

Well, the one I want to use is politeness, but it’s not politeness, is it?

No, it is not. It’s interesting that you said that.

How is it different?

You’re setting me up really nicely. A core argument of my book is that there is an essential distinction between civility and politeness, and in English we have these two words. We have civility and politeness, but people often today use them interchangeably, whether or not they want more of it or less of it. And in America, in the West, we have two vocal groups right now. One group says, “Oh, we are so divided. We’re so broken. Democracy is in peril. We need more civility and politeness in order to save democracy.” So they use this one phrase, “civility and politeness.” And there’s another contingent as well that says, no, civility and politeness are part of the problem. They’re the tools of the powerful, the patriarchy. They oppress the powerless, and we need to burn it all down, throw the baby out with the bathwater. Less civility and politeness in order to achieve greater justice and equity in the world. But both these contingents use these phrases interchangeably, and I argue that they’re different.

I love etymology. I love studying language, and I love the origin of language. I’ve loved learning about Japanese and Japanese characters and the stories. So the etymology of civility and politeness is illuminating, and it’s, it’s actually honoring the original etymology to separate these words. So the etymology of, well, let me tell you what the difference is first, then I’ll go.

I’m thinking like civilization…

So politeness, I argue, is manners. It’s etiquette. It’s technique. I know there’s a lot of influence in Japan on Confucius philosophy, but so is this concept of li. I don’t know if that is a concept here at all, but it’s like ritual. It’s propriety.

Japan is certainly known for its politeness.

That’s correct. What we do is what we say, whereas civility isn’t external, it’s internal. It’s an inner disposition of the heart. It’s a way of seeing others fundamentally as our moral equals, worthy of respect just by virtue of our shared dignity, our equal moral worth as human beings, by virtue of the imago dei, that we are, we are created with it. We have the divine imprint, and that means that every single one of us without exception bear an irreducible moral worth and are worthy of respect. We owe to others that bare minimum of respect by virtue of imago dei.

I think I read on the back of your book that it’s not just about your actions and words but about the attitude of your heart, right?

Right. The disposition of the heart is what civility is, and that sometimes actually respecting someone, actually loving someone, requires being impolite. It requires telling a hard truth, having an uncomfortable conversation, even especially in a democracy, engaging in robust debate. I mean, think of a marriage, you know, sweeping differences under the rug is not sustainable for an authentic true relationship. It’s going to get messy. It’s going to get hard. You have to have uncomfortable conversations. But, and in fact, having difficult conversations can be a tool of strengthening a relationship. It’s not about whether you disagree, it’s how you do it and whether you are…

If you’re uncivil, does that mean that you are fighting these? What kind of interaction is uncivil? You guys are being uncivil. You know, something I may say to my boys something, right?

Civility requires action sometimes, but it also takes certain action off the table. I’ll give you an example. In chapter 7 of my book, I talk about civil disobedience. And let me just go to the etymology to illuminate the distinction a little bit more. So politeness, our word in English, comes from the Latin polire, which means to smooth or polish. And that’s what politeness does—it papers over difference, it sweeps it under the rug, as opposed to giving us tools to grapple with difference head-on. The etymology of civility is civitas, which is our etymological root for citizen, citizenship, civilization, city. And that’s what civility is— it’s the, the duty, duties, the conduct, the mores, that the disposition, the habits befitting a citizen in a city, and especially in a democracy that requires truth-telling, that requires honest, robust debate that is the lifeblood of a democracy.

Okay, so, you know, living here in Japan, we’re often taught to be polite because that’s such a big part of society. And I have seen a lot of relationships broken when they don’t know how to be polite. They say, well, let’s just not talk to that person, and then I don’t have to be fake. I just won’t see that person. And there doesn’t seem to be a kind of a way through for building community. There’s a lot of brokenness in relationships in Japan. So what you’re talking about is a way through that.

That’s so interesting. I’m not saying don’t be polite. I’m not condemning Japan as a polite society. I’m saying that’s not enough, that the form the words, the rituals, the actions, without the inner disposition that sees you as my fellow human being worthy of respect, that it’s not going to be enough. And in the West as well, we too often settle for politeness. We, we settle for just people doing and saying the perfectly correct thing, but we’re missing civility, that inner disposition of the heart that helps us actually know when to depart from politeness, when to have those uncomfortable conversations.

Okay, so let me ask you now, because this is the Art Life Faith Podcast, what is the role of beauty and art in creating this soul of civility?

I did a kintsugi class while I was here in Japan, and I love that as a metaphor for life and the human condition, this ancient practice of taking broken pottery that some might cast away but taking it, piecing it back together, and making it more beautiful on the other side of this process, illuminating our brokenness. I think that’s really powerful.

So the brokenness of society is something that you as an artist of society are trying to speak into?

I’ve been going back and forth about what I am because I’m not just a writer, I’m not just a speaker. In fact, like this season of my work, I’m a practitioner. Like I am both trying to live this and build initiatives and institutions in my community and helping dozens of other people across the country right now, including Congress, including state legislatures, including Ivy League universities, build initiatives around my work as well. So, civic architect is one idea. I don’t know. Listeners, write to me with your ideas for how to characterize what I’m doing. I wrote this book. It’s both descriptive and normative, but now I’m doing it, and so I don’t have there’s no category really for that that I know of. So if you know of one, if you can help me think of one, I welcome it.

Yeah, well, I’ll keep thinking about it. I mean, one reason I asked you to come and speak tonight for this event is we were connected by a mutual friend who runs the Harrison Center for the Arts. I looked at some of the pictures. I saw you were doing events there. You were connected to this art gallery. Can you tell us a little bit more about that connection?

To really do justice to that story, let’s back up a little bit about why I wrote this book. I love history. I love philosophy. I love ideas. I was raised by two very curious human beings. My mom and dad are intellectually omnivorous, and our home life growing up was just very stimulating. And my parents taught me wonder was a way of life. I went to a combination of public, private, and charter schools growing up, but I loved all school because I had this really intellectually robust home life that promoted the life of the mind. Then I went to grad school at the London School of Economics, because I wanted to put ideas into practice. I feel like my education kind of stopped at the Italian Renaissance, and I wanted to know more about the world that I was about to live in. Then I got my first big break in DC. I served in federal government, and it felt like the honor of a lifetime. I couldn’t wait to serve my country, and I chose to serve at the United States Department of Education, the single largest institution in the history of mankind dedicated to student instruction. And I was devastated to discover they didn’t really care about education, at least not how I had been educated, about soul craft and ordering our passions and beauty and goodness and truth. And on top of that, it was so dehumanizing, my experience in Washington. My experience was kind of a microcosm of our dysfunction and division as a whole. I saw two extremes that are equally as dehumanizing. One was the hostile contingent in government, people who were willing to step on anyone to get ahead, overtly belligerent. And the other contingent were polished and poised and polite, but ruthless and cruel.

Yeah, I believe it.

I saw people who would smile at me and others one moment and then stab us in the back the next. And that really disillusioned me. And I realized upon reflection that these two extremes they seem like polar opposites. And in fact, people often tack in one direction as an antidote to the other. People who are just exhausted by the hostility are trying to be uber polite to try and compensate, but they’re actually equally as dehumanizing. Both insufficiently appreciate the profound gift of being human in ourselves and in others. The hostile contingent sees others as pawns to be bludgeoned into submission, silenced.

That’s certainly the image of government.

And the polite contingent sees others as pawns to be manipulated and then discarded, but neither see human beings as they really are— beings with dignity, worthy of respect. So I fled Washington. I served one year. I remember the day very clearly. I came home from work one day. It was a very dispiriting day, and I said to my husband, I’m done with DC. I’m done with the swamp. I’m done with government. Let’s move to Indiana. And he said, okay, sounds good, we’ll move to Indiana.

So why Indiana?

Because he’s from there originally. He’s from northern Indiana, and I wanted anywhere but Washington. I just wanted something different. I had in my mind like rolling pastures and farmland, like just peace and tranquility. So he smiled and said, okay, sounds good, we’ll move to Indiana. No takebacks. And a few months later, we were out there, and one of my first friends came up to me after church one day and she said, “Hi, I’m Joanna Taft. Would you like to porch with us sometime?” And I never heard the word porch used that way.

I’m not sure what that is.

But I was curious, and again, we didn’t know many people in town. And so we went to her beautiful historic great big front veranda on her porch that Sunday afternoon, and I realized that she was staging a quiet revolution against our polarized, divided, isolated status quo from her front porch. She had curated people that day, much like what you’re doing here tonight, you know, not to have a structured dialog across difference, but just to say You know, what does it mean to engage one another as human beings first? And it was a beautiful oasis from the divisions that I had been just so immersed in in government, where, you know, the world wants us to assign value to our race, our wealth, our political persuasion, where we live, all these different identities. And it was an oasis from that. It was just a chance to be present with other human beings and I’ve been on book tour the last several years. I’ve been in like 145 cities and 5 countries. And I saw people like Joanna doing the same independently. People who said, this is the power in Joanna’s work and her life being an argument for this work.

She was saying, I can’t control others. I can’t control who’s president. I can’t control what’s happening down at city hall. I can only control myself, and I’m going to choose to double down and make my community better and more beautiful. And I tell her story in my book, The Soul of Civility, because the porch is the metaphor that I use, one of the metaphors I used for this, this theory of social change, that we can’t change others. We can’t. It’s the world wants to disempower us and blame.

Yeah, I love it. Especially here in Japan, community is so much more important than ideas. And my sense is that America is getting more and more interested in, this is my idea, this is where I stand, are you with me or are you an enemy?

Is there “porching” in Japan?

There’s a lot of cafes. People are always going out to izakaya, which is kind of Japanese bar restaurant type of thing. That is a meeting ground. Country Chicken is a fried chicken, izakaya-type place that’s just down there. We can see it out the living room window here. I do karate with my dojo, and we meet there like every couple months. It’s just a fun place to gather and talk. And I’m the only Christian in the group, I’m the only foreigner in the group, and they’ve invited me into their community through the sport of doing karate together. It feels like porching, I guess, because we’re always sharing various ideas. They sometimes ask me provocative questions about politics in the States, and I usually try to avoid those topics. But yeah, that could be porching, I guess.

It absolutely is porching because it’s not even about the porch. You got that right away. It’s a way of engaging others in the world with civility, seeing them as a human being first. You know, you’re not American or Japanese first. You’re not a Republican or Democrat first. You’re my fellow human being and I want to know you. I want to see you. I want to know you and maybe even love you. That is what Joanna fostered on her porch that day that felt so powerful, to have people be seen and known and loved in the fullness of who they are. And that’s refreshing in a world that wants to essentialize us.

Yeah, that definitely is what we’re trying to create tonight. We open our home to people. It’s why we are where we are. It’s kind of easy to get to. You came from Tokyo Station. How far are we from there?

Like 10 minutes.

Not too far, right?

I know, it was wonderful.

Yeah, so we’re trying to be centrally located for that reason. And our church too isn’t far from here. We’re trying to create that kind of community. So going back to the art gallery, or just arts in general…For artists who are listening, what would you say to them about their role in this? How can they help be an architect of civility in their cities, in their communities? What does that look like?

