Episode 218 - Art + Faith: A Theology of Making with Makoto Fujimura
Makoto Fujimura is a leading contemporary painter, a well known writer, curator, and founder. At his core, he is a creator. Perhaps best known for his bicultural artwork, Makoto fuses abstract expressionism together with the traditional Japanese art of Nihonga and Kachoga (bird-and-flower painting tradition). His desire is to reframe how we talk about art, love, and beauty from a biblical perspective, and provide a hub that draws creative minds together from around the world. Makoto shares more about partnering with God and the coming of his New Creation.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. I'm here as always. Or mostly with William. We are without Rusty. William. Greetings.
William Norvell: Greetings. It's good to be here.
Henry Kaestner: William, I know you pretty well, and it's been a great joy and privilege to get to know you over these last seven years and these hundreds and hundreds of podcast episodes and hanging out outside, etc.. But, you know, I do not know how creative you are in terms of whether you can write a poem. I know you did a great podcast on humility. That was awesome. That was creativity. But I don't know if you can like write or draw or play musical instrument, can you?
William Norvell: I am routinely the last pick at any Pictionary game that has ever existed.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, wow.
William Norvell: So if that answers that. No.
Henry Kaestner: It does. Actually, it does answer the question.
William Norvell: I think I'm creative in ways that actually brings me life. So I'll give you an example. So I'm a horrible guitarist. I can not hear a song and play it. I can't do anything that guitar people can do. However, when I push myself to learn a song, it unlocks something inside of me that's just different. And so I push myself to do creative things because it stretches me in ways that are awesome, and so I thrive on it, even though I'm mostly terrible at it.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. So I know what you're talking about too. And for me, I can't write, I can't draw. I took out the bass guitar because it only had four strains. I thought it'd be cool to be in a band and have kind of like a cigaret kind of dangling out of my mouth. I thought that would be really neat, but I couldn't play the bass and I couldn't pull off the look. I mean, it's just complete mess on all levels. We've got a buddy of ours, Riley Flynn, who is a poet and does a great job, and then I'll read. Yeah, it's me. He does amazing stuff, and I look at it in the simplicity and the beauty of it. I mean, surely I can do that. And yet, as it turns out, I can't so much. But today we're talking about creativity and we've got an incredible artist with this on board. And you might say at first glance, well, I don't know that this is exactly a story about entrepreneurship, and yet it is all entrepreneurs are creators. And our hope with today is that our guest, who is it really? I mean, in the Christian world, I don't think of a more famous artist than Makoto Fujimura, and he's going to help us to understand how to unpack and unlock and access that creativity, which I think he would suggest is in us all to include William and to include me in a way that our work might be better. And in the process of creating, we might come to understand and commune with the living God all the more so without further ado, Makoto Fujimura, thank you very much for joining. Welcome.
Makoto Fujimura: Thank you for having me.
Henry Kaestner: So we've been looking for this for a while. We just found out or maybe William already knew about your role in helping out with some of the aspects of the movie Silence by Martin Scorsese. But your work has spanned all sorts of different aspects from painting and writing and curating and being a founder. Well, let's start actually, I was going to ask you about your background, but before we go there, I want to actually get right into it. I want to talk about the most recent book you have. It's Art and Faith: A Theology of Making is picking up on this concept that William and I were just riffing on. It speaks to the intersection of art, faith and culture. Start off by giving us an overview of the book.
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, Art plus faith is my life work. Really. What we do is reduce the entire manuscript, which is three times as long as the book and make it more concise and readable. And it really began journeying as an artist into faith. I call my conversion inversion because the more I thought about my life and really my ancestors, there's significant heritage of Christians that I didn't know about in Japan, especially in the time of persecution and beyond. So I think it was meant to be that I become a part of Christ and then realize that as an artist you kind of get trapped or maybe glazed aside in this gap between the church and the world. And you are doubly exiled from both because you don't fit into no longer the patterns of the world. Obviously, as a follower of Christ, your goals and your even ambition is challenged to be re shaped by our Savior. And then you go into church. And even though I am a, you know, leader, elder type, I don't fit into the church culturally. So I've always struggled to find my place. And yet that has become a journey of art plus faith. And I talk about some of the experiences, even though what I call a theology of making is really bigger than the framework of religion. I think this is a concept that every human being can benefit, that we're not just Homo sapiens, we are Homo faber, we are makers. And unless we make, we don't know what we're trying to espouse in terms of anything but education system basically fails to get at the core of the base of our epistemological knowledge. So we fall short all the time. We think we know something but really don't. And so this is something that I began to write about even as far back as 30 years ago.
