Change the world with SDGs and ART in ASIA
It’s been nine years since Hidetaka Nakamura came to Cambodia with just only one MacBookPro.
After arriving in Phnom Penh as a nomad worker, Hidetaka Nakamura founded Social Compass that aims to solve social problems through art and design in 2014.
Not only in Cambodia, but also in Laos, Myanmar, and Japan, he has been traveling around the world to create animations of mascots, working on cutting-edge projects such as projection mapping, planetariums, and VR. Moreover, he teaches animation and design to grow Asian creators.
Ths dream is to be a traveler, to live a life of freedom, to wander
When Hidetaka Nakamura was a student, he wished he could travel around with just a guitar, but unfortunately, he was not good at music. Thus, he wanted to travel to make friends with children with only one soccer ball, but he was not good at that as well.
Moreover, he is not good at English. Looking back on that, he does not know why he wanted to go abroad so badly.
But he thought that I could press the shutter of a camera at least, so he enrolled in a film department at the art university.
He wanted to become a photojournalist and go into the world’s war zones. For this reason, he chose Cambodia for his first solo trip abroad in the summer of his second year at the university. He left on September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attacks in the United States.
“To be honest, I remember getting on the plane with a lot of trepidation.”
He says.
Crayon Shin-chan is a new way of communication
“A memories are almost sepia-toned. “
It is his memory.
Seventeen years ago, Phnom Penh was just as he imagined it would be in a developing country, billowing with sand and smoke. The rawness of the Tuol Slane concentration camp and the Killing Fields gave him a strong sense of the traces of the Pol Pot civil war.
One evening in the middle of this trip, I wandered over to a local Kui-tiu (Cambodian noodle) stall. I placed a quick order and took a seat. The Cambodian lady at the stall asks, “What your name?”, so I asked her back as well.
The lady laughed and said “Misae, Misae.” I asked.
When I looked at her strangely, she continued to point at her son running around and said, “Shin-chan, Shin-chan.”
She was referring to Misao and Shin-chan, the characters in the Japanese TV anime called “Crayon Shin-chan”. He guesses she wanted to say that her son is a naughty boy like Shinnosuke Nohara, and her aunt is always angry like Shinnosuke’s mother, Misae.
He was impressed that he was able to communicate with Cambodians through Japanese animation despite the language barrier.
He felt that he should not take pictures, and his interest shifted from photojournalism to the world of animation.
Working in London, Challenging New Technologies in Tokyo After graduating from art school, I was lucky enough to move to London, England, where I worked at an animation studio for about three years. At the time, I was longing to live in Europe. After three years, this life of longing became a mundane routine.
Before turning 30 years old, I came back to Japan and worked for a year at a venture company before founded the company. He is interested in the iPhone and iPad, which had just been released, and wrote the title “iPhone application designer” on his business card, which brought him a surprising amount of work.
He also went to Silicon Valley as an art director for a venture company at the University of Tokyo and won an award.
Then, the earthquake happened in Japan.
He was a little wondering about continuing to work in Tokyo, even though he should be able to work with just a MacBook Pro. In 2012, he was invited to work in Cambodia, so he flew to Cambodia.
What you can only do in Cambodia
Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, is much more comfortable than I had expected. There are many cute cafes, free wifi, and unlimited electrical outlets. It was the perfect environment for a nomadic worker.
However, it’s not easy to continue working on animation and design in a developing country. Only if I waited, no one would order me to do design work. That’s why his job was almost all from Japan via the internet.
However, since I was living in Cambodia, I wondered if there was anything that I could do only in Cambodia. The longer I lived in Cambodia, the more I began to think so. The Japanese community in Cambodia is small. I have made friends who are engaged in social contribution and international cooperation, such as NGOs and JICA, which I had no contact in Japan.
They are passionate about making the world a better place. This is the kind of relationship that he would not have had if he had not been in Cambodia, a country overflowing with social problems.
Why can’t he do something for Cambodia and the world like they do? Even so, the only thing he can do is create animations and designs.