Well, Pope Francis has this great phrase. He called us all to be artisans of the common good. And I love that. I do a lot of work with civic leaders, with elected officials, with CEOs, with educators, people who might not consider themselves artists. I think we’re all artists. We are all creators because we are made in God’s image, and our God is the Creator.

Yes.

And I think that we are closest to being who we really are and who God created us to be and most like him when we are creating. So that’s a core message I have for people in my community that might not think of themselves as creative. They’re not part of the creative economy. And it’s like, no, you are. And it’s about finding that still quiet voice that you have a calling to, and to innovate, to see a need, something that doesn’t exist, and to build something that meets that need. So this season of my work, I’m not just talking about the book. I call myself a co-creator with these dozens of local leaders. I call them Civic Renaissance Ambassadors. They’re congresspersons. They’re state representatives. They’re local mayors. They’re city councilors. They’re school teachers. They’re people from all walks of life who have read my book, found it useful, and said, “Okay, I’ve read it, I love it, but how do I live it?” And when I was getting that question all throughout book tour, I said, “I don’t know, I just wrote a book.” But now I’ve learned a lot and I’m co-creating. That’s what I call myself, a co-creator with these people who are doing this, who see loneliness, they see brokenness, they see life as it ought not be because people are cutting friends off, cutting family members off over politics. I don’t know if that’s a problem here. I’d be curious to know if it is, but that’s a big problem in the US where you’re ending friendships, lifelong friendships, family, no contact with parents. Over politics, your view on the vaccine, your view on Donald Trump. And that is like self-sabotage. That is disordered loves. We are making the most important things the not important. And so people see those needs and they want to be part of the solution. So, I’m calling them to co-create with me.

I think a lot of artists have this image that they make work and they hope somebody is going to buy their painting or hope that someone’s going to hire them to come in and play for this event but don’t know how it fits into the bigger picture. But you’re saying that everyone has a role to play in building the kind of community to build the kind of city that we want to see. It’s so easy for us to get practical. Like, this is what I have to do to make a living. And this is my narrow pathway here. But it’s a much bigger vision, how it all fits together. Is that right?

Yes. And I think that the message I would share with my co-creators, these civic leaders that I work with is also a message for artists as well, is that no effort to create beauty is ever wasted. It can be really easy to feel like it if the piece doesn’t sell, or if, you know, no one notices— I feel that sometimes. I feel like I work so hard and I’m like, does anyone even care? Is this working? Is this doing anything? And then I have to remind myself, no, the process is the point. Just the act of creation, the act of bringing goodness and beauty and truth into the world, that is its own reward.

You were talking about keeping the conversation going by continuing to meet with these people working in government and other business leaders and people like that. I can see how the arts can play a role in that as well. There’s tremendous power in the arts to bring people together over certain topics from a third-party perspective. It’s a safe way to create a platform for people to engage one another, I think.

So we’re almost out of time. People are going to start ringing the doorbell and coming in here. Is there anything you’d like to share before we end?

The final chapter on my book argues—it’s on misplaced meaning and forgiveness—and it argues that we have made a religion out of politics, and that’s bad for democracy, bad for religion, bad for Christianity, bad for our souls. And I argue that we need to do things that give us life, that it’s not enough just to say love politics less. We have to do things to actively displace and replace a harmful affection. I’m getting this idea from Thomas Chalmers. He’s a Scottish theologian. He has an essay called “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” He says it’s not enough just to say, soul, love sin less. You have to cultivate love of God. That is what will permanently displace the love of the sin. Nature abhors a vacuum, he says. It’s not enough just to diagnose that we have an unhealthy attachment to politics and to toxicity that is poisoning our soul. What are some things we can proactively pursue that are more noble and life-giving? I talk about intellectual curiosity. I talk about friendship, especially friendship across difference. I talk about beauty and the sublime. Beauty is something that delights us. The sublime fills us with awe. It’s like, you know, a thunderstorm, waves crashing on the shore. It’s like staring up space at night and being humbled by this concept of infinity and giving us a sense of smallness. That is good for our souls. I’m on holiday here in Japan with my 3 children, and it’s hard to travel with 3 kids under 6, and it’s tiring. But I want them to know that the world is big and vast, and how we live every day is not the way that most of the world lives. That is humbling. It’s so beautiful. And I’m just so grateful to be here with you.

Yeah, that’s great. Well, how can people learn more about you?

I host a newsletter intellectual community called Civic Renaissance. It’s about beauty, goodness, and truth, and reviving the wisdom of the past to help us lead better lives in the present. Please do consider joining me over at Civic Renaissance. It’s about taking ideas out of the ether and living them, like putting this work into practice now, and how can we live richer, more fulfilled lives and relationships now. And, of course, read my book, “The Soul of Civility.” I hope it’s an encouragement. If you are in Japan, and whether you’re Japanese or American or from the West, I want to hear your observations about how this distinction between civility and politeness applies here. I came here with a kind of working hypothesis. I’ve been all over the world talking about this distinction. I was like, what’s it going to be like going to the most polite society in the world? I hope that this does meet a need in some way here, because we need human dignity first. Just manners alone are not enough.

Well, thank you. I’m really looking forward to tonight and seeing the kind of discussions that we’re going to have. So thank you so much for sharing your time with us.

My pleasure. Thanks for having us.

You’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. Don’t forget to pick up your own copy of The Soul of Civility, wherever you buy your books. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne!” We’ll see you next time.

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

This week on March 11, 2026, we remember the 15th anniversary of that terrible earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that struck the northeast coast of Japan. In memory of that event, last month, we had a big gathering within JEMA, which is the Japan Evangelical Missionary Alliance, the organization that represents every missionary and every mission organization in Japan. We all met in our new church space, Grace City Church Tokyo’s space and spent three days looking at the earthquakes and floods since 2011 and trying to see what we could learn from them and prepare for the next one.

Some of the stories that they told were actually quite funny. There was a group that came to mud-out a house. The seawater had gone clear up to the ceiling, and so the walls and the insulation were all soaked and full of mildew. But this group, instead of starting with the ceiling and then the walls, and then the floor, started with the floor. They not only removed the floors but cut through the beams and very foundations of the house. Well, that next team that came in to take out the walls, first had to fix the foundations and then put the floors back before they could work on the rest of the house. And so, at the gathering, they were talking about the need for someone who can lead groups who actually knows what they’re doing. And hopefully, knows a little something about how a house is built.

Basically, the problem that kept coming up over and over again during the course of the gathering was that the Church of Japan felt like they had to start from scratch every single time a disaster happened. They needed to try to find new resources: new people, new networks, new money. And so to that end, recently, a new network was formed called Zenkisai, which is the Christian National Disaster Network. And little by little, it’s growing. And also, after this past earthquake, the Noto Earthquake, within Mission to the World, I led a committee to form a disaster relief project account that is for every disaster in Japan, not just for one. When that next disaster comes, we will be ready to receive your help. I’ve put the details for that in the show notes for this episode. So now, through this project account, we can receive funds that will be used to buy food, water, supplies, and also cover costs of sending groups of Japanese people to the disaster area from our churches in Japan. And also very important, we will be able to pay Japanese workers to aid in the relief effort. That next disaster is coming. We know it is, but we’re doing what we can to plan for it.

Anyway, before we move on to two conversations I had with people at the gathering, I want to let you all know about a sale coming up. On March 11, on the 15th anniversary of the earthquake, for one day only, all of the ebooks I’ve written about the earthquake will be available for $0.99 on Amazon in the US, and just 100 yen on Amazon in Japan. This includes both children’s books, “The Tsunami Violin” and “Pippy the Piano and the Very Big Wave”, in English and in Japanese. The sale also includes another book I wrote called “Aroma of Beauty”, with a beautiful foreword by Makoto Fujimura. Personally, I think you should get the book just to read what he wrote, his experiences after 9/11.

And by the way, we also have an exhibit going on in our church space with “The Tsunami Violin”, showcasing the beautiful artwork by the very talented Holly Rose Wallace, as another way that our church community is remembering the people and towns affected by the disaster. A big thank you to all of you who’ve already bought all three of these books and left reviews. Thank you so much.

Okay, now let’s turn to my conversation with Dean Bengston.

We are here at the JEMA Gathering (Japan Evangelical Missionary Alliance), spending three days talking about disaster relief and trying to prepare for the next disaster. There’s been quite a few ways that many of us here in this room have been involved over the past. But, Dean, I really wanted to talk with you. You moved into a disaster area soon after the 2011 earthquake. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are?

I am with the Lutheran Brotherhood Mission in Japan. We were living in Sendai at the time, and through a number of circumstances, we ended up connecting with Abe-san in Ishinomaki and delivering necessary goods. We soon realized there were a lot more needs and started mudding-out houses. I commuted from Sendai for a year and 10 months before we moved.

I have very fond memories of a concert that we gave in that home you started up there. Can you tell us a little bit about how arts played a role in your ministry there?

I think early on, we realized that people needed healing in many ways. And we had a friend, Shizu-san, who’s a singer-songwriter, and we invited her to come. She wanted to come to mud-out houses, but we said, Shizu-san, you have to come and sing and minister to people through song, that people need healing, and music brings healing. And so she reluctantly agreed to do a concert in an open space, a lot that we were using for gatherings for takedashi cookouts. Shizu had lived in Ishinomaki in her junior high years, but she explained to people, I don’t know how to really sympathize with you. So she started by singing songs that everybody knew, old Japanese songs. And after several songs and people singing along, she said, Well, I just like to sing a song that I wrote. Singing old Japanese songs or popular songs that people knew drew people in. And then they opened the door for her to sing songs that she’s written and to share a part of her life and her faith in a very natural way.

Do you feel like that was surprising to her or to the people in the room that it had the impact that it did?

I don’t really know, but all I know is I think for several musicians, it changed their ministry so that even when they were doing concerts in churches, they moved from doing all “Christian” music to actually starting out their concerts with songs that people maybe knew. And Kosaka Chu is really good at this. He could share a testimony and weave it in with that there’s somebody loves you, and he would just sing a song about love, and then he’d share about God and how he loves you. I don’t know, I think it changed people’s lives. An awful lot of musicians volunteered, and they were well received. So we really appreciated it. We’ve had a lot of concerts.

Yes, you sure have. What was the name of the house that you were…

House of Hope or Kibou no Ie.

And how often were you having concerts there?

At least once a month. But before House of Hope, we were having them outside in empty lots, empty parking lots that we were using or empty house lots that we were using. Then we moved into the community center and had several concerts in the community center and very varying concerts. Everything from a Hawaiian Luau to gospel choirs to vcontemporary singers, and Roger, you on organ, and also the koto.

Right, the koto player, Chieko.

Yeah, that was beautiful. And we have a small place, so people were just enamored with being able to be so close to the koto and watch the keys on the organ. And also, wasn’t there a flute?

I was trying to remember if it was flute or violin or something.

Flute, I think.

It was so moving for me to be there and see the people… I mean, it wasn’t like background music. Everybody was so focused on what we were doing and interacting with us. It really was a moving time.

I think music has played a big part in bringing healing to people.

Tell us a little bit about your son. He’s a visual artist.