Henry Kaestner: Hmm. So my oldest son is studying history in college, and so I'm starting to look at things through that frame a bit. I wish I had studied history when I was in college. And you touch on two things that are there, historical themes. And I want to unpack each, but I'm going to do them in turn. One is the history of the Japanese church. A good number of our audience is going to be familiar with what is going on in Southeast Asia because at Sovereign's Capital we do a lot of investing in Singapore, in Indonesian. So we have guests from that region on where we hear about the house church movement in China. We hear about what happened in Korea over the course of 100 years, but Japan is a country that's left out of it. So I'd love for you to touch on that before you do so. And if you don't remember, this two part question will remind you later. But the other one is that your comment about maybe the church not completely getting you in there, the artist not being fully embraced and appreciated. Seems like it must be a new trend because when I think back five or 600 years ago, if you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you see all the great paintings and it looked like faith and art were very much intertwined and of course, through classical music. But I think that maybe I agree with you, maybe that's not as much. Now, why do you think that is?
Makoto Fujimura: Hmm Yeah. Japan is a remarkable example. Japan is the end of the Silk Road, so all the cultures flowed through China, Korea into Japan. And so it's an amalgam. It's a syncretic culture that began to refine everything that it imports. That's what it's good at, is importing what is foreign. Like a Ford automobile. And we find the
Henry Kaestner: People drive Fords in Japan. I thought, they drive Toyota.
Makoto Fujimura: Well, they yeah, exactly. That's what happens is they take from what is outside and they make it into this refined, you know, reality of and everybody says, oh, that's what a car is. And then, of course, you know, it gets exported and then refined again and so forth. But Japan has always been, you know, has now it's true that Japan has the best scotch whiskey, you know, the world's best. Yes, the best bagel, the best pizza.
Henry Kaestner: You know, best bagels in Tokyo, in Japan.
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, bagels in Tokyo. As best pizza as well. I mean It depends on who is doing the judging, I suppose. But you know, Tokyo is remarkable because you go in and you see all these, everything from food to technology that is such high, you know, refined whole. But Japan rarely invents anything of its own. And 16th century Japan, which I am kind of an expert, I went back to Japan. I was born in Boston. My father is a research scientist. My father was doing his post-doc with a guy named Noam Chomsky and brought generative grammar theory back into Japan. So I grew up in that scientific community and it was back and forth between Japan and US in my childhood years and really don't fit into, you know, either side. I still don't. But my journey has always been, it seems, defined by this reality of the past. And the Japanese history is full of these inflection points. But the one that I was most interested in, in 16th century and 17th century esthetic that came out of it. So I came back to Japan not knowing that that curiosity will lead me to Christ. I mean, this is a incredible journey, if you think about it, because, you know, who would think, you know, go to a country that is less than 3% Christian population now you will find Christ. But that's exactly what happened. And later on, as I was writing my book, Silence and Beauty, and after that, my mother passed away and I was thinking about the legacy that she left me. And it was this faith legacy. She was not an outspoken Christian at all. In fact, she was kind of a hidden Christian. But she told me that when I became a Christian that, you know, she's not surprised because in my ancestry line, there are Presbyterian evangelists, there are pastors, they are underground church leaders. So that influence must have caught up to me, you know, in my in inversion to faith and Japanese history, really, this inflection point of what happened at the end of the 16th century has defined Japanese esthetic to the extent that you can almost attribute almost everything we know about Japan from that period, namely consolidation of dictatorial forces of Shogun that reestablishing itself in Japan to be close to outside influences. It became an aggressor in many ways, and that led to the nationalism that to, Pearl Harbor and those things, those movements of ideology or, you know, how Japan saw herself there. On the flip side of that was the tea master Sen no Rikyu, who consolidated the esthetics of East into Japan. And anything you hear about tea ceremonies and flower arranging and calligraphy and all of the arts in 17th century were influenced by Rikyu. And most people don't realize that the Rikyu's influence and Christianity overlaps. And that's exactly when the persecution of Christians for the last couple 250 years begins. And it was during those 250 years of silence that we see Japanese culture establish and refine itself. So that's a long way to answer that question, and I'll be happy to go into the second one, but
Henry Kaestner: Well, I think that's very, very interesting. And so the movie that you advise on Silence is about that period and the role of Jesuit Priest that came in and was the church around during the 250 years that it was closed off to the West?
