It’s been a year since the launch of KIMINITOU.

I would like to thank everyone who has been viewing this website.
I would also like to thank all the people who have contributed to our interviews, dialogues, talks, and events.

It has been a year of many rewards and new challenges.

The most important gain is “mis-delivery”.
I think we created a “mis-delivery” where people who come to see artists, accidentally read or listened to the stories of scholars, politicians, and journalists that appeared in the articles and events of the dialogues and talks in KIMINITOU.

I’ve come to realize that one of the missions of KIMINITOU is to create such “mis-delivery”.

On the other hand, the COVID disaster has brought light on many social issues throughout the year. This COVID disaster added more issues to the pile of problems that had been accumulating as a result of mankind’s folly.

As I mentioned when I started this media and in my New Year’s greeting, KIMINITOU was launched to solve social issues.

In this sense, it is the right time for KIMINITOU to show its true potential.

However, people who are interested in social issues already have frequent access to media that deal with them, and them calling out on such issues ends only as an echo chamber.

What we need to do to solve problems is to get people who lack interest get interested.
That’s what “mis-delivery” is all about.

So, why are there so many people who are not interested in social issues in the first place?To put it simply, why is the voter turnout in elections so low?
It’s hard to say, but I think the root of the problem is that many people have given up on the idea that society will change.
If we don’t change the mindset of those who have given up, we will not be able to get out of the echo chamber.
This is a huge challenge.

On a different note, I saw the exhibition “Turf and Perimeter” by Tsubasa Kato, a young artist born in 1984, at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.
I had never heard of this artist before, and I saw the exhibition without any prior knowledge.
There were several video installations of people pulling on huge structures with ropes and knocking them down in different parts of the world.
I was kind of struck by this.
As a simple person, I thought to myself, “Anything created by humans can definitely be destroyed by human hands. ”
(I also felt hopeful to see an artist born in 1984, in his 30s, creating such installations that topple buildings with human power.)

Most of the problems we face in our society today are created by human beings.
One or two people can’t do anything about it, but if many people participate, as in the installation I saw in “Turf and Perimeter,” something can change.

When I thought about it, I realized that although the COVID disaster is chaotic, it is an opportunity now as people have more time in their lives with remote work and shorter hours, and many of them are starting to pay attention to the trends in society and the world.

For the next year, I’m going to create a great “mis-delivery” to get more people to pull the rope together.

August 19, 2021

Joe Yokomizo  Editor-in-Chief of KIMINITOU