Yeah, he was actually starting art school, but it got delayed because of the earthquake. And so he volunteered with us at the beginning. And then he was able to, because he speaks English fluently, he was able to not take English and got Fridays off. So he volunteered for the first semester every day, every week on Fridays with us. And through that, he did one project, a byobu folding screen made out of cell phone parts.

Cell phone parts?

Yeah, the old flip phones. And there was a farmer who’s a small farmer in our neighborhood with a cell phone factory next to it. Now, as the waters came in, it drove all the parts of the cell phones into his ground, and we cleaned out his field. Joshua also did a number of things. He made paint from the muck and did some paintings with that.

Wait, I don’t understand. It was out of mud?

Yeah, out of the muck, he created paint.

No, I didn’t see that work.

Yeah. Actually, most of his art shows are interactive. He’s an interesting character because he always wished that he could touch paintings when he was a kid. So he did one show where he had all the paintings hanging at different levels, and you could walk around and touch them because they were all at touching level. So usually, his art shows are interactive.

Well, the cell phone project, that wasn’t just him looking for pieces. Wasn’t it collaborative in some way? Asking for people to bring in things?

Oh, that was a different project. He’s had a lot of different shows.

But just that way, too, of inviting people in, whether it’s volunteers who are there or people in neighborhood, too, is another connection point through the arts. I thought that was such an important message. Thank you so much for sharing.

So Dean and his family were one of the many who moved into the disaster area after the earthquake. And every time I visited up there, I loved seeing the trust built with the community and the ways they were accepted. They were not seen as outsiders. And they’re still there now, 15 years later.

Okay, so I also want to introduce you to Stephen Nakahashi. He was one of the young men who answered the call to help in the disaster area shortly after the earthquake. So this big organization, Samaritan’s Purse, came in not only with a lot of supplies, but with money to hire workers. And a call went out across the nation of Japan to send them people who could work full-time. Steven was one who answered that call, along with a lot of other young people. My wife’s sister, Virginia, also moved up there as a missionary through Mission to the World as she had just graduated from college. And there was Ryo and Mami Amano, Jordan Foxwell, and so many others that went up there as well. And eventually, through their work, Ishinomaki Christian Center was started.

Also, in a past episode, Episode #43, we talked with Rachel Reese Kollmeyer who also came as a missionary through Mission to the World. She is a very gifted violinist and worked with the others to teach and perform and help with the children’s music clubs and a gospel choir for kids and the annual arts festival and so much else. They also had craft-making with the kids. I was particularly moved by a musical that one of the students wrote inspired by all this, and then worked with us for the production of their musical.

After the earthquake, it was especially hard for the children. The men, whose livelihood had been the coast, now had long commutes to work in other places, and the women had to go to work as well. Not only did the kids not have their parents around as much, but they also didn’t have as many resources available to them as before. The parks were gone. Many school programs had shut down. And so they did what they could to help the children dream again. And so many relationships came out of that time.

Now let’s hear from Stephen.

So, Stephen, thank you so much for taking this time to talk with me. This is the Art, Life, Faith Podcast, and with the 15th anniversary of the 2011 earthquake, I wanted to talk a little bit about the role that the arts played in the relief effort. But before we do that, please introduce yourself.

Thank you for having me. My name is Stephen Nakahashi, a pastor’s kid. I grew up in Japan from the age of 11. Prior to that, I lived in Scotland with my family. So I’ve been in Japan for 33 years and counting. I became involved in disaster relief from 2011 with Samaritan’s Purse and then I subsequently started working with Ishinomaki Christian Center and lived in Tohoku for 14 years. And currently, I am serving with Noto Help in the Hokuriku region since 2024.

So, you were just in a panel discussion here. You’ve had quite a few experiences with disasters. Can you list them in order with earthquake and floods by year?

Okay, 2011 was the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku. Then the 2016 earthquake in Kumamoto. Then heavy rain and flooding in Kumamoto in 2020, just south in Hitoyoshi. And then in 2021, there was again heavy rain and flooding in Saga Prefecture, north of Nagasaki. And then in 2022, there was flooding again in Aomori, in the northern part of Japan, which was a bit of a surprise as that has not happened before. And then in 2023, there was again heavy rain and flooding in Akita, again in the north. All of those happened in the summer of those years. And then in 2024, on the first of January, was the earthquake on the Noto Peninsula.

And then after you were brought in, I know you went in giving advice, helping in any way you could, but then you moved there.

I did, yeah.

And you’ve been there for a year and three months.

Yeah, that was a big decision for us. It was mainly driven by the importance of my family to be together. For 10 months, I had commuted from Miyagi to Noto. I would be down there for two or three weeks before going back home for a week or so and then repeat. So that became quite difficult, and we thought it’d be important for our family to be together.

Yeah, I was able to go twice to Noto Help while you were working there. We were in this big room with, I don’t know, maybe there were 60 volunteers or so broken up into four or five groups. You’re introducing, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do today. This group is going to do that. This group is going to do that.” You were the man in charge, telling everyone what was going to happen. For some, maybe it was their first disaster, and they don’t know what’s going on, but you gave them this assurance, “It’s going to be okay. Your driver is going to get you there safely. They’re going to bring you back. We’re going to serve the Lord in this way.” Really was a powerful experience.

Really? I’m glad you thought so.

I think one of the interesting things about the Noto Help situation was how, those who are listening probably don’t even know this, the roads were really hurt by the earthquake. Basically, transportation was almost shut down. Finally, when they were able to open up the roads, they made one road to go up north, one road to come back. It used to be a two-way road, and they made it a one-way road. A police blockade stopped anyone from going because it was bottlenecking the whole peninsula, so y’all became the entrance point for working throughout the whole region. Was that a big responsibility? People contacting from all over the country and all over the world to wanting to help?

Yeah, I think it was really a tricky balance to maintain. We really understood how much people wanted to help, and we knew how important that was for the recovery as well. So we wanted to make sure that we were not getting in the way of first responders, like ambulances or any vehicles like that. It did seem like it would be wise to try to, as a Christian community, to be responsible for that. So we were glad we could help in that way.

Let’s back up to 2011. The 15th anniversary is coming up, and so many memories. I mean, Community Arts Tokyo, this organization, was started through the experiences of that. When I was in the shelters in that disaster, in the chaos, and in the anguish, the anxiety people are feeling, and saw how the arts brought healing, to see how they brought comfort, how they helped us build relationships. During a time when people are saying, “We don’t need goods. We don’t need the food and water. We’re good.” And yet there was still an entry point, a way to connect through the arts. And I, experiencing the power of that, I wanted to bring that back to Tokyo. So we started Community Arts Tokyo, building community through the arts in Tokyo. But it was experiencing that with you up in Ishinomaki, in the Tohoku area, that was my first connection to it. I was just wondering, I’d love to hear your memories of that. As you look back and think about those times, what could you do to help me process that and those who are listening to try to understand, especially as artists, what role they can play in a disaster relief situation?

I remember fondly the time that we ran the Junior High School Kids program in Ishinomaki, and I really could connect with those kids over a longer period of time. Where we taught the kids at the local junior high schools for three months from April through July. And then we had the Ishinomaki Gospel Festival. So there was a goal of something beyond just practicing, but to actually have a stage at the end of it for the kids to perform and experience something different. And the catch copy, so to speak, was for the kids to be able “to dream again.” And yeah, in the midst of the devastation at the time, there were lots of kids whose parents were really struggling with the aftermath of the earthquake. In Ishinomaki, especially, there was a lot of parents, the dads of the family who are fishermen, often were gone for a long time. But then post-disaster, the mothers also started working, and the kids didn’t really have anywhere to be or to go. And they didn’t really have that sense of looking forward to something. I think that played a really important role in helping some of those kids at the time to experience something new.

I loved those gospel festivals because it was like the whole town was coming together for all the businesses. There were stalls so they could offer food or whatever they made. On a personal note, I also loved giving organ concerts outside. I brought my portable organ up there and I’m playing, and I don’t get to play outside very much as an organist, so that was really fun.

Yeah, that was really an amazing combination of the local people coming with their stalls and then so many different artists coming to serve and to play. We also had a play area for kids, because a lot of the parks had been damaged, there was really not many safe places for kids to play. So that was another aspect that we added to it. So the kids could enjoy something different. It was an amazing coming together of communities through music and through the arts.

It definitely was. Thank you so much for all the work you put into those. You were in Ishinomaki right after the disaster and for a long time afterward. And then Ishinomaki Christian Center started. And as I understand it, part of the vision for that was to be a meeting place for creating community. People had their own homes. They had their food and water. But still, that community building aspect was an important part of what was needed to help people recover. Now you had a spot to do it. You had the land. You had the building. I really enjoyed being able to come up, not as often as I wanted to, but when I did, to hear, what the situation was then and how people were doing. And to see you building that community, especially right where that building was. It almost felt like a wasteland from the first couple of years of my memory of that spot. Now it’s a thriving place. It was right next to the train station. When you look back, how would you put it in your own words?

As we were just talking about today, if you approach the situation with the mentality of being the caregiver and then people receiving care, and especially in a physical way, once that need is no longer there, then the relationship also ends there. Music and the arts in many ways is something that we don’t always realize that we need. And it’s a really good way to bring the community together, even after the physical needs are met and people don’t really need those types of support. But whether it be a disaster or not, and all the more so after a disaster, the people in the community were going through a lot of uncertainty. Opportunities often provided by music and different means of the arts has provided the opportunity to continue to build relationships with people. That was really important to continue the relationships with the people that we had come to know.

Are you seeing that now in Ichikawa, on the Noto Peninsula, where you’re living now? Is that part of the vision? I know a lot of people ended up moving away. And you were sharing in the panel how a lot of the older people living there are being encouraged by their children to leave and move in with them. They’re answering, “No, this is our home.” But there’s a lot of resistance against rebuilding their homes, rebuilding their towns. What is your vision for that and how do you see the arts playing a role?

I think so. I think as we move into the phase of that physical need not being so much of a need. And we are now reaching out into the temporary housing unit communities, and we are trying to build those relationships with the people. And so definitely, I think from this year onward, and even to this point, there’s a role for the arts to play in this phase. One of the challenges in Noto is that unlike maybe in Tohoku, a lot of the temporary housing unit communities are quite small, and sometimes they don’t really even have a gathering place. If they do, it can only house maybe 10 to 15 people. So it’s hard to reach people in that way. But yeah, I think now that we do have a center in Anamizu that hopefully we can start to connect to people more there. And we look forward to being able to coordinate people coming along.

Thank you. Well, I look forward to our next trip. Maybe we’ll bring some artists this summer.

Yes, definitely. I look forward to it.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

You’re welcome. Thank you.

You’ve been listening to the Art, Life, Faith Podcast. And don’t forget to pick up your own copy of “The Tsunami Violin”, “Pippy the Piano”, and “Aroma of Beauty”. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne!” We’ll see you next time.

Welcome to the Art, Life, Faith podcast. And I’m your host, Roger Lowther. Well, Happy New Year everyone! It’s good to be with you in 2026. I hope you’ve had a good year so far. Two of my boys are in college now but were able to be back with us over the winter break, and we got to have some fun in the snowy mountains of Japan, including an overnight snowshoe camping trip up one of the tallest mountains in Japan. It was beautiful, but it was also very, very cold. So cold, in fact, that the water in our water bottles froze almost immediately. And my fingers stuck to any kind of metal I touched. But so many good memories.