Makoto Fujimura: Well, there was a revival in Japan before that, and this was alarming to the dictatorial forces because it was introducing egalitarian ideas and so many of what was pushed back. Same thing happened in Korea, by the way, and the two nations share somewhat of that history, but with different outcomes. And so Japanese history is a remarkable history of resilience. You know, so most people don't realize that when the bomb in Nagasaki went off, that that bomb killed more Christians than those accounted for at those martyred in the 250 year history. Nagasaki is a Catholic town, and that day, that moment around 10 am was a worship service, a mass taking place that attracted, if not all of Catholics. And the bomb exploded right on top of the church. So, you know, most people think Japan is a non, you know, Christian culture. And I wrote my book, Silence and Beauty to trace that it's not it is a hidden Christian culture. And even though if you do a survey, there's less than 3% who identify themselves as Christians. But in fact, the culture, entire culture is imbued with Christianity in ways that I don't think we can say that about America anymore. So, you know, it's a flip of what we experience here. We fight culture wars. They don't. Why? Because they see culture as tied to nature. And you don't fight nature. You know, you work with nature. And so everything that's developed esthetically is an integration of nature and culture. And that's why it's almost impossible to fight culture wars in Japan. By here, nature and culture are split, and that's part of what we are experiencing here. Why the artists I exile from faith many times is because we don't understand the connection, the integrated connection between who we are as makers and what impact we have in the world to reshape the world or to transform the world rhetoric as part of creativity. You know, it can be a way to move forward that transformation, but that is not enough. What you know, you just talked about as far as renaissance art, reshaping Western culture, by the way, was during the Black Plague, that these things that were happening in extreme duress and trauma with invasions everywhere, artists like Fra Angelico were painting in faith, integrating their faith with their art. And that became the base for Renaissance. Shakespeare was writing at a time when Black Plague wouldn't allow him to establish his theater in London. So he had to build this theater outside of London and, you know, talk about an entrepreneur. He understood that the time would give him an opportunity to do something new. So he set up the theater in tears, putting the royalty on top and the patrons in the middle, commoners on the bottom. And he wrote, you know, to connect the dots. Romeo and Juliet, right? Romeo from, you know, upper house and Juliet is from the commoners, you know, streets. And what happens? Well, Romeo does not learn of the feigned death of Juliet because the messenger was quarantined. I didn't notice that until during the pandemic. I read Romeo and Juliet again. I realized, oh, my goodness, this is about trauma of our time of the pandemic shutdown. And this Shakespeare basically entrepreneurial that has created an art form that can speak into that divide? Right. Well, everybody's feeling this divide and this frustration of not being able to communicate. And, you know, there's kind of a caste system that held people in bondage. And everything that Shakespeare wrote was to break out of that. And that led to the basically the British history of literature. So, you know, two examples Fra Angelico and Shakespeare. You can look at those two and find examples of how in the past, both faith and art were part of creation of a new culture.
William Norvell: Wow. Wow. That's fascinating. I always learn so much I was telling Makoto before we got here. I got to hear him speak seven years ago at a small event. And as we discussed with Zero Artistic Nature, he had just written a book called Culture Care that I read, and it just sort of opened my eyes to how to care for these people in our culture. What part of the Body of Christ they play and how the average. I'll say person like me just kind of misses that on average. And it just opened my eyes. And I'm not going to say I've changed everything, but I want to give you a chance to talk a little bit about that divide. And, you know, how how does a person who doesn't identify, you know, with artists and, you know, they say that I can't draw a stick figure, right. To save my life. And yet I know I'm part of the body with people that can do beautiful things, but even then, I don't appreciate them sometimes don't understand them. It's like, could you help us think through what part of the body creatives and artist have and how we that maybe don't share that can think about that and support and love and appreciate things in new ways.
