Origami workshops, audiovisual sessions and a comic contest have been held since the beginning, last