In this world, there are "heavy lives" and "light lives." That is a misunderstanding of life. Interview with Takashi Itagaki [Part 1]

That day, a shock ran through the head of Takaya Matsuda, then 25 years old and president of HERALBONY. Takaya visited the museum with his mother, and while still excited, called his twin brother, Fumito. On display there were works by Sanae Sasaki, Satoru Kobayashi, and Kiyoshi Yaegashi, who are now popular artists at HERALBONY. They were colorful art pieces drawn by people with intellectual disabilities.

The Lumbini Museum in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture, where they are from, is a museum that also serves as a welfare facility for people with intellectual disabilities. It is the place where MUKU, the predecessor of HERALBONY, was born.

The many conversations that the museum's artistic director, Takashi Itagaki, a long-time leader in the welfare industry, has had with the Matsuda brothers, the company's representatives, have served as the most important ethical guidepost for HERALBONY as it develops its business.
The words that Itagaki weaves have a special power that can only be spoken by someone who has continued to think for a long time about difficult questions such as "What is a human being?" and "What is life?"

In this episode of "HERALBONY & PEOPLE," we would like to dive into the deep ocean of thoughts of Mr. Itagaki, who is such an important person to us, and take a peek inside his mind.

-First of all, could you tell us about the Lumbini Museum, and what is the philosophy and concept behind it?

Itagaki Takashi (hereinafter, Itagaki): The Lumbini Museum is a facility opened in 2007 by the social welfare corporation Korinkan in Hanamaki City, and includes an atelier and gallery where people with disabilities can create art, as well as a cafe and bakery. I began working with people with disabilities as a staff member of Korinkan about 10 years ago. I'm no longer a staff member, but I continue to be involved in the corporation's art-related projects as an advisor.

--Is this a museum that deals with so-called art brut?

Itagaki: It's true that Lumbini Museum exhibits many works of art brut and outsider art, but we believe this is not just a museum to look at art, but a museum to "encounter life" through art.

-Could you tell me more about it?

Itagaki: The story goes back to the mid-2000s when the museum was founded. When considering what kind of museum to create, the current chairman, Mitsui Nobuyoshi, wrote "Borderless Art Collection" in the proposal. Mitsui wrote the word "borderless" casually, but when you think about it, not many people have a negative impression of "borderless."

So I intuitively felt that if I delved deeper into the question of "why people have a positive impression of the word borderless," I would be able to see the mission of the museum we were creating, so I decided to start by thinking about the word "borderless."

Itagaki: This reminded me of a time when I was 19 years old and in my second year of university. At that time, I had experienced a major loss in my relationships, and I couldn't find meaning in life. I felt like the weight of the time I spent just living each day was too heavy. To escape from that pain, I kept thinking about random things like what existence is, and what the beginning of the universe was like.

I was holed up in my one-room apartment in Tokyo, thinking all the time, when suddenly I wondered why I thought that what was inside my skin was me, and whether it was possible that everything other than what's inside was me.

At that moment, the world was turned upside down, and everything other than myself was flowing into me, and at the same time, I felt as if I was being pushed out of myself and spreading out into the entire universe. I discovered that my inside and outside are actually the same thing. I think this is exactly what it means to be "borderless."
Itagaki: There's a famous song with the lyrics, "Imagine a world without heaven or hell, without borders." I felt that many people shared the image that if you remove the things that separate things, a world that is one step closer to the ideal opens up ahead.

On the other hand, it's not necessarily true that this feeling comes from our own real-life experiences, but there is certainly something in our souls that somehow makes us feel that "it's better if there are no borders."

For example, gender, male and female. This is also a boundary between concepts. If you remove that border, the concept of human beings appears. Furthermore, if you remove the border between humans and animals, living things appear. What do you think is left after removing the borders between concepts like this?

What remains when concepts and words have all disappeared is the whole of the universe, including the visible and the invisible, the past, the future, and the present. I realized then that this is the true meaning of "life."

All existence and phenomena are one. The energy that makes all of them possible is life. Because of the experience I had when I was 19, I understood that what we feel at the end of "borderlessness" is life.

Itagaki: To begin with, when the universe began with the Big Bang, hydrogen atoms were born first, then they came together due to gravity, undergoing nuclear fusion, and exploded to become the Sun, and the new atoms that exploded and scattered then came together again, then scattered again. This repeated process gave birth to the stars and the Earth. When the Earth was born, there were no living organisms, but from these atoms rocks, seawater, and eventually the molecular bonds that would become the prototypes of genes were formed, and replication began.

Therefore, in the continuous workings of the universe over the last 10 billion years, it is impossible to clearly distinguish between before and after life arose. If we think about it in this way, we might think that life has actually existed since the very beginning of everything.

The universe was born, the earth was born, various substances and living things were born -- all of this transition is life, and I think that "life" or "living things" in the narrow sense are just one of many variations of the state of life. In other words, life has been there since the universe was born, or even before the universe was born.

--I never thought that life might have existed long before the universe was born.

Itagaki: In the real world, we create various restrictions, borders, divide, and value or belittle some people in order to live. The act of excluding and dividing someone is fine as long as you are on the safe inside, but at the same time, it carries the risk that at some point in time you will be pushed to the outside. So, in reality, we are always afraid somewhere. In reality, we want a borderless world where everyone is treated equally and with care.