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, all of us have different ways of understanding the world. And, you know, some of us are more visual like me, some of us are kinetic, some of us, you know, listen to music and can understand immediately what the composer is trying to do. So we all have different entry points and all of us are creative. We are creatures of the imagination. And unless we find and sanctify our imagination, we will be prone to follow the dictates of consumerism. And so how that works is basically our history of modern history, or media. But really we, you know, cannot live a single moment without using our imagination to understand the world. Now, most of us think imagination is like fantasy. You know, it's not something you make up. You know, the story that you make up. But that's not what imagination is. Biblically speaking. This is a direct tie because, you know, so many of the words used for our hearts in the Bible that word, you know, that we translate into our hearts in old testament and the New Testament both are pointing out, you know, Dr. Adam Davis, who I work with, she's a Hebraic scholar. She says the closest word in English language for heart is imagination. So, you know, when we are talking about our hearts, we're actually talking about imagination, biblically speaking. But we have disassociated what's going on with our bodies and our hearts with rational means. Right? We trust the rational means oftentimes, and we don't trust the heart. Now, that's a systemic problem for question, because if you don't connect the two, that means your Sunday's faith is not going to translate into your Monday to Saturday's faith. It's going to be dissociated. You know, you might have sent to checking boxes on Sundays and go through the ritual of, you know, agreeing with those principles. But it never gets into the heart. And that's where making will come in, is whenever you're making, whether it be an omelet or you're gardening or you're playing baseball or whatever, that is not something that you can just simply explain to people, you know, how does a pitcher pitch his, you know, curb and when does he use that, right. Those are not something that you can just spell out in a calculus formula. And, you know, then everybody can do it. It's far more complicated. Even the simple, you know, motion of throwing a fastball is not very easy to teach. So what does that say about a knowledge? You know, as I say in the book, Art plus faith. You know, we tend to, as Christians argue over the recipe. We argue all day, you know, and create denominations. But really, have we tasted the fruit? Right. And if you are asking a chef to make an omelet or anything, you want to taste what he or she has made first, right before you make judgment on the recipe, if you want to know the recipe, you taste it. If it's good, then you ask to the recipe, not the other way round. Most of the time in education, in the church, we do. The opposite. We give you the recipe to send to, take this recipe to see if you agree with this, and then you try to make it. But the making is not emphasized, so we never really connect semantic knowledge with our head knowledge and actually how we come to know the world is opposite, right? As babies we come into knowledge through taste and touch and smell, and then our language develops because we have developed the affective side, imaginative side, connecting bodily experience with language and perception. But, you know, we think that knowledge is, you know, head down. So we, you know, live every day disassociating ourselves so many act of making, everybody has some way to reconnect that and those we find to be hearing whether it be just walking outside or watching a movie and responding in a community or having a beer together or whatever that may be. Those are things that actually outlast many of the things that we think are important that we are sent to. Now, they're not unimportant, but they are disconnected.
Henry Kaestner: Makoto we've interacted briefly and neither of us can remember exactly whether it's around Praxis or whether it's around. Q But you're not foreign to the concept of Faith driven entrepreneurship, and you have seen people from the right brain side and the left brain side. And I think you're in a really unique spot and maybe is a continuation of what you're just talking about to be able to say after interacting with business people that think maybe not in terms of palettes or accords or things like that, but think in things like customer acquisition costs and lifetime value and capitalization. When you interact with that crowd, which you are not a stranger to, what are some things that you reflect on? Like, if they only could do this, then they'd have so much more joy. Or if they only did this, they could integrate the creative process more and get more fulfillment from their work. What are you just your reflections of having interacted with our audience for a long time?
Makoto Fujimura: Absolutely. I will send you a link about this. But I went to a university called Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
Henry Kaestner: That's where my sister went, the bison.
Makoto Fujimura: Oh, okay.
Henry Kaestner: And that's where Tim Keller went, of course.