Anyway, I want to thank you so much for your support of our newest children’s book, The Tsunami Violin, which was released late last year. Many of you have been writing me notes of encouragement, telling me who you’ve gifted the book to or your own experiences with the story. I want to share one of them with you. One woman read the book to her granddaughter’s elementary school class. In her note to me, she wrote,

“Every child was wide-eyed and engaged. Students were able to identify how the characters were happy at the beginning, how they were changed by the tsunami, and how at the end of the story they were happy again because they were able to bring others hope through their story and their music. I will always cherish this special time with the students and that it was possible because of your book.”

So of course I’m encouraged to receive notes like this and pray that this book will continue to have an ongoing impact in people’s lives.

In our last episode, we shared a little bit about the making of The Tsunami Violin and the people involved. I thought you may also like to hear a little bit more about the background of what went into the making of the book. We consciously followed the traditional sonata-allegro form that is so common in much of classical music. In the beginning, we have the exposition, when the main theme is introduced. The main character is introduced as a tree, living in a literal garden of paradise, a forest that was planted 400 years ago and was designated as one of the most beautiful sites in all of Japan.

Then everything falls apart. The tsunami comes and physically breaks the tree, tearing her up by the roots. This is the beginning of the development section, when the melodic theme is broken into fragments. Also, the development is usually in the minor key to express sadness.

Then in the story the craftsman shows up, has the tree cut into smaller pieces, takes them to Tokyo, and begins to build a violin out of them. So this is the part where the development continues, where melodic fragments are taken through different keys and different ways: backwards, forwards, and upside down. Sometimes they find new relationships with a secondary theme. In other words, the fragments are put back together in new ways.

And then the story ends with the main character finding hope and new life as a violin, surrounded by community through her music. And this, of course, is the recapitulation, the opening musical theme but as a new creation. Somehow that theme is deeper and more beautiful for having gone through the trauma of the development, through the breaking, through the minor key, and we hear the melody with new ears. I pray that as you read this book, you will be filled with new wonder as to how God brings hope into broken lives.

Okay, today I want to share with you a conversation I had with Jerrod Partridge, a phenomenal artist working in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. He and his wife Jessie play a central role in the life of the community there, running a studio right on the main strip, and also in the lives of so many artists including, recently, a Japanese intern who came from our community here in Tokyo to spend the summer with that family. I so appreciate them and am happy just to be able to share this conversation with you so that you can get to know them as well.

Hello Roger.

Thank you so much for being on the show.

Yeah, I’m thrilled to be here.

Yeah, I really wanted people to know you, not just because you’re a phenomenal artist, but also because of your story.

Well, I mean, you’re very integrated into that story. So, it seems appropriate that we’re sitting here talking.

Yeah. So let me just try to share with listeners what happened. You came to Japan on a 10-day trip, two weekends with a week in between. And during that time, you did a number of events. For example, there was a church that was just starting in a new location called Double O Cross, and they wanted to introduce their space to the community. And so, in order to do that, they hosted, for the first time, an event. I think it was the first event they ever had in that space. They hosted an art show of your work. It was an amazing event. We had a live musician playing a traditional Japanese instrument, and we had wine and cheese. It was sophisticated. A lot of people came in for the first time, and the pastor was so happy.

That was a really incredible experience for me to get to experience the church in Japan, to get to experience the culture, meet so many wonderful, gracious people. It was really, honestly, a life-altering experience for me.

Also, there’s more about the story of this church. They wanted to plant a second location to have another service, but everyone wanted to be in that one space where the art gallery was because, somehow, I think through events like that, that we were able to do afterwards, people were really drawn into that space. It felt like a place of home. The community really liked being there. It was a space that was a gift to the neighborhood. To introduce that space to the neighborhood through the arts really was a powerful message.

It was very welcoming. The artwork, how it was displayed, and then having the musician play. I did a drawing while she was playing. So that was a neat collaboration. Then, even one of the guys from the church made some refreshments and snacks that related to the work. Because I do a lot of drawings with walnut ink, he had snacks that were made with walnuts and things. And I thought that connection and relationship was so thoughtful and really made the whole thing have depth and meaning beyond just pictures on the wall.

Right, and you should know, too, that some of the relationships made for the first time in that event have continued through that church and through our artist community. I still am talking to those people.

Yeah, that’s amazing. And likewise, relationships that I’ve made have continued.

So cool. Well, then the next day, I think it was, or a day later, we had an event at our church, Grace City Church Tokyo, where we hosted a talk and luncheon before worship and sold some of your works. You were able to talk about it over a sushi lunch, and we also had a Q&A time.

Yeah, that was really fascinating. It was eye-opening for me, some of the questions that came out, because there are things that we just don’t think about necessarily. We don’t consider how a different culture is going to see your processes and interpretations. One thing that I specifically remember I do a lot of work on handmade paper, and the paper is intentionally really textured. I leave openings and holes. It’s real rough. But I know the Japanese people are used to paper making in such a high form. The paper that they make is so gorgeous and perfectly done. So there was a little confusion of why would you make paper that’s so rough and imperfect. But when I explained the process, there was a really neat connection of understanding why I would choose to do it in that form. So that was a really wonderful memory. Then also the question of why I might have been painting some of the things I was painting.

Yeah, I remember that. My church sponsored the event, and we made it clear you were a Christian. It was not necessarily a Christian event, but it was hosted and sponsored by Christians. One of the people asked, “Why do you, as a Christian, why are you painting Shinto Shrines? Why are you painting Buddhist temples?”

Yeah, that was fascinating. It was an eye-opening question for me because as a foreigner, everything was new and different and visually exciting. I didn’t think too much about why, as a Christian, I might be drawn to these things visually.

Do you remember what your answer was to their question?

Only vaguely. Because I was a little bit surprised by the question. So, you tell me what you remember.

I remember you saying, “Because it’s beautiful. I wanted to paint it because it’s beautiful.” But they were a little bit surprised by that because I think there’s a pretty strong message to, especially Christians in Japan, that you should not go to shrines, you should not go to temples, that it is contrary to what the God of the Bible desires. And they try to avoid that side of Japanese culture, which is such a huge part of Japanese culture. It’s a real struggle in the Japanese church, I think.

Yeah, and I could see that struggle and was glad to be aware of the sensitivity of that. But at the same time, I did feel like the message of the fact that a Christian can see the beauty of what is created by non-Christians, but also the beauty of the fact that everybody are children of God, that whatever understanding we may have of religions, of culture, that there is beauty all around us in God’s creation, but also in man’s creation. And that can be celebrated. That can be celebrated through our approach as Christians without having to limit ourselves to the person making the creations. They have to believe what I believe for me to appreciate what they’re doing. And I just think that that limitation is unnecessary and not helpful.

Yeah, I actually I have a lot of discussions with Christian artists in Japan about this, and there’s a lot of opinions about it. We’re still trying to figure it out because, yes, we believe as Christians that there is no beauty outside of God’s beauty. So all beauty is essentially pointing to the source of all beauty. But when it comes through other religions, there is a, I don’t know, a barrier, I think, within the heart that make it difficult to worship God and to see that beauty because of growing up in that culture and such a strong connection between Japanese art and the Japanese religion.

Yeah, I think as a foreigner, there’s obviously that cultural separation where I’m able to see things from a distance because I didn’t grow up in the culture, and I can just see it all as an outside beauty. There’s a much easier time for me to do that And again, to recognize the sensitivity of a Japanese Christian’s perspective on that was really informative to me.

Yeah. I remember one of the practical cool things about the event was that we were inviting many people who weren’t Christians to the art event, to the luncheon. And then because worship was happening right after that in just the room next door, it was one more doorway into Christian community, into Christian worship. People came from that event then to worship for the first time in their life because of what you did, because you came. Let me transition to that. Why did you come to Japan in the first place?

Well, it was a really unexpected thing. You came and did a concert at our church here in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, because of a relationship that you had with our pastor. I felt the need to introduce myself after I heard you play. I’ve always been very drawn to and attracted to Japanese aesthetics. The fact that it’s encouraged nationally is a really fascinating thing to me, but it’s always been something I’ve been drawn to. When I found out that you were a performing artist in Japan, I just felt the need to introduce myself. From that introduction, you saw the work that I was doing. You invited me to Japan. Our church decided to help me get there. They ended up sending me to Japan to have this exhibition with you. It felt all very God-led because none of us planned any of it. It was like just from that introduction, all these things started happening that felt necessary and changed lives in a way that we could not have planned.

That’s so true. I love meeting artists wherever I’m traveling around. But the fact that after inviting you, you said, “Yeah, I’ll come.” Now, that is very unusual. Most people I invite, they’re like, Well, that’s okay. Thank you. I had no idea how talented you were as an artist at the time, but also how good you are with people. Just to see how God worked through you was just an amazing blessing in so many ways. To see how God just, through that one chance meeting, that all this came about. So one of the things that came about is recently a Japanese artist came from Japan and stayed in your home for a while and worked as an artist. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, so we hosted Satomi Suzuki. I met Satomi when I was in Japan in 2019, but it was a very brief meeting, and I didn’t know for sure that we had met. When you mentioned to me the idea that she was looking for an artist in residency program. My wife and I own a flower shop and art gallery here in downtown Ocean Springs. And you saw that that might be an interesting opportunity for Satomi to get a different experience. We said, “Yeah, that sounds wonderful.” The name sounded somewhat familiar, but I met so many people while I was over there, so I didn’t know for sure. But I dug back down into my memoirs from the trip, papers and things that I had brought back, and I found this lovely little note that she had written at my art exhibition of how much she enjoyed the show, how much she appreciated me being there. To see that written out immediately made me feel like there’s this deeper connection that I wasn’t even aware of.

You even have it here on the table next to you. You kept it.

I pulled it out for you to see because the name sounded familiar because she had written this at the show, and I had brought it back and read through. And she wasn’t the only one. Multiple really wonderful comments from people that I met. But we were excited about that continued relationship of, “Okay, here’s somebody looking for an art. She wants the opportunity to paint. She wants to experience different things.” And life in Ocean Springs is very different from life in Tokyo. Much fewer people. Much slower pace of life. But again, it felt like something that was beyond our knowledge and intention of what was going on. And so when the idea came, we said, yes, this sounds like a wonderful thing, a wonderful opportunity for us to have a different experience for our family to experience the Japanese culture coming to Ocean Springs with no clue as to what that was going to look like. We didn’t even know if Satomi spoke English well. We didn’t know anything about her, but we said, Okay, sure. Then we still didn’t know where she was going to stay. Our oldest son ended up getting a job opportunity out of the state for a few months.

Again, that just fit right into the plan that God had for this to work out that we could not have known was going to happen. So all of a sudden, we had a room available in our home, and we invited her to come and be a part of our family. And she fit in in the most amazing way. She came in with a real loving, gracious heart. She wanted to work. She wanted to be able to experience a different culture. And we thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed having her here.

