I'd like to introduce myself for launching my own website including blog, portfolios and podcast. I'm Shun Ishimine, a graduate student learning landscape architecture at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
1. My Home Island
I was born and raised up in Okinawa, which is tropical small island located in the southernmost area in Japan. Some Japanese people seem to think of Okinawa as Hawaii in Japan. I think that's true. Okinawa is currently the part of Japan but ,because originally Okinawa was the independent country called Ryukyu Kingdom, my island has super unique cultures and is also super famous destination not only for Japanese tourists but also international ones as a resort. I'd been there until 20 years old, and then I moved to Nagasaki for the college where is famous for being bombed by Atomic Bomb during WWⅡ.
2. My Second Home: Nagasaki
The time I spent in Nagasaki was, now I recall that time, the beginning of my life dreaming to be the Urbanist. It's also super famous for the slope land city, which gives significantly unique landscape: a lot of houses were built along the surface of mountains. It ends up with being ultimately beautiful landscapes especially at night. You must be overwhelmed by its beauty. From the undergrad to Master's degree, I had learnt city planning specialized for the landscape regulations. Especially in my researches, my focus was the process of building landscape regulations and how effective it is to visualize the site's landscape identities derive from the site's distinctive culture and history. In other words, I researched the top-down system making process.
3. What I did in Nagasaki
At the same time learning at the college, I had been working at the community design organization as well( Slope land Community Design Organization "Tuskuru" & Nagasaki Urban Design & Landscape Laboratory "null"). As the workshop facilitator and amateur designer, I involved with a lot of community based projects to make local people aware of how wonderful city we are living in and how much room being able to be utilized there are in Nagasaki landscapes. All of them are activities coming from the question: "No matter how many people decrease and how Nagasaki's economical situation gets difficult in future along with various sorts of social issues, we must still enjoy Nagasaki's unique cultural lives." In other words, what we intended is to reorient and reframe our cultural way of living to enjoy Nagasaki itself rather than just moving out to seek great opportunity to other cities - this sort of things happen a lot in Japan, which is regarded as one of the serious social issues. It's exactly "bottom-up" movements. So. it was the period when I was struggling with the dilemma between the stand point of landscape policy making and one of community design: top-down vs bottom-up.
4. Studying Abroad to Hawaii
This experience became my biggest interest and drives me get into the new field: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. One day the idea came up with my mind: "If someone having a professional design background is in charge of making regulation and manage urban design, Japanese urban design and community building activities could be better and end up with contributing to society as a whole." Based on this idea, I'm trying to integrate my background into landscape architecture. In other words, I intend to become the negotiator standing between city planners, community, and government to put their opinion together by design. I believe this sort of an expert must be needed.
It seems a little bit sloppy though, that's me!
I will upload new articles in English, so if you are interested, please take a look at it.
Thank you!
Shun
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