Makoto Fujimura: Yes, that's where Tim Keller went. Yes. And the [...] that all these people, good people went there. But it is a large liberal arts institution and it has three schools now, School of Engineering and School of Management and Liberal Arts. And I was asked to be on the board of Bucknell and about seven years ago and the first conversation I had, I don't know what an artist can bring into a conversation among, you know, many CEOs and entrepreneurs. But I sat there at lunch surrounded by other board members, and they asked me, you know, we don't have artists on the board. So, like, what do you think about our plan to build a art building, you know, $50 million building on the hill. And they were expecting me to be the [...]. Then I said, How many art majors do we have? You know, when I was here, it was like ten, you know, and then they actually, you know, staff went out and checked and there was like 27 and I said, So we're going to sequester 27 kids up on the hill in this fancy new building. That doesn't make sense to me. You know, we just voted to have a school of management. Why don't we put art and art history in there? Wouldn't that be amazing? You know, this integration of business and art that doesn't exist in the world. And here's an opportunity that I saw, you know, maybe just a portion of art and our history can go in there to connect the dots to create these intersection points. Well, there was a guy sitting across from me. I didn't know him. His name is Steve Holmes, and he heard that and he said, you know what? That makes total sense to me because I was accounting major at Bucknell. But if you were to ask me, what was that one class that shaped how I do business? He said it was art history class that I took.
Henry Kaestner: Really?
Makoto Fujimura: Yes. He said, you know, it taught me how to see. It taught me how to talk to other CEOs. You know, he rose the ranks in hotel business and became a very successful entrepreneur. And he eventually decided to give $30 million to Bucknell to create this intersection of art, history art, and the school management. So yeah.
Henry Kaestner: So there can be many of those in the country.
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, I don't think so. And you know, I donated a very large piece called Rhapsody, so I'll send you a video link of that.
Henry Kaestner: We'll put it in the show notes.
Makoto Fujimura: And next time you are in Bucknell, you know, go see this building because it is like beyond what I imagined. Right. This conversation between an entrepreneur and an artist literally produced something that would leave this enormous legacy for the next generation school of managements, you know, and they created two floors of art, including Metaverse Studio with the dark room that you can do silver print photograph. So you can go back and forth, you know, in history.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah.
Makoto Fujimura: And this is going to be used by many of the management majors who you know, who's going to be walking around looking at this art.
William Norvell: Again, I'm fascinated by this. So for a good number of our audience, I think they're probably thinking this is interesting and I will take some interesting points away from this, but maybe it doesn't have any practical application to how I run my business as an entrepreneur. That could be something someone's thinking. I want to go one layer deeper to what you just said. What was it about that art history class that changed the way he led? And what do you hope this center by having two floors of art? What will that change as an entrepreneur? What should entrepreneurs listening to this seek out in their day to day life? And how could that change the way they see their product development or lead their people or write their mission and vision for their organization? How does that transfer happen?
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah. So what's interesting is that not only artists are asking that question, but business sector is asking that question. Right? So I get invited by all these people now. And I just spoke as a keynote speaker at Stockholm Economic Forum, and I was the first artist to speak there among, you know, MIT and Harvard MBA professors. And what happened surprised me because to answer your question, if you understand human creativity and general activity, your potential for generative thinking and generative living, those are not far apart. So what I'm saying is entrepreneurial thinking that creates generative businesses can lead directly into living generative lives, but we haven't connected the dots. So now, thanks to Adam Grant and others who studied empathy as a key component in creation of generative community within businesses, we have data to prove that actually empathy is part of this process of connecting those dots. That's why if you create a company, if you create a business, if you create a team of any kind, you have to pay attention to the metrics of organizations, psychology on empathy, skills like you want leaders who have that because they are able to connect these elements that has been separated by assumptions of the past. You know, when businesses succeed, you can have a bottom line measurement of different levels. And, you know, obviously you want, you know, ROI that makes sense and so forth. But really what you're asking is, is this going to be an enduring. Right. Whatever I made. Is this going to be enduring? That's an artist's question. And the answer to that from an artist's perspective is not to just do things because it's going to be successful transaction money. Right. Every exhibit that I have, you know, there's one that one painting that everybody wants, you know, it's just great. Right. But the temptation is to just repeat that, you know like franchise it, you know, and create more and more. But that kills the very essence of the poetry of whatever that painting has. Right. It has this generative potential in that one painting that can give birth to ten other paintings. My job is to create ten other paintings, not to repeat that one. So in that sense, you know, I have been trained to live thinking about abundance, faced with scarcity. That's an entrepreneurial right where you're facing certain limitations and challenges and you see those challenges as opportunities, right? Those setbacks as a new way of thinking about how to reframe your business. That's an artist. So two side that thinking exactly the same way. But as you know that, you just notice your question is very much at the heart of this because it is separated. And that's why we can't think, Oh, I'm an entrepreneur. Therefore I have to think like an artist, you know? And for me as an artist, I have to be an entrepreneur to be a successful artist. So those two, you know, at least we're starting to have that conversation, which is really beneficial to both side.
