Takashi Hirano has been many things in his life. The 36-year-old has worked as a freelance photographer, a teacher of Japanese, and a political attaché at the Japanese Embassy.
But today he has a particularly interesting status: Hirano is likely the only Kyiv-based journalist explaining Ukraine’s complicated politics in Japanese.
As the editor — and only journalist — of state news agency Ukrinform’s Japanese service, Hirano’s work makes Ukraine understandable to a Japanese audience. It’s a continuation of the work he did as a political attaché, where Hirano helped gather and explain to the Japanese government the events rapidly occurring in Ukraine during and after the EuroMaidan Revolution that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
But it is also the end result of a young Japanese man’s love affair with Ukraine from afar.
“For me, it was the country of my dreams,” Hirano says.
Geography books
Hirano was born and raised in Yonago, a city of just under 150,000 people in the west of Japan’s main island of Honshu.
Because his father was a geography teacher, he grew up surrounded by books about different parts of the world.
In Yonago, it was difficult for him to get a sense of the rest of the world. As a result, books served as a “fantasy, but one that actually exists.”
It was in these books that Hirano found information about Ukraine. Until then, he did not know that the country existed and that it had its own language, culture, and traditions. Hirano then began to seek out more information online and occasionally communicate with Ukrainians in English over the internet.
From reading geography books, Hirano says he became interested in Ukraine and fell in love with the country.
As a result, when it was time to enter the university, Hirano chose one where he would have the opportunity to study Ukrainian: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Although Hirano saw Ukrainian as a major language with millions of speakers, it was still a minor one at his university. As a result, he also had to study Russian as his main specialty.
After graduating, Hirano could not find work in Japan connected to Ukraine. Instead, he worked for years as a freelance photographer in Tokyo. Initially, he found success in that field.
However, with time, that changed: the number of newspapers and magazines decreased and mobile phones could increasingly take high-quality photographs. Suddenly, everyone was a photographer and honorariums for freelancers grew significantly smaller.
Hirano decided it was time to look for other work — and he hoped to find it in Ukraine.
Ukraine at last
That was when Hirano saw the advertisement on the website of the Japanese Embassy in Kyiv: Ukrainian universities were looking for native speakers willing to relocate and teach Japanese. The salaries were lower than in Japan, but housing was provided.
Hirano decided to give it a shot, and submitted an application. Soon, he was accepted by Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.
He relocated to Ukraine in 2008 and spent the next five years teaching Japanese.
When Hirano arrived in Lviv, his Ukrainian still had a long way to go.
“His Ukrainian has improved tremendously since I met Takashi a couple of years after he moved to Ukraine,” says Yuliana Romanyshyn, a former Kyiv Post journalist who studied Japanese under Hirano.
“At that moment, he could already speak and write in Ukrainian but often needed help to understand difficult words or phrases. But he was very persistent in his studies, constantly working on his skills.”
She says that Hirano was also a very effective language instructor. The university did not have enough Japanese textbooks, so he would often create his own exercises for the students.
“He was a very creative, enthusiastic, yet demanding teacher,” Romanyshyn says.
In the ensuing years, Hirano would get a master’s degree in international relations from that same university in 2013. Then, in 2014, he would take the political attaché job at the embassy, which he would hold for four years, until his contract ran out.
And, in September 2018, Hirano would go to work at Ukrinform, helping to inaugurate the news agency’s Japanese service.
His duties there include translating Ukrinform’s voluminous news coverage from Ukrainian to Japanese, conducting interviews, and writing analytical pieces that explain Ukraine in Japanese or Japan in Ukrainian.
While it is difficult to identify the exact readers of Ukrinform’s Japanese service, Hirano says he believes it is a primary source of information on Ukraine for Japanese journalists and television channels, political experts and people seeking information on the country.
Perhaps there is even another young person like him, reading Ukrinform and dreaming about Ukraine from a provincial Japanese city.
Hirano says he is happy in Ukraine and wants to continue living here.
“What I have at work and in my personal life satisfies me,” he told the Kyiv Post.
At home with strangers
After roughly 10 years living in Ukraine, there is little that surprises Hirano. He seems to deflect questions about cross-cultural misunderstandings and avoids broad generalizations about how people react to meeting him.
However, he admits that many Ukrainians are curious about what causes a Japanese person to learn Ukrainian and move to Ukraine. There were times in Lviv when he would answer this question every week, sometimes even daily.
Ten years later, Hirano is still surprising people. He often writes on social media in Ukrainian, and Ukrainian users initially do not realize he is from Japan. When they find out, they often want to meet him.
He has made many Ukrainian friends this way, and uses social media and his contacts to meet and befriend locals when he travels to other Ukrainian cities.
But for all his deep integration into Ukrainian society, Hirano still sees differences between Ukrainian and Japanese worldviews and approaches to life.
In February, the IZONE art gallery exhibited a series of his photographs, titled “Grandma Atsuko.” The images on display all focused on one person: Hirano’s grandmother, who passed away last year.
The photographs spanned a period of roughly 15 years, from Hirano’s student days up until the last year of his grandmother’s life.
But the exhibition was not simply a memorial to Atsuko. By showing changes in her appearance over 15 years, it also expressed Hirano’s view on the nature of beauty.
“Beauty is not in youth, but in the change in one person over a long period of time,” he says.
That message was lost on some of the Ukrainian viewers.
Showing private photo is not common in Ukrainian photography, Hirano says. As a result, some thought the photographs were simply a memorial to his grandmother and, thus, the exhibition was not true art.
There is also another difference he has noticed between the peoples of Japan and Ukraine: to the average Japanese, Ukrainians seem very emotional.
If Japanese tend to think first and react some time later, Ukrainians are more likely to react right away, at times quite radically.
“I feel that this is completely different from us,” Hirano says, but stresses that it no longer surprises him.
He also says that street protests — both the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and other smaller demonstrations — are another cultural difference: they are rare in Japan.
“In Japan, we see dissatisfaction in society, but people don’t come out into the streets,” he says. It’s simply not a common practice.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, politicians often hear the public’s grievances and modify their decisions thanks to protests. “We think that (the protests) are very emotional, but then we see there is a positive result,” he says.
On July 21, Ukrainians will head to the polls to vote for a new parliament. That same day, the Japanese people will go to the polls to vote for members of the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of Japan’s bicameral National Diet.
As a journalist and the one man well-positioned to explain the two countries to one another, Hirano will be watching.
“Let’s see which country will have more changes,” he says with a laugh.
