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

Five large paintings drawn by children in Ukraine with wishes for peace that commemorate Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami are planned to go on public display simultaneously in five Japanese cities on Friday, the 11th anniversary of the disaster, Jiji Press has learned.

The five cities are Fukushima, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The city of Fukushima is in the same prefecture as Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, where the country’s worst nuclear accident occurred due to the March 11, 2011, natural disaster.

The exhibition is planned by Minoru Watanabe, a 65-year-old resident of Fujinomiya, Shizuoka Prefecture, who keeps the paintings.

The Ukrainian children started painting the pictures in March 2017, after the late Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada visited the Eastern European country. Watanabe got acquainted with Takada when he was working in Paris as an employee of an apparel manufacturer and the two called on the children together to paint the pictures.

Takada, the founder of the Kenzo brand, passed away in 2020 at the age of 81.

Of the five paintings, two were drawn in the capital city of Kyiv and one each in Slavutych, where many workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant live, and in Donetsk and Luhansk, where conflicts with pro-Russian armed forces continue.

Grieving over the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Watanabe first put the paintings on display at the base of Mount Fuji, which straddles the prefectures of Yamanashi and Shizuoka.

According to Watanabe, who still has interactions with people in Ukraine, many in the country say they are scared to death because of the war and the recent attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in eastern Ukraine.

“I hope their anguished cries will reach the people of Japan” through the paintings, Watanabe said.

Each picture is painted with acrylics on a huge plastic sheet measuring 7.8 meters by 3.5 meters, the same size as Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” which portrays the horrors of war. Such painting is thus known as “Kids’ Guernica.”