William Norvell: That's fascinating. And I want to go one other place before we move into sort of a lightning round, which is fun and be remiss not to mention culture care again. And in culture care you talk a lot about the importance of creating and embracing beauty as an antidote to cultural brokenness? And of course, there's a lot of people listening. Brokenness culturally is very high right now, specifically in the U.S., as you mentioned. So we're most of our audience is we have people from around the world, but a good number here in the U.S. And, you know, you have this beautiful line we can write that, you know, beauty has a way of feeding our souls. And I just wonder, how have you come to know Christ more through generating beauty and art? And for those of us who maybe can't generate as much, how do our souls get fed? And I'm going to ask the, you know, really rudimentary question when like, I don't even understand it. Sometimes I see it. I know a lot of work went into it, but I don't know if I'm appreciating it right or I'm understanding it. You know, how does beauty revive someone's soul who maybe doesn't quite get it?
Makoto Fujimura: Well, thanks for that question. First of all, I know I think the word I understand means to stand under. Oftentimes, we over stand and try to force our perceptions on, you know, our previous knowledge into that mystery. And that doesn't work. That produces actually the dissonance between what we can experience in learning about something new. You know, you can't expect to learn a new language overnight. It takes years of listening and actually new neurons, you know, connecting, right. Connections being made in your brain. That's new. And that same thing with anything music, art, theater, cinema. It takes years of paying attention and listening and learning from the Masters like Martin Scorsese, you know, why is this film so powerful? We really need to stand under that person, though, under the art at least, to be able to begin to ask the right questions so we can learn, you know, we can understand. And so that practice actually is a discipline that I think every successful entrepreneur will have to have because it's not just, you know, you're creating a product that's going to sell. And, you know, we start out that way. We think, you know, this is a great idea. It's going to be a hit. Oftentimes, you know, we're humbled by our own assumptions and we realized like, oh, I actually have to listen to my customers. I have to test this out in various cultures in order to see if my ideas can even have any kind of success. And so, you know, we go through the process of, you know, standing under the customers, standing under whatever the field we're serving to understand that this is an entry point and my ideas would it work. Well, that depends on whether you understood it well enough or not. Right. So it's not just head knowledge, but it's experience. It's knowledge of actually, you know, being on the ground to experience the testing stages and so forth. And so those are, I think, very much at the heart of. So my sense is that most of us have both the capacity and inclination, an interest in learning something new. And by the way, if you're driven by faith, you have to have this element of imagination connected with your faith. Otherwise, your faith is a doctor and that you can, you know, force feed yourself and others to convince others that you are right. But you will never understand God or what the Spirit is doing in the world if you don't allow yourself to stand under. Right. Faith is a substance of things hopeful, the evidence of things unseen. And that substance, the word substance in Greek is hypothesis, which means to literally stand under. So we really need a, you know, posture of humility to understand anything. And I think that's how you grow a business. I think that's how you understand the arts.
