Paintings by kids in Ukraine honoring 3/11 to go on display in Japan Friday

5 giant work drawn by kids in Ukraine with needs for peace that commemorate Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami are deliberate to go on public show concurrently in 5 Japanese cities on Friday, the eleventh anniversary of the catastrophe, Jiji Press has discovered.

The 5 cities are Fukushima, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The town of Fukushima is in the identical prefecture as Tokyo Electrical Energy Firm Holdings Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, the place the nation’s worst nuclear accident occurred as a result of March 11, 2011, pure catastrophe.

The exhibition is deliberate by Minoru Watanabe, a 65-year-old resident of Fujinomiya, Shizuoka Prefecture, who retains the work.

The Ukrainian kids began portray the images in March 2017, after the late Japanese dressmaker Kenzo Takada visited the Japanese European nation. Watanabe obtained acquainted with Takada when he was working in Paris as an worker of an attire producer and the 2 referred to as on the youngsters collectively to color the images.

Takada, the founding father of the Kenzo model, handed away in 2020 on the age of 81.

Of the 5 work, two have been drawn within the capital metropolis of Kyiv and one every in Slavutych, the place many employees of the Chernobyl Nuclear Energy Plant reside, and in Donetsk and Luhansk, the place conflicts with pro-Russian armed forces proceed.

Grieving over the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Watanabe first put the work on show on the base of Mount Fuji, which straddles the prefectures of Yamanashi and Shizuoka.

Based on Watanabe, who nonetheless has interactions with folks in Ukraine, many within the nation say they’re scared to loss of life due to the conflict and the latest assault on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear energy plant in japanese Ukraine.

“I hope their anguished cries will attain the folks of Japan” via the work, Watanabe mentioned.

Every image is painted with acrylics on an enormous plastic sheet measuring 7.8 meters by 3.5 meters, the identical measurement as Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” which portrays the horrors of conflict. Such portray is thus referred to as “Youngsters’ Guernica.”