Introduction

March 11th, 2011, many precious lives were lost in the Tohoku Earthquake.

Many lives, family, homes, memories, and hope...

In the midst of all the lost things, we, the Western Washington University Japanese Student Association, seek something, anything positive that we may be able to learn from such a tragedy.
This notion of, "What do can we learn?" founded our current project that we call, the Kizuna Project.

This Kizuna project is a part of Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Effort and is our journey to realize the answer to this question. In order to do this, we ask those around us, "What do you value the most in your life?" We hope to find our own answers by listening and seeing others' answers.

Valuable Things

In the initial stages of our project, we attempted to answer this question ourselves.
So, where do our values lie?
In life?
In family?
In a lifestyle with leisure?

We know that there is no right or wrong answer to such abstract questions, and also find that there is an infinitely diverse variety of answers.

An underlying theme we found, though, is that these values are something that many may take for granted in everyday lives, almost just expecting them to always be there; least thinking about when these values might be taken away or lost.

It is expected that we have a life to live.
It is expected that we have a family that supports us.
It is expected that we, in a middle/upper-class society, have a life of leisure to live with cell phones, computers, TVs, etc.

But, many of these things we expect to exist in our lives were lost in the earthquake and the people of Japan we forced to realize where their true values lie.

Although we did not directly experience a loss from the Earthquake in Japan, we still wanted to take this as an opportunity to reflect upon our own lives.
There IS something we can learn from this incident.
There IS something that we can gain amidst all the loss.
We believe that one of those things to gain is the recognition of the real values that may be taken for granted or forgotten in our every day life.

By utilizing this opportunity, we are able to cherish our object of value if we already possess them.
By utilizing this opportunity, we are able to work harder to obtain our object of value is we don't possess them yet.

This project started with a simple question and has now evolved into what is changing our lives.
Through this effort, we hope that you may reflect upon your own life and perhaps affect your life in the same way.

Now, please follow us on our journey with the pinwheel to find where people's true values lie.
暖かな応援 よろしくお願いします。