Henry Kaestner: Okay, we're going to enter into a and I can't believe we're going to do this. This may not go over well at all because you're very, very thoughtful in your responses. And I hesitate to even do this, but we're going to go through Lightning Round and we're going to alternate hard questions that you think, how can I possibly answer this in 30 seconds? And yet we're going to ask you to and remember, this has been prerecorded. You can say that was awful. I strike that and we will. But I want to get your quick reactions. A bunch of questions some are easy and some are hard, I'll ask four or five, 30 seconds each response. William will do the same and he'll finish out with a question we always ask our guest, which is What is God teaching you through his word? Okay, so you know that that one's going to come. That will be the end and it will put you out of your misery. Okay. We're going to start first one. I'm not an artist. We've established that. But there are different parts of art that can bring me to tears. I think of the Hallelujah chorus, for instance, every time I get tears in my eyes. You as an artist, is there anything, whether it's a song or a movie or something, when you get exposed to it, it brings tears to your eyes because of the beauty of it.
Makoto Fujimura: Absolutely. Every moment as an artist, I'm looking at burning bush is everywhere. But I just wrote about, Lux Aertena, by Morten Lauridsen who composes his music after 9/11. I'm a survivor and I never know I was trapped underneath two towers.
Henry Kaestner: Wow.
Makoto Fujimura: So after 9/11, there were no songs that we could sing. And even in the church, you know, we have all these triumphant songs, but we don't have a song to sing Lux Aertena by Morten Lauridsen, played over and over in NPR stations.
Henry Kaestner: And we're going to put that the show notes.
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, I'll send you links.
Henry Kaestner: Okay. I was part of the family business that was in our family for 150 years in Baltimore, passed out of our family five or six years ago. The longest family owned business in multi generations is from Japan, where I understand there's a legacy of this. There's a family, and it's been in the in a family for 27 generations. Which brings me to the fact that you have a very famous father whose work was really, really amazing and instrumental in the way that a lot of people think today about spatial linguistics, even artificial intelligence. He was early in that field. As you reflect on your father's work, how do you see God in that? Maybe there's an intersection with your work as an artist, maybe not. But how do you process it all about what your father studied, what he learned, and what he taught the world in light of your Christian faith?
Makoto Fujimura: Oh, thanks for asking that. I think about my father every day. He passed away four years ago. But there's not a day that I don't think about his legacy and legacy or what I just said about understanding really is about who he was as a scientist. He always said, with our modesty and humility, we will not come to understand anything. And speech and hearing science has been severely set back by assumptions of pride that we can reproduce human sound by segmenting that my father, in his entire lifetime tried to change and younger scientists are following in his tracks. But I think that's the greatest legacy my father left me.
Makoto Fujimura: Awesome. Okay, last one for me before we go over to William. I have only been in the airport in Nagoya and I've missed one of the most beautiful, amazing countries I've got to stop. I've got I get a fix in a tone that covid's made it difficult, but I really want to go. I'm fascinated by the culture a lot of our listeners are. You have a foot in America and a foot in Japan. What's a movie that you think does the best job to characterize the unique culture of Japan for an American that's fascinated by the culture?
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah, I mean, we talked about Silence. Martin Scorsese's silence, that's one. My neighbor Totoro by Miyazaki animation. I exaggerate that all day with you and I see you all to Japan and visit the sites
Henry Kaestner: Have we ever done exegesis on on animation William before.
William Norvell: Not to the best of my knowledge. Five.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, no.
William Norvell: But we'll try.
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah.
Henry Kaestner: We're going to put that one in the show notes. [...] William onto you.
William Norvell: Okay. Mine are going to have a heavy weight, but hopefully you'll have a good answer. Is everyone creative?
Makoto Fujimura: Absolutely. No question about it.
William Norvell: Okay. Second question would be define creativity for us in your words.
Makoto Fujimura: Yeah. Creativity is defined by God. God is the creator. So we have to look at Genesis, actually, the entire Bible, to understand, to ask that question.
Henry Kaestner: And I got one last one before we go back to William, because I forgot one. What's one thing that you like to give to.
Makoto Fujimura: Though? My wife's ministry, Ambrose International, which we're doing a gaita this week. We went to India in February and created a documentary film with our team and it is one of the most remarkable phenomenons. We created a children's center in the middle of a brothel in Mumbai. And during the shutdown, this has become one of the great examples of God operating in darkness. We have over 80 children being educated straight out of the brothels, and we'll be able to send some of them to private school this year.
Henry Kaestner: So there's a documentary on it.
Makoto Fujimura: Yes.
Henry Kaestner: Another thing for the shownotes.