That’s why he is going to contribute to society through animation and art design. That’s why he designed the character “Watty” to express my thoughts.
What is “Watty”!?
“Watty” is a character based on the motif of Angkor Wat that explains and educates people about social issues in Cambodia in an easy-to-understand manner.
There used to be a traditional exercise called Khmer Gymnastics before the Cambodian Civil War. However, since many intellectuals and school teachers were killed by the Pol Pot regime, although there were Cambodians who vaguely remembered the Khmer gymnastics, it had not been transmitted to the present.
To reintroduce Khmer gymnastics into physical education in Cambodia, the Japanese NGO Heart of Gold published a textbook for teachers on how to do Khmer gymnastics.
However, it is difficult to convey the gymnastics in still images.
So, we decided to make an animation of Wattie’s Khmer gymnastics.
The animation we made as a sample got the interest of the Cambodian Minister of Education. Furthermore, thanks to JICA’s grassroots cooperation, we were able to secure funding to create the animation, which was aired on national television every morning at 6:50 am for three years until 2017.
Since then, Watty has appeared in a variety of animations for JICA, foundations, and NGOs to raise awareness about littering, traffic congestion, sewerage, agriculture and irrigation, forestry, public bus promotion, math education, teacher training, and traffic safety.
We use animation to convey social issues that are difficult to convey with words alone funnily. This is one of the activities of Social Compass.
Not only creating but also spreading
Every Cambodian has a smartphone and loves to watch videos on YouTube and Facebook. However, while there are plenty of opportunities to watch the animation, there are no schools that teach how to make animation.
Therefore, SocialCompass has been conducting workshops on how to make animation in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.
It’s exciting for us to work with children in rural villages that don’t have televisions or electricity to make animation. They always come up with colors and characters that we never imagined.
We teach them various styles of animation, from analog stop- motion to digital, such as Adobe After Effects, depending on their age and target audience.
In addition, every year I serve as a judge for DigiCon6Asia Cambodia, a video contest sponsored by TBS in which creators from all over Asia participate. The other day, the animators who were selected to represent Cambodia were invited to Japan to interact with animators from various countries.
It is not enough to watch the animations on TV monitors or small screens of smartphones.
We also held a projection mapping event to discuss environmental issues at a huge underground facility in Phnom Penh that was built with ODA support from the Japanese government.
Children’s drawings of fish, stars, and animals were animated in real-time and projected on a large underground screen. It was also a projection mapping event that showed animated stories and quizzes to educate people about littering and how to think about the environment while having fun together.
The children watched intently with their mouths open, sometimes shaking the manhole with their cheers. After watching, the children picked up trash from the underground facility.
I would like to expand this kind of activity to various countries in the future. I am currently thinking of building a mobile dome with an omnidirectional screen and projecting animation contents like a planetarium on it.
I think it would be interesting to think about space in developing countries.
From 2020, the project will also take on a full-scale challenge in the field of art. White Canvas, an art competition held in Cambodia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, aims to discover young Asian artists and support their sustainable activities. For this purpose, they have adopted the art blockchain and VR space.
Cambodia’s creativity and the future
Cambodia’s culture was destroyed by the massacre of school teachers, cultural workers, and artists during Pol Pot’s civil war. On the contrary, until now Cambodia has been able to become a pioneer in whatever it does.
Cambodian youth had never heard of Picasso or Beethoven. However, the Internet has connected us to the world, and we know Lady Gaga.
In other words, for young people living in developing countries with no ties to the rest of the world, this could be a great opportunity in the future.
The points he thinks important is to have fun and be creative with the people I work with. If the work is enjoyable, even Cambodians, who are known to have a high turnover rate, will work with us for a long time.
Nowadays, you can create animations and designs from anywhere with a MacBookPro. Without worrying about national borders, we can use art and design to solve social problems.
Through the topic of Crayon Shin-chan, he was able to communicate with people of completely different languages and cultures. He believes that visual communication has the power to transcend language barriers, understand each other, and create a better world.