Yeah, that’s so kind of you to open your home to her in that way. I know for a fact, and actually you all too can know for a fact by reading her blog, just how much it’s changed her life to be able to go on this residency, how good it was. I’m going to put some links in the show notes so you can see her artwork and what she was up to.

And she was on a recent podcast with you.

She was, yes.

We enjoyed listening to that.

I interviewed her to help raise money for her time here. And so, you can go back and listen to that. I’ll also put a link to that in the show notes.

So why Ocean Springs? What brought you here as a visual artist? This is a special place. Tell me why.

Yeah, there’s a there’s a unique art culture here. We lived in Jackson for a long time, and Jackson has a unique support and celebration. And I think Mississippi as a whole supports artists and the arts. It’s hard to say that this doesn’t exist in other surrounding places. It probably does. But living here and knowing that Mississippi does not always get a good reputation for things. Most of the stories coming out about Mississippi are not positive. But living here, I can tell you it is a very positive and encouraging place for artists. Jackson was wonderful. We ended up moving our family down to the coast in 2016. I grew up in Mobile, which is also on the coast and so being near the water was always an attractive place for me to be. But we moved our family down here. The culture of Ocean Springs has really been developed by this one family, the Anderson family, who in the early turn of the century started a pottery studio. One of the brothers was a really successful potter. One of the brothers, Walter Anderson, was a painter and printmaker. And now there’s a museum here in town dedicated to his work.

And it’s really neat to see how this one family of artists have created an aesthetic for the whole town, and how the town celebrates that, identifies with the imagery that they created. I just really love that artists were able to give this unity to a community. I think that attracts artists, that they see that art has become an identifier for this town, and therefore, artists want to be here.

I love that downtown area. It’s a walking area, right? Shop after shop after shop. It’s just a really fun place to be.

It’s beautiful with all the old oak trees. That’s one of the real iconic aspects of the town and the area all along the Gulf Coast, not just Ocean Springs, but the old oak trees are special. There’s actually an exhibition that I curated at the Walter Anderson Museum right now that is based on live oaks. I selected 10 different artists to create work, to dig into the cultural, spiritual, ecological aspects of living with live oaks. It’s something that needs to be celebrated.

Yeah. I know that right next to that museum is where you just opened, you and your wife opened up a shop in a really nice hotel in an older style.

It’s a boutique hotel, so 15 rooms, small but right in the downtown area, right next to the Walter Anderson Museum. Ever since we moved to Ocean Springs, we thought it’d be neat to have something downtown. It just has such a wonderful feel. We thought, Well, that would be neat, but we don’t know how we would do that or what it would look like, or even if it would be supported. We just didn’t know. Then we met the developers on this hotel, and we saw that we had this unified vision for what it could be, and a real nature-focused aesthetic to it. They appreciated what we were doing. Jessie, my wife, with her floral design, fantastic designer, me with the artwork that I was doing. I’m doing a lot of nature-themed paintings, and they just really fit together with their vision of the development. That’s been a really neat thing. Community has really stepped up and supported what we’re doing. It’s been a big learning experience. We’re still within the first year of opening. We’ve never had a physical shop before. I’ve been painting full-time for 15 years. Jessie’s been doing weddings and events for about that amount of time. We’ve always just worked in the studio and then had events that we were working for. This is our first time to actually have our own physical space. It’s been amazing. There have been some hard things to it, but a lot of learning going on.

Yeah, I loved seeing this space. Thank you for showing it to me last night. You talked about how the Andersons created this atmosphere where the artist wanted to join, and you now are definitely a huge part of that being right on that main strip with all the old shops in that hotel right next to the museum. It’s just so cool to see how art is playing such a huge role in life of the city here.

Yeah. And even within the museum itself right now, there’s an exhibition of the Ocean Spring’s Art Association has this huge exhibition of artists from all along the coast within the museum right now. And so, the arts culture here is really huge. It’s encouraging. It’s exciting. We just had this big Peter Anderson Festival in town, where around 150,000 people come in one week. That’s a lot of people. In Tokyo standards, that’s not a whole lot. But for this small town, for that many people to come because of the arts, is really exciting.

So we’re just about out of time, but is there anything else you would like to say before we sign off?

Yeah, I’d like to talk a little bit about just traveling as an artist. We talked about traveling to Japan, but I’ve actually gotten to lead a bunch of groups to Europe for travel and to teach drawing and painting in Europe. We’ve been to Italy 10 different times. We’ve taken groups to Spain and Greece, and we went to Sweden this year. Every time I go to a different culture, I learn something else about humanity, and it’s usually positive. And I think that’s a wonderful thing, to experience the cultures, how people interact with the arts, how people interact with each other, and then being able to bring that back to my daily life. It’s always going to influence you in some way, whether it’s obvious to others or not. It may just be all internal. So the trip to Japan fit in that as well. It was a different type of trip because I was having a show instead of leading a group. But being able to offer that to other people and knowing how life-changing that can be has been a really exciting thing over the past several years to be able to do. I’m actually organizing a trip. We’re going back to Italy next June soon, and then I’m putting together a trip to France to study Monet next September.

That’s so cool. People listening, could they join as well?

Yes, of course. It’s open. We go and we really focus on studying the arts. Some people take drawing and painting lessons from me while we’re over there, but not everybody. Some are just there to soak it up and enjoy it from the periphery. There’s some of us that are really digging into creating work and experiencing the place through drawing and painting. But I understand that’s not for everyone. We do encourage people to respond to the experience creatively in whatever form they may have. They may take photographs. They may write in journals or write poetry. I think that being over there and responding creatively is something that we can encourage no matter what their experience level is.

Well, thank you so much for your time and for opening people’s eyes to the beauty of the world around them, the cultures around them. And thank you so much for sitting down with me.

Thanks, Roger. I appreciate it.

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.

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

I have an exciting announcement to make. Our next book, “The Tsunami Violin,” comes out next month, November 2025. We’ve been working on this project for some time now, and we are so excited to finally be able to share it with all of you. This book is based on real-life events that happened after a tsunami hit the northeast of Japan in 2011 and tells a story about a tree that is completely destroyed, along with a forest she lives in and her town. And then a master craftsman, a woodworker, comes along and redeems her and forms her into a beautiful violin, which now currently travels around Japan and around the world, giving concerts and telling people her story. We’ll have more information about that in our next podcast.

For now and along this same theme, I want to share a conversation I had with Vince Black. He is a woodworker and pastor from Fort Collins, Colorado. Every month, we invite an artist to come and share their art with us after a meal and then lead a discussion. “What does their art have to do with our lives? What does that have to do with the Christian faith?” Art, life, faith. When this artist can speak English, I ask them to record one of these podcasts so that we can share the story with you as well.

Vince looks for downed trees in the forest, which are badly damaged. Either they’re badly burned or beetle-eaten or something else happened to it. It just looks like trash laying on the ground. And then he redeems them and carves beautiful objects out of them: flower vases, bowls, cups. His whole message is about finding beauty and hope in this world coming from brokenness and death.

In the very beginning of the event, Vince shared a little bit about one of his projects sculpting people without any limbs, which led to a fascinating discussion in perfectionist Japan. He talked about Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” which seeks to show the perfect proportions of the male body. And the question was what happens when a body does not meet those proportions? Does that mean it’s no longer ideal? Does it mean it’s broken? Does it mean it’s not beautiful? The Bible tells us that in heaven our bodies are perfect. Does that mean that everyone has all their limbs in heaven? These are just some of the things that we talked about.

Vince also shared about the death of his 18-year-old son. Then my wife, Abi, shared a little about her 18-year-old niece, Lydia, who had a genetic mitochondrial disease. At that time, all the organs of her body were slowly shutting down. She was suffering and in a lot of pain, and there was nothing the doctors could do to heal her. When Vince spoke, it was earlier this year in January, and Lydia died that very next month. Abi went to the funeral and brought one of Vince’s flower vases and gave it to Lydia’s mom and told her the story. This flower vase was particularly damaged by a forest fire and showed its suffering. And yet, it was beautiful. It was the perfect gift for that time of grieving, and to show the incredible beauty we can find in brokenness, and to share that we’re not alone in our grieving, and that God is always present with us, and that suffering is not the end. His art gives just a little peek into what God is doing in this world and the beauty that he will one day bring out of all suffering.

There was another person we also gave Vince’s bowl to that was going through a very difficult time. We always keep one of his flower vases in a place of honor in our living room where everyone can see it and be continually reminded of his message. If you ever come to Japan and visit us, you can see it sitting there in the living room. Vince’s time with us was really meaningful, and I’m so glad that I now get to share it with all of you.

Roger

Vince Black. Thank you so much for being here.

Vince

It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Roger

Yeah, I’m really intrigued by you and your art. We’ve talked a little bit before we started recording. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Vince

Sure, I am Vince Black. I have a history in art. I’ve always wanted to be involved in art. It’s something I grew up desiring to be in. I went to a small school and studied sculpture, so I have the very useful degree of sculpture that will get you a job in a coffee shop or something like that. I studied classically under one artist. We had a lot of fun and worked on the human form for four years. It was a beautiful time. From that point on, I moved toward ministry, toward being a pastor. People have brought up the corny joke that I am now sculpting hearts instead of sculpting other materials.

Roger

Oh, nice.

Vince

But I’ve been a pastor for about 20 years and have always been interested, still interested in art, and have been in art circles, talked to artists, had artist groups at our church, but have just recently, over the last couple of years, gotten back into art again. Physical, tangible, sculpting art.

Roger

Now, you’ve brought some of these pieces with you. I have them right here on the table, and I’ve been noticing some are heavy, some are light. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what we have seen in front of us?

Vince

Yeah. About two years ago, I started turning wood on a lathe. I was given a lathe, an old lathe from a friend. A lathe, if you don’t know what it is, it’s a tool that will turn wood very quickly toward you. It’s spinning at 2,000 RPMs towards you.

Roger

That’s dangerous.

Vince

Yeah, so it can be dangerous. This old lathe that was given to me, I had no idea what I was doing, took a spin on it, and threw the wood across the room that I was in. I knew that that was a dangerous thing but was intrigued enough by it. This is something that could really be interesting. Got a newer lathe and started turning wood, and we can talk through all of that. But I’ve got here four pieces that I brought with me to give a sense of what I’m doing. The whole thrust behind the work that I’m doing is taking something, a piece of wood, that has been either gone through fire or death through beetle kill or some other insect that has been downed. That would typically be either thrown in a fire or brush pile or just lay to rot. I’ve taken those pieces and turned them into what I think is a beautiful piece of work.

I have a bowl here that’s about 6 inches in diameter. It’s aspen. Aspen you see all over Colorado, but this one has burn marks on it from a fire that it has gone through in a canyon that’s near our house. That’s one piece. You can see the beautiful white or yellow tones of the wood with some scarring on it from the fire. I have another smaller vase that was pine. And pine in Colorado goes through a couple of different destructive things. One is beetle kill. Beetles will infest a pine tree and then begin to go from pine tree to pine tree, and just take out entire forests through the kill. And what happens is it leaves them, leaves the sticks or the stumps of these trees there dry, which makes them very susceptible to fire. So many trees will be killed by beetle kill and then taken out by forest fire. So you can see on the edge of this one, the charred bark around the side of it that’s been taken out by fire, but probably before that beetle kill.