Makoto Fujimura: That's right.
Henry Kaestner: Okay. All right. Thank you, William.
William Norvell: Okay. So coming to the in here, but as you mentioned, you have to look at the entirety of the Bible to understand creativity. Of course, in Revelation, we're told that we're heading to new heavens and New Earth. And I'm wondering what, from your perspective, what does it look like to participate in that work now that will come to fruition in the Garden City?
Makoto Fujimura: Everything down in faith, everything that we make in faith, whether visible or invisible, will be multiplied, amplified by our God gracious. God does not need to do this, but God insists on inviting us to co-create. So this has been the pattern throughout the Bible. You know, God doesn't name the animals. God asks Adam to name the animals. God doesn't create his own tabernacle. God asks Bezalel and Oholiab in Exodus 31 to create the tabernacle. God doesn't ask to, you know, share the good news with the poor to be among the poor. Jesus himself comes to that.
Henry Kaestner: Okay, one more, because you brought it up God ask humans to name the animals. Most of our listeners will not be acquainted with the fact that you're a double major in art and animal science at Bucknell. Give us one interesting animal fact that you think most people don't know but points in the God.
Makoto Fujimura: I wrote my thesis on optimal foraging theory of [...]. I can tell you that they're absolutely perfectly timed in how they forage for food to save saved them their energy in wintertime.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, Did it take you a long time to review all the prior work on that.
Makoto Fujimura: Well, yeah, there's a lot written on this, but is it really the most important thing when sitting in a freezing cold shack by the Susquehanna River, taking data?
William Norvell: That is. That is also the first time we've heard that thesis topic come up on the podcast. Okay, unfortunately, we are coming to the end of our time. It's our last question which we love to ask is about God's Word and how it's coming alive to you today and potentially new ways. But we'd love to offer and invite you to share something that maybe you're learning from God. Scripture could be something this morning, could be something you've been meditating on for a while, just loved. If you'd share that with our audience.
Makoto Fujimura: Well, I'm surrounded by them. And you see this painting behind me, which is series of paintings that I'm doing on the Psalms. And this is Psalm eight behind me. I just painted this today, but it really is. Every month I take one Psalm and I do a 48 by 48 inch pretty large painting on that psalm. And I started this about two and a half years ago and realize it's going to take like 14 years. There's 150 Psalms. So one Psalm per month means, you know, I have to dedicate myself over the next that is 12 years to accomplish this.
Henry Kaestner: Can I preorder some 23?
Makoto Fujimura: All right. Yeah. These are not anything but meditation on the Psalms. I have no interest in selling these or even showing these. They're done almost in the sacred way of me. To know God and know God deeply. I have to practice what I preach. So I spend every month, every morning coming to the studio. I listen to the Psalm one psalm that I'm working on over and over and. Just simply reflect on it before I start my day.
Henry Kaestner: That's awesome.
William Norvell: That's beautiful. That is a long obedience in the same direction right there. Well, for our own sake, I hope you share them one day. I know you may not feel led to, so I'm not going to force you to you. You listen to God.
Makoto Fujimura: I put some on Instagram, so.
William Norvell: There we go so we can find them? Yeah. There's been so much fun. There's been so much fun. You know, we didn't give it in to so much. I'll end with if anybody is looking for a movie. It's a bit long, but silence is stirring. And of course, Michael wrote a book about sort of exegiting the book in the movie as well. But Liam Neeson. Andrew Garfield. Adam Driver, Martin Scorsese. It is it is not your typical Hollywood film. You end with a sense of unsettledness, which is healthy to wrestle with, I think.
Makoto Fujimura: And very beautifully Japanese that way. Yeah. Andrew Garfield was so heavily criticized in that role as disappearing in the movie. But I said, Wait till Japanese see this. And when 300,000 Japanese saw this movie lined the streets of Tokyo, you know that Andrew Garfield, you know, could relate to the Japanese because that that's what Japanese do. They disappear. Don't take over. That's the ultimate sacrifice and ultimate love. And that was played so well by Spider Man.
William Norvell: Amen.What a great place to end. Thank you so much for joining us for so grateful.
Makoto Fujimura: So good to be with you.