And even though we have never experienced "borderlessness," we somehow feel it is a good thing, which may be because we want to "return to the beginning of life." The first state of life, where there was no distinction between up and down, right and left, future, past and present. We know it without reason, feel nostalgic for it, and yearn for it. We remember it with our entire existence. There was freedom, equality, and a perfect state with neither shortage nor excess.

When I thought about it, I thought that if everyone wants to return to life, I wanted to create a mechanism that would give those who want to return the push they need. This is the Lumbini Museum, a "museum of life" that makes us think about borderlessness.

--Mr. Itagaki, why do you think the works of the artists at Lumbini Museum captivate people so much?

Itagaki: As you say, many people who see the works created at Lumbini Museum and the process of you all creating will feel that there is something special power in your works.

I think this is because, rather than being based on their own thoughts, they directly project in shapes, colors and lines what they believe to be "I am alive and I exist here" from a deeper place. That is why, when you come into contact with their works, you feel the absolute strength of life.

This is not at the level of a thought or an idea, but something much deeper, even deeper than the soul, something that comes from a magma-like place deep within humanity. The viewer may not recognize it as the word or concept of "life," but I believe that what they are looking at is certainly "life." Through the works of Kobayashi Satoru, Sasaki Sanae, and Yaegashi Kira, I have unconsciously experienced coming into contact with life. Life becomes existence as it is, and existence expresses life as it is. I believe that those of us who wish to return to the "original life" feel that life and are moved by it.
--Through their works, we have the experience of coming into contact with the "original life" to which we inherently wish to return.

Itagaki: At Lumbini Museum, we offer experiences that allow you to come into contact with all life from various perspectives.

For example, there is a work in which a photographer stayed overnight in the primeval beech forest of Towada for a week, taking pictures of events happening in the forest. The trees just stand there in silence, but in the photographs they are clearly moving with some powerful force, and we can sense the life in them.

On another occasion, we introduced a practical activity center called "Kamagasaki Arts University" in Nishinari Ward, Osaka, in a town formerly known as "Doya-gai" (a neighborhood of doyas), where former male day laborers who supported Japan's rapid economic growth come together to create poetry, plays, objects and other forms of expression.
Itagaki: I believe that all life has a "reason." The men in the flophouse district, the mentally disabled, the trees, the insects and animals, the invisible microorganisms, and of course you and I all have our "reason." By continuing to convey the "reason for life" of all living things, a sense of life spreads among people. The feeling that "this and that are all life" grows over time.

As we come into contact with the various voices of life and share our experiences, we will be able to create a society that is more likely to accept actions and proposals that say, "If everything is life, then this is how we want it to be." At the core, everyone is probably thinking the same thing: "I want to return to life," so I feel that there is a huge, potentially huge, and powerful need spreading.

--So, society should become a better place if we are exposed to many different "opinions about life."

Itagaki: By taking up the theme of life, we can appeal to all issues related to inequality in life, such as unreasonable discrimination and prejudice, exploitation, murder, and war. Of course, this will also lead to the elimination of discrimination against people with disabilities.

Conversely, the effect of only addressing discrimination against people with disabilities is limited. This is because the root of the problem is that we actually believe that there are important lives and light lives. The fundamental cause that makes discrimination possible against any attribute, such as disability, race, ethnicity, religion, or sex, is that we unconsciously and deeply hold the feeling that "as long as a life meets certain conditions, it is okay to treat that life lightly."

This is a misunderstanding about life. The essence of the problem lies not in our perception of attributes such as disability, ethnicity, or gender, but in our "perception of life" in the first place. If we try to correct this misunderstanding, it is not effective to isolate and address only the issue of the lives of people with disabilities, for example. This is because we end up only manipulating the perception of superficial attributes. To bring about essential change here, we must always address "life as a whole." In my opinion, the winning strategy when it comes to life is to treat it as a whole.

Itagaki-san always gives us new discoveries. It's never a new discovery, but something that has always been there, but that everyone has overlooked. There is a warmth that gently illuminates something that is too deep for the light to reach, something that is too dark to see.

In the second part, we consider what it means for people with intellectual disabilities to exist in this world, and what would happen in a society where medical advances meant that disabled people no longer existed.

>>Click here for the second part: In a world without people with disabilities, difficulties in living will be rampant - An interview with Takashi Itagaki of Lumbini Museum [Part 2]

HERALBONY GALLERY is currently holding a special exhibition titled "The Beginning of the Unusual" featuring works by nine artists affiliated with the Lumbini Museum of Art.

Please come and see for yourself the many valuable works that have been used in various products and projects.

HERALBONY GALLERY Special Exhibition "The Beginning of Unusual"

Period: October 12th (Sat) - December 28th (Sun)
Address: 2-38 Kaiunbashi-dori, Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture @HOMEDELUX Building 4F
Opening days: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, public holidays Opening hours: Thursday and Friday 12:00-18:00
Saturdays and holidays 10:00-12:00 / 13:00-17:00
Learn more

Currently, the Lumbini Museum is working with ARu, a group of artists who turn life into light, to run a crowdfunding campaign to spread the experience theater "If Your Life Was Light," which converts the pulse of life into light, to the world. For more information about this project, which can be considered the culmination of Itagaki's activities to date, please see this page .

▶︎Lumbinii Museum " Experience Theater in which Life Changes into Light: If Your Life is Light"