Roger

Yeah, it’s gnarly, like how it sticks out like that. I really like it.

Vince

So what I’ve been trying to do over the past couple of months is bring some smooth, beautiful edges out of the harsh, as you said, gnarly pieces of wood to show both the beautiful and the destroyed in one piece.

Roger

It’s a nice color contrast, too. It has the black against the white with the brown texture of the wood. What about that one?

Vince

So this one is ash, and you can see the visible marks of the beetles that trace all the way through it, eating away the wood and eventually killing it. So that’s what took this tree out. And again, leaving some of the bark edges on the side of it, trying to pull up some of the beautiful smooth insides of it, but still leaving the remnants of the beetle killer. And then this one is a small juniper vase, probably three or four inches tall. And the juniper, it’s also called redwood. It’s got the red inside of it coming out of some of the white flesh here and then leaving some of the bark that’s been taken down as well. That’s been my desire recently from these turnings is to have some of the remains of what we see in the death of the tree, but from that, carve out some or turn some of the beautiful softer edges of it to show both, to show the contrast, which I think, and my whole desire this is to show the beauty that comes from the brokenness that has been left. So we see the discarded, the destruction that’s there, and the redemption that can come from some of those harshly treated pieces.

Roger

Why would you want to do that? I think we’re often taught to try to look away from brokenness and from pain, from suffering. For you, too, when people make things, they try to make it usually as perfect as possible, to have no blemish. You’re embracing the brokenness. Why? Tell me more about that.

Vince

Yeah. There’s a story behind a story, and part of this goes back to two years ago. We have five boys. Two years ago, we lost a son to cancer, 18 years old, fought for a year and a half. Even in the hospital, he began sketching out. He would draw and sketch some things. He began sketching out this image of a skull that had been turned upside down, and he drew flowers coming out of it, even in the hospital, as he was thinking through this. As we talked to him, he said, “One day, there will be some beautiful things that come from death.” This was before he knew his end was near. That really has struck me. From that, my wife and I began talking after we lost our son, Ezra, we began talking about just some healing for me and a place of being able to be creative again. I wanted to show some of the beauty that can come from death. You brought up many people try to turn from suffering or turn from that. I think beauty is more beautiful when it’s juxtaposed against suffering. When you actually see the brokenness and see the thing that’s underneath it, to see the beauty that can come from that makes it even more beautiful.

It shows a beautiful picture of redemption and what I believe God can do to the that we experience is bring some beauty from that. I wanted to make that visible in the pieces that I was bringing to life.

Roger

Yeah, and it definitely comes through. Actually, I was at an art gallery showing last week talking to an ikebana artist, which in the Japanese flower arrangement form, they try to juxtapose life and death in the textures and in the materials that they use. I showed her pictures of what you make and she thought that they would work perfect with her ikebana. She would love to something together.

Vince

Yeah, that’d be great. I would love it.

Roger

It’s definitely part of the Japanese aesthetic, I think. It is beautiful. You call it black cone, right? I see black cones, your logo at the bottom of these.

Vince

About five years ago, our family took a trip to Sequoia National Park. As we were there, we would see these massive trees and massive pine cones. We have a picture of our son, who was probably five or six at the time, holding this pine cone that was literally half his size. A foot and a half long pine cones. We read one of the plaques at this National Park that said the optimal situation for a pine cone, especially a sequoia pine cone, to release its seeds from the cone is under forest fire. So these pine cones have been designed by God to pop open under the pressure of heat. And the seeds are released then only when the pine cone busts open from destruction. And my wife and I were out on a date about two years ago, talking through this idea of turning wood, and what could this be, and could we name this something? And so we took our our name. My last name is Black. Took our name and put that in with this story of the pine cone. And the artist I had designed the logo has this pine cone with five seeds that are busting out of it, and each of those seeds represents one of our boys. There’s this beauty that comes from the cone, and that beauty is only there because of the pressure that it’s been under. That’s become the name Black Cone.

Roger

Yeah, that’s great. Even the logo then has that symbolism. Why is this not just pleasing to the eye, but something good for society, for us, to think about?

Vince

I think for me, it is, again, I want to bring to light the things that we often discard. I want to put those things in the spotlight. There’s an artist who used to put up installations, where he would put up a large wall. I think he did one on Central Park in New York. He would put a wall along Central Park. And people would walk around thinking, What’s on the other side of this wall? And they would get to the end of the wall and look around and see Central Park and say, “Wow, that’s a beautiful park.” The whole point was this is something that’s been here all along, but you’ve not looked at it because it’s always been there. Now I’ve blocked it from your vision. And as you walk around it, you look in with some intentionality again and see the beauty behind it. And he did several installations like that where you would wrap bridges in canvas or wrap things in canvas so that people couldn’t see them and then take it off and people would enjoy the image again.

So I think there’s a piece of that for me is this is something that we would… If we were walking through a forest and saw a tree that was knocked over and burned, we probably would just keep walking. Why not take that, put it in front of us and say, There’s beauty in this as well that mirrors the lives that we have? We all have stories. We all have a piece of us that’s broken, pieces of us that are broken. There’s the temptation to say, That piece is broken. I need to hide it, not talk about it, push that aside. But to bring that to light and say, This is a part of who God has made me, something that others may shove aside, I want to see as something beautiful that would bring to light who our God is.

Roger

And who is he? Well, you’re a pastor, and so you talk about this all the time. I’m actually really intrigued by the fact that you’re a pastor and an artist making these things and the combination between the two. Tell me a little bit about that.

Vince

God is Creator. This is something I learned from my sculpture professor, he taught me. He would correct me all the time when I would say, Oh, I just want to create. And he would say, You can’t. And I would say, What? And he said, There’s only one Creator, and all we do is mirror our Creator in being creative. So he would allow me to use those words, You can be creative, but you cannot create because there’s only one Creator, and we get to mirror that. So that’s what I want to point to, that God created these things for our enjoyment so that we could see more of him. So let’s bring to beauty some of the things that he has created that we would often discard.

Roger

I’ve heard it said that the new heavens and new Earth, that somehow through the brokenness, it’s more beautiful for having been through the brokenness. God doesn’t just wipe it away, but the scars are there to point to his glory, as part of the story, which is exactly what you’re putting in your woodwork here.

Vince

Yeah, that’s what I want. I want to do it. I want others to see that. It’s been an avenue for me to have these conversations with others. It’s been a unique opportunity to bring both, yes, I’m a pastor, but I also do this, and there’s a reason I do it, and there’s a story behind it, and there’s been some real meaningful conversations that have come from it.

Roger

Well, hey, you should import your your work here. I’d love to see more work like this around. I’ve actually never seen anything like this with wood. It’s very interesting. You’ve probably heard the Japanese aesthetic about kintsugi and how pottery that’s broken, put back, and made more beautiful, more valuable, stronger for having been broken with the gold veins. That’s such an interesting way that you’ve done that with wood, the same aesthetic and thought process. I love it.

Vince

Yeah, thank you.

Roger

How can people get in touch with you?

Vince

That’s a good question. I do have a website that I try to keep up to date with the things that I have, blackconeworks.com. I also post things as much as I can on Instagram. You can message me through there as well. So it’s all right there.

Roger

Very cool. Thank you so much for sharing with us this evening. Looking forward to tonight, to see who comes and have a great discussion.

Vince

Yeah. Thanks for the time.

Hello and welcome to the Art Life Faith podcast. I’m your host, Roger Lowther.

Every year, we have interns come work alongside us in what God is doing here in Japan through the arts. This summer, one of our interns was a phenomenal dancer named Anna Gardner Herren, with a huge heart for missions around the world. This was her third summer with us here in Japan, and she also made trips to Taiwan and Korea.

Last August, I interviewed her in this podcast—”#61 Summer Internships” if you’d like to have a listen—so I thought it would only be fair to give her a chance to interview me this year. She has her own wonderful podcast called The Purpose of Beauty, where she explores the role of beauty in our lives talking with various artists from around the world. In this episode that I’m about to share with you, we discuss some things that I’ve never talked about before on this podcast, especially about the music of Bach and its impact in Japan, so I think you’ll enjoy it.

You can find other episodes of her podcast by searching for The Purpose of Beauty or by going to our show notes. Here is our conversation:

Hello and welcome to the “Purpose of Beauty” podcast. I’m here with Roger W. Lowther, founder and director of Community Arts Tokyo and worship director at Grace City Church Tokyo. He also just happens to be my boss as the Mission to the World team leader in Japan. So let’s welcome Roger.

Thank you. Great to be here. Looking forward to talking with you about this.

I’m so excited to talk to you because you have so many books written about beauty, so I really wanted to hear some things that you had to say.

Sure. Well, where do we start?

Where do we start? Well, one of the things that I really enjoyed hearing you talk about is Bach, and especially Bach in Japan. So for those of you just tuning in, he is a really amazing organ player, has played all over Japan and America and probably other places as well. And he was telling me more about how Bach is so influential and important in Japan, possibly more so than America.

Yeah, I would say so.

But how did you first encounter Bach?

Oh, interesting question. I’ve actually never been asked that before.

Really? Well, I would love to know.

I was about to switch teachers between elementary school and junior high, and the teacher wanted to test me, audition me to see if he would take me on as a student. And so he gave me a lesson and said, “I want you to learn this piece.” It was from the Liturgical Year, the little pieces that Bach wrote, each one’s like a page long, so it’s not too hard. And I passed the audition. He said, “Wow, I’ve never had someone learn this so quickly.” I had nothing to compare it to so I didn’t know. I practiced really hard.

So Bach is one of your origin stories of playing the organ?

Yeah, I mean, it was a very stressful situation, so I didn’t actually enjoy playing the piece very much. But that was my first interaction. Yeah, and then it’s grown from there.

Wow. Did you ever think you would be playing it here in Japan?

No, Japan was not on my radar at that point. But actually after that, my audition to Juilliard, to college, was through a piece. They make you memorize and play a prelude and fugue of Bach, which are much longer as organ works than piano. It’s about 15 minutes, something like that. And so that was my first piece on the audition, and I will never forget any of the notes in that piece ever, because I had four other auditions before that one, and I recorded it, and it is permanently etched into my head. So yeah, right now I’m actually going through a whole project to record all of Bach’s sacred organ works.

Why his sacred organ works?

Because people really haven’t focused on that. They’re not technically as showy and interesting for people in concert situations. They’re like, “That’s a little too slow” or “a little too long.” And yet in worship, it’s “a little bit too long.” They don’t really want them in worship either. So people don’t really play most of the pieces in that collection. I thought, “Okay, well, the only way it’s going to be heard, is if I record it, maybe do a whole set.” I’m thinking of doing a whole marathon of it. It’ll be many, many hours to play them all in a row.

You’re going to play them all in a row?

At some point. This is a long-term project. Either next year or the year after that I’m getting ready for it.

That’s crazy. Well, best wishes for that. I also am curious, since coming to Japan and playing Bach, do you have any stories about your interactions with Bach here in Japan?

