Please join us for the 2020 Cultural and Educational speakers series. JASGA will present a virtual Pecha-Kucha Evening on Friday, July 31st at 5:00 pm.
Our first Pecha-Kucha presentation has several themes: Town-city-regional development, community engagement, grassroots activities, and US-Japan friendship. Each of our four speakers will talk about one or more of these themes.
Pecha-Kucha is a storytelling format where a presenter shows 20 slides with 20 seconds of commentary for each slide. At our Pecha-Kucha event, several professional people will talk in a virtual session to share their expertises, insights, and future plans with the audience.
Our Pecha-Kucha talks are a different format from our conventional speakers series. The short presentation times will enable the audience to concentrate their focus on the contents of the speakers' talks. We anticipate that the results will be stimulating and motivating for life and work, not only for the next generation but for experienced adults also.
Please refer to four Speakers bios and talk titles:
Misa Yamamoto - "Essentials Creative: Art and Community Engagement"
Misa Yamamoto is a Graphic Designer and Art Director based in Austin TX. She graduated from Texas State University Communication Design program in 2012 and is currently a senior designer at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas in Austin. She has strong arts and designs professionally skilled in Branding & Identity, Typography, and UI/UX Design. She collaborates with her husband, Fabian Villa (photographer) and lives in Austin. She is from Tokyo, Japan, and fluent in Japanese.
She is part of the art collective Essentials Creative. Essentials Creative is a multi-media collective producing holistic applied arts experiences. These multi-faceted events incorporate disciplines such as photography, fashion, graphic design, video, projection, animation, music, and installation. Although a single image may include many Essentials members, there is always a unified vision of experimentation, fluidity, and diversity.
Junro Narita - “Throw Yourself in the Midst of Capability, Service, Money, and Love”
Junro Narita is currently full time academy head coach at Austin FC, a new expansion Major League Soccer (MLS) club that will begin competing in the highest professional tier in the United States in March 2021.
Ever since encountering the inner obsession for soccer at age 9, he has been devoting himself to this beautiful game as a player, as a coach, and as a person. Junro turned to full time coaching in summer 2008 and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has been serving as;
a US Soccer Federation’s National Coaching Course Instructor since 2012; the Technical Director at St Stephen’s Soccer Academy since 2013, and the Austin FC Academy Head Coach since 2019.
Austin FC Academy’s aim is to nurture and develop future homegrown professional players; it began the process in May 2019.
Adam Doyle - "The World's Idol: Hatsune Miku"
Adam Doyle is currently working as a Campus Technologist. He is a former History Teacher and the Ellison High School Anime Club Sponsor.
While Adam has always been interested in Japan's culture and language, he never stopped to seriously learn and consider more than surface level material until he became associated with JASGA almost 10 years ago. he sponsors a high school club with his wife, Abby Roberts, that goes hand-in-hand with both the enrichment and the opportunities that we have experienced since then. He learned about Hatsune Miku, the topic of his presentation, from students in his high school, but he appreciates its significance because of the connections he's been able to make with Japanese culture. Adam is a serious student of Japanese, he is also an unabashed lover of anime, video games, manga, cosplay, and idol music. He hopes that combination will make for an interesting perspective.
Mayu Takeda - "Keeping it Interactive: Community Engagement and the Power of Curated Creativity”
Mayu Takeda is an Associate Planner at Asakura Robinson whose interest is in the application of community-led planning to address equity issues and to create spaces that provide a sense of community and belonging. Her portfolio includes small area and downtown master plans for small towns and disinvested communities as well as community-based design and planning of green infrastructure and resilience strategies. Previously, she was Senior Associate at the Center for American Progress (CAP), where her portfolio included immigrant rights and gun violence prevention. She served as the Western Regional Director of the “It’s On Us” campaign run by the White House and CAP
Mayu graduated with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was the recipient of the school’s 2018 Award for Outstanding Leadership in Urban Planning and Urban Design.
This event is free and open to the public. Your Donations are grealy appreciated!
Please register here for the Pecha-Kucha Talk Evening by July 29.
We look forward to seeing you online!
aturday, June 13, 2020 
Come make your own kite. We will offer a hands-on workshop for making a kite, and then you can let it fly high in the sky. There will be lots of fun, a screening of a film about a master kite maker of Edo (old-time Tokyo) style Kites presented by Mr. Mikio Toki.