Oh, yeah. It really shocked me. I’m used to playing Bach in America, and you’ll probably have smaller audiences if you do an all-Bach concert with the organ. I think in America, we like having lots of color and orchestration and loud/soft dynamic changes and things like that. The organ is so good at changing colors. But Bach tends to be a more similar sound for longer periods of time. And yet it’s been amazing the reactions I’ve gotten from Japanese people. So a story: Just my first year here, I was meeting with a language partner to help me learn how to speak Japanese. We’d meet once a week and have conversations together. And one of the things I wanted to do was just practice speaking about Christianity in Japanese.

Oh, that’s actually so scary.

I knew it was needed. I needed to learn how to do it, but she didn’t want to talk about religion at all. She’s like, “No, no, no, let’s stick to politics and art and culture.”

You mean politics was easier than religion? Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, so we had a great friendship, but that topic was off limits. We’re not talking about religion. And I’m like, okay, well, I guess I’ll have to learn it some other way. Then Easter, that first year, I gave a concert at a local church and invited her. She wanted to support her language student, so she came. And at the end of the concert, she was in tears. And I was thinking to myself, What’s wrong? Maybe she got bad news. A family member is sick or something like that. And she said, “I can’t talk right now. We’ll talk next week.” I’m like, Okay. I hope she’s okay. And so then the next week, we got together for our usual scheduled language conversation. And she said, “I’ve never thought about hope that way. And the way you talked about it through the music of Bach and from the Bible. I’ve never heard that message before.” And that was the beginning of something. We were able to talk about religion quite frequently after that.

Because of Bach?

Because of Bach. It opened this doorway in her heart to something that was off limits before and to a little bit of herself. I still talk to her now. This is, I don’t know, 20 years ago. I’ve been here 20 years. So it opened doors to deeper relationships. And I have so many stories like that.

Do you have maybe one more that you want to share with us? Because I love that story.

Well, we’re looking out the window of my living room here, and at that building way over there, I gave a concert in the lobby of that business building. It’s a huge space, and I brought my organ and a battery, and I was playing music by Bach, and this guy came by. He’s like, “Oh, Roger. It’s so good to see you again.” He was a conductor who had hired me a number of years before to play the St. Matthew Passion.

Oh, beautiful.

Playing the organ continuo part. So those of you know the St. Matthew Passion, it requires quite a few singers. There’re multiple choirs and two orchestras. There’s a lot of echoing going back and forth, calling to each other. There’s a lot of people. First of all, I was the only non-Japanese in the room, but also I was the only Christian in the room.

Wait, you’re playing St. Matthew Passion? And you’re the only Christian?

Yeah.

That’s crazy.

And there’s one point in the rehearsal, the director knew that I was a missionary, and he stops. He was trying to explain like, “well, this is the point where, let’s just let Roger explain it because he’s a missionary. Roger, would you stand up and explain to everyone?” And I’m like, okay, first of all, I knew everyone in that room spoke Japanese better than me, and I’m like, That’s quite a lot of pressure for not making mistakes. But anyway, I did my best. And it was just through these rehearsals, people would ask me questions after like, “What does this mean?” And I remember during the concert itself, the conductor broke down in tears, and the orchestra members were looking at each other like, “What’s wrong with him?”

Like, while you all are performing?

While we were performing.

Oh, my goodness.

The musicians were like, “Is he having a heart attack? Should we stop and help him?” Because he’s faltering. This isn’t a professional orchestra. It’s a volunteer orchestra. And afterwards, I talked with him. He said, “I want to be a Christian. Never before has the message hit me so deeply.” That was a fall concert, October, and he was baptized that following Christmas worship.

Okay, that’s crazy.

Yeah. There were others as well in the orchestra who were reading through the text and trying to figure out why this was so powerful and what was going on. Where else would Japanese people who have never seen a Bible before…here they were reading scripture in this context because of the music of Bach. It’s just amazing how God has provided this doorway.

It’s such a bridge to use the arts to share the gospel. And you would know that because you lead Community Arts Tokyo here. But that’s really special that Bach was such a gateway for you to be able to talk about God. So wow.

Yeah. Praise God.

I was reading one of your works. You’ve written so many books, and we need to talk about that soon, too. But I was reading one of your books about Bach in Japan and was wondering why it’s specifically impactful for Japanese people. Do you have any ideas?

That is a difficult question to answer.

Sorry.

I’ve been trying to figure it out for years. I think that in the arts, there’s this idea of trying to give an image to yourself in order to sell more works to be more successful like that. Bach was completely the opposite. He’s more like a craftsman. He just wanted to do the best he possibly could in his local context. Leipzig was not one of the biggest cities in Germany at the time. And so he’s just doing his thing, doing it to the best of his ability. And I feel like a lot of artists in Japan are like that, too. It’s more about the work they make rather than the name attached to it. Some of the greatest works of art here, it’s not about their name. It’s not written on there. You may not even know who wrote it. It could be anonymous…Oh, man, who made this?…that craftsman mentality. So I think that’s part of the answer.

That makes sense because even from something like rice balls, there’s this idea of making it right and making it well. And there’s people who are famous for making a rice ball well. But of course, they weren’t making it well to be famous. Why would you want to become famous for making rice balls? But at the same time, there’s something really Japanese to me about that, about investing your time to make something really well, not for other people to look at you and say you did it well, but just to do it well.

Yeah, definitely. Actually, the most famous artist in Japan for the music of a Bach, Masaaki Suzuki…he’s really famous, I mean, when you go to the Leipzig Museum, the foremost museum about the music of Bach, it seems like half the recordings there are by Suzuki. So a Japanese group, the Bach Collegium of Japan, is representing the music of Bach globally, but he’s a very humble man. He wasn’t doing it for his own glory or anything like that. “Let’s record all of the cantatas of Bach to the best of our ability and just see what happens.” And God has really blessed his efforts in that.

That’s so beautiful. I think it inspires me that people would care about doing something well, not to be seen. I feel like as a Christian artist, sometimes I’m saddened by seeing non-successful or Christian works that to me, aren’t that great. But then when I see people who are Christians or non-Christians just doing something really well. I feel like we, as Christians, should also work so hard to do things well for Christ.

I appreciate beauty and things done well for sure. Because it lowers walls and it allows for more people to interact with the artwork, to build community around that artwork. I feel like when things are not done as well, it feels like it’s…I don’t know, if you’re trying to put more meaning on the message…then it’s almost manipulative. “You should care about this because of the message.” Well, if it’s good, you can’t help but be drawn in.

I think that’s one thing that I’ve really been encouraged about with Community Arts Tokyo. For reference, this is my third summer interning with Community Arts Tokyo.

Thank you for coming back so many times!

I’m so happy to come back because not only do we get to interact with a bunch of really amazing artists, but Christian artists who are making works really well for God. You’ve probably experienced that way more than me here.

We feel really blessed that we’re surrounded by such an amazing community of people who do their art to the best of their ability. We really inspire each other and encourage one another. I love that community.

It’s really a community. I think that you and your family and these other artists from the church and Community Arts Tokyo have created a community where we are able to invite people in who are not Christians, even who are not artists. It’s something that’s been special to me and special to some of my friends. To me, it’s really beautiful. That brings me to the point of, what is the purpose of beauty in your life?

Oh, you need to read my books!

Oh, yes. Tell us about your books, please.

Aroma of Beauty is one. Hidden Beauty is another.

That one’s my favorite.

Yeah, I mean, I thought a lot about this… Let me tell you a story. It’ll be easier that way. I used to think that beauty was something decorative, that it was something unnecessary. It’s only something for when you have the time or money to do. And then in 2011, we had that large earthquake, and I ended up going up as a truck driver bringing food, water, supplies.

To the countryside of Japan, right?

Yeah, and I thought, that’s what people need in that situation. But we found out from day one, from my very first trip, that beauty was just as important as all those other things, that people actually could not live without it or it led to despair. It led to “Why go on living? We lost everything.” And yet, somehow, beauty would bring not just encouragement, but hope, which is really powerful in that situation. And so that’s why I called the book Aroma of Beauty. It’s a bunch of stories about how people are finding hope through beauty in that terrible situation.

Yeah. How can we find your books?

They’re all on Amazon or wherever you buy books online.

I’ll link it in the show notes. Okay, great. And tell us about your new book, too.

Yeah, my new book comes out August 1.

Yes. So the day this podcast airs, your book should be live.

Awesome. Go buy my book.

Yes. Go check out his book.

I really had fun writing this one. It’s called Hidden Beauty: Seeing God in Japan.

Wait, is this the one that you wrote on the plane?

I don’t think so.

Okay, no. I just remember you writing one book, literally on your plane ride to or from Japan.

I’m always writing on my plane rides.

I love it. Okay, but the Hidden Beauty book.

Yes.

Which I’ve gotten to preview, and y’all haven’t.

We do a series every month called Art, Life, Faith. It’s a great opportunity for artists to try to connect and work out what it means to connect their art, their life, and their faith. We feature a different artist every month. Those are great, but I realized that I wanted to share those stories with more people. We had the gathering, the event, but what if we try to get this in print? Try to continue the process, continue the conversation. And so quite a few people in that book were part of those Art, Life, Faith discussions. I wanted to get their stories out there and work with them. And it was amazing to see the excitement on their faces. Like, “Oh, my story is coming out in print. Thank you, Roger.” So I’m working with them asking, “Is that accurate? Would you change the wording of that.” And they’d respond like, “Yeah, maybe I would change that, but that sounds good.”

And so seeing God in Japan, it’s about Japanese people seeing God in their lives, but also through the art, culture, and history of Japan. I would say that even if the readers are not interested in Japanese culture at all that they would still be interested in the book. “How do we see God in our daily lives? How can we worship God through anything that we do every day?” That’s basically the message of the book.

Which is a lot about ethnodoxology, another thing I really wanted to ask you about. I don’t know if you remember this, but about a year ago, I went and met one of your friends in Korea who is an artist, and we talked about ethnodoxology in Korea. But I would also love to talk about ethnodoxology for our listeners in Japan. What does that look like? And first of all, what is ethnodoxology?

Okay, first, ethnos means the peoples, the nations, and doxology means praise, praise of the nations. People were thinking how do we get the Bible, how do we get scripture, how do we get the gospel into every language in the world, worshiping God through their heart languages rather than translating into English or something like that. But then about 25 years ago, there was this big movement to ask what does that look like through the art languages: the ethnic instruments, musical forms, ways like that… Because there’s still this image in Christianity of importing either contemporary worship songs or traditional hymns, and that those are the only things that are legit when it comes to worshiping God. So how do we encourage the nations by saying, “Your art forms are legitimate in worshiping God.” At the time, that was basically unheard of. It was very controversial, and people got angry, and they stood against it. Even here in Japan, we’ve seen that. Okay, can I share a story about this?

Please do. I would love to hear a story.

So we’re sitting here next to some kotos. [music] You just heard me pluck one of the strings. My son is learning the koto from Chieko.

I love Chieko-san.

Her story is great. She became a Christian, and she was a professional koto player, a traditional Japanese harp. And when she became a Christian, she’s like, “Oh, now I have to give up the koto and learn the piano.”

Wait, what? That doesn’t make sense.

Because she’s a Christian now, and that’s the only legitimate art formsfor Christianity.

The only instrument you can play as a Christian is the piano?

Or the guitar.

Yeah. No.

In Japan, there is that image, and the koto is associated with the temple or the shrine. She’s like, “Oh, no, that can’t worship God. That’s another religion.” And so she was bummed about that because she was a professional and that was what she had dedicated her life to.

Wait, first of all, that’s incredible that she would be willing to become a Christian knowing that.

I know.

Yeah. That’s actually really moving.

That’s part of the power of her testimony. But we invited her as a church staff at Grace City Church Tokyo. We prayed about it and approached her and said, “We would like you to play in worship on the koto.” And she’s like, “No, I can’t do that. It will not go well.” And we’re like, “No, no, no. We want to do this. We think it’ll be good.” And she’s like, “Okay.” So she did. And she was shocked as she was playing. Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she felt like for the first time she was able to worship through her heart language of koto music. She had no idea that she could worship God through koto music. It just had never occurred to her before with the image she had of Christianity, that God would love her to the depths of her being, the very identity of who she was as a koto player. So it was really moving to have her play.

That’s really beautiful.

But…

But? Oh, no.

After worship, that’s when the trouble started. There were a lot of angry people. We had a lot of meetings, not the types of meetings that you really want to have. People were saying, “I could not worship because of that instrument. How dare you sneak in that instrument? It prevented me from worshiping. It was very distracting.” They were very upset.

That’s crazy because to me, I feel like it would be very moving and beautiful in worship.

Yeah, you would think so. I mean, it’s not a loud instrument. It’s pretty subtle.

It is so subtle.

But do you know what the key was? When we shared, “Did you see the tears coming down her cheeks as she was playing? It was so powerful. She was worshiping God through her instrument. And we want to first love her and embrace her. And personally, I too was drawn in praise alongside her. I was able to worship God more fully because of her playing. Can’t you see it in that way?” Then they were like, “Oh, well, I guess if you put it in that way.” They thought we were trying to be clever and tricky, sneaking in our agenda of bringing in traditional Japanese instruments just to be cool or something, like a gimmick. No, it’s not about being a gimmick. It’s about a relationship with Chieko and loving her, embracing her, allowing her to worship God and coming alongside. That was the key. So then next time she played in worship, they were able to worship as well because they felt, even though they didn’t know how to worship God through that, they could worship alongside Chieko in her relationship with God. It was so powerful and so good.

I love that story, and it makes me so happy to hear that she was able to use her art form for Christ, even though it’s not a traditional Christian instrument, if you will. It reminds me of another artist that I think might be in your book, Kei-san. We have this wonderful friend at our church. His name is Kei-san, and he makes fashion design beautiful clothing. He’s a Japanese fashion designer. I remember putting on one of his designs and thinking, I want to dance in this. He actually allowed me to borrow this design and take it to Nagoya and perform in it. I bring this up because maybe it’s not a traditional way to worship through dance or to worship through wearing a costume or a fashion design. But to me, this fashion design was part kimono and part Western wear. I wore this to portray the story of Ruth, who was a foreigner living in Israel. While I, as an outsider to the Japanese culture, I first see the kimono fabric. I see that it’s in the shape of a kimono, and to me, it seems so Japanese. But to all the Japanese, they only see how it’s different.

They think, “Oh, that’s not a kimono. That’s so different.” It’s different. How they see me. They don’t see me as “she’s nice and respectful.” They see me as, “she’s an outsider.” And so it helped me to see the story of Ruth and to see how she might have experienced herself in Israel, being an outsider and people seeing her as an outsider. But yet she made this firm commitment to God, to our God, despite her being a Moabite. And so if she could worship the God of Israel, and I can also worship God with dance, and you can worship God with the organ, and Chieko-san can worship with the koto, then that is ethnodoxology in our daily lives.

Yeah, it’s something that only every individual person can answer because sometimes it surprises us what that looks like. For example, I was thinking recently about my recent podcast with a heavy metal musician. He has a very large following here in Japan.

Wait, is he Japanese?

He’s Japanese.

But he does heavy metal? Yes. And he’s a Christian.

Yes. And he’s a Christian.

And he’s a Christian? Tell me more.

Okay. I mean, it really fits the subject of ethnodoxology because you may think, “Okay, koto, that makes sense. A traditional Japanese instrument. Heavy metal? Not so much.” I mean, that’s a Western art form. The West is imposing their musical styles on the rest of the world. Isn’t it terrible? But this singer, we call him Tone…

Tone?

In our interview, he told me how he felt like he was born to this, that God called him into this. If you listen to his music, you notice, first of all, it’s heavy metal, but he’s singing in Japanese. So okay, it’s in Japanese language. And he’s using Japanese traditional scales.

Actually? Wait, are they different than the ones we use in America?

Yeah, they’re actually koto scales. It’s different. And so you can hear it very clearly on his guitar, he’s going through the Japanese scales. But he says the reason this is Japanese music isn’t for those reasons but because he’s a Japanese man worshiping God in his context. That makes it Japanese. That makes it the praise of the nations. When you think ethnodoxology, you wouldn’t think particularly of a Japanese person worshiping God through heavy metal music.

No, that’s not what I would think of, Roger.

That’s not the image that comes up. And yet that fits the category as well, right? I mean, he is very good at what he does. He’s very technically proficient, loves high quality. When you watch his music videos online, you’re like, “Wow, that’s really good.” And I think we are going to see Tone in heaven leading us all in worship of God through heavy metal music.

That’s crazy.

Yeah. And it’s going to be representing the country of Japan in a sense. It’s all about how we praise God in our context with who God called us to be. And it’s different. With heavy metal music, it’s an in-your-face-a-little-bit art form. It’s very loud. It’s very fast. And yet there’s this sense that through it, you are giving everything—all your mind, body, soul, all your technical proficiency, all your energy, all your passion, it’s all coming through. And heavy metal as a style can do that better than, well, koto music, as a contrast.

You know, koto is like the silent version, the inner version.

Yeah. So I think God gifts these art styles to us in order to praise him. That’s what ethnodoxology is. To be able to praise through this gifting that God gives us, whether it’s organ music or dance or whatever it might be in our context, in our communities, for his glory.

That’s beautiful. The praise of the nations. Well, thank you so much for telling us about ethnodoxology and about how God can be glorified not just in piano and guitar. I want to ask you just a couple more questions. The first one is, is there any way that we can be praying for you?

Yes.

How can we pray for you?

Well, as you know, as a church we’ve been on the move for 15 years with no permanent worship space.

What does that look like on a Sunday morning?

So that has been very busy. We had all of our church equipment stored in a van in a large building on a weird elevator mechanical robot system.

Like one of those rotating car things? Oh, my goodness.

We’d have to do that and drive it to the venue wherever it was. There were many different venues, and then unload and set up, and then do the whole process in reverse.

Which is just so exhausting on a Sunday morning. The sound people and the helpers set up the whole church, which is not a small church.

No.

And then take it down and then start over the next week and not have anywhere to come during the week.

So from June 1, for the first time, we have a semi-permanent space we can use throughout the week. We thought, great, we’re going to have more time. And we do but for different things. Now that we have a space throughout the week, we’ve been using it throughout the week for so many great things. And God has really been giving us many opportunities for meeting new people, for evangelism, for discipleship. And it’s so exciting. But it’s also very tiring. And the setup process from June first until now, we’re speaking mid-July. We’re a little bit tired. We’ve really been pushing. It’s been really good, but I’m looking forward to resting a little bit for the rest of this summer and recovering from that.

Yeah. I wonder if you could talk to any of our listeners who might be artists who just need some rest. How do you find rest in God or in art when you’re exhausted from working so hard?

Well, I’m probably not a good example of that. What I do personally is change the art that I’m focused on for a little bit.

Okay, well, that is true. You never stop.

So if I’m focused really hard on music and then I get really worn out from music, I can switch then to writing. And in different genres of writing, whether it be writing fiction or non-fiction. And personally, I find that really energizing to switch what I’m focused on in my creative projects.

I do understand that, though. It’s a different pathway of your brain. Well, I know we can be praying for you about getting some rest, whether that’s changing your art form for a little while or whatever. But is there anything else we can be praying for, for Community Arts Tokyo as an organization in the future?

Yeah, I’ve been actually a little bit disappointed about the way this movement hasn’t grown like I had hoped within the church in Japan, this idea that art plays an important role in worship, in evangelism, in discipleship. There’re so few Christians in Japan. Churches are small with mostly older people. We’re seeing great things happen in our church and churches in our immediate network, but I really need to see this movement spread further, wider. How can we help the nation hear these stories? That’s one reason I started writing. We really need more people to come alongside us so we can be in more cities, working with more churches. And I would love to see God grow the church here in Japan, to see his kingdom grow and for arts to be a part of that.

Well, we will definitely be praying for that. I think we can all agree that that is something we all also want. So thanks for sharing that. I have one final question for you, but I’m going to give you a second to think about it while I close out the podcast. Do you have any advice that you would give to our listeners? I don’t know if I have any listeners who are organ players currently, but we might start something. But just artists or people who use the arts in their daily lives or are no longer professional artists but are Christians. For that purpose, as they pursue beauty, whether that’s in just going to worship and getting ready for worship and putting on a Sunday dress, or whether that’s making beautiful things for Christ. Do you have any advice that you would personally give to our listeners who are artists and also not artists.

Yeah, sure.

While you think about that, I’m going to briefly close out the podcast. Thank you so much for listening. The goal of this podcast is not to get famous, but just to share some beautiful stories of people that I have met and to hopefully allow you to be encouraged by the way that they see Christ through their art. And I’m really excited to have Roger on here. He’s written some wonderful books. So if you’re more interested in learning about the purpose of beauty or the aroma of beauty or the hidden beauty of art in Japan, and Christianity in Japan, you should go check out his books. I’ll definitely link it in the show notes. They’ve been really helpful for me as an artist, so I hope you’ll go check them out. They’ve been so encouraging.

Thank you for that endorsement.

That is not a paid endorsement. I want y’all to enjoy this and be encouraged by something that is so encouraging to me. So with that, I’ll turn it over to you to close this out.

Well, the advice, I guess I would say to artists is to not be discouraged, that God has given us certain gifts and passions to do things. And if we rely on people for encouragement to do it, then a lot of pathways end up being closed. For example, when I first started writing, people were like, “You’re an organist. You’re not a writer. Why are you writing?” And I had people saying, “Missionaries, you’re supposed to be in meetings all the time.”

What? Aren’t you supposed to be serving?

If I had just listened to people’s voices when I started writing during COVID, I would have not been writing now. And I do feel like God has blessed that to get certain stories, certain messages out to wider groups of people. And so that’s the message I have for other artists, too. Be creative. Enjoy what you’re doing and see God enjoying what you’re doing and delighting in it. And if you are able to praise God through what you’re doing, others will come alongside and be able to praise him as well.

Amen to that. That’s so encouraging. Thank you for that. And thank you so much for joining our podcast.

Thank you for inviting me.

Hope to have you back on again sometime. Which means I have to come back to Japan, right?

Okay. Well, we’ll be here.

Thank you so much. I hope you’ll have a wonderful rest of your day.

Bye.

Thank you for listening to the Art Life Faith Podcast. As we say in Japan, “Ja, mata ne.” We’ll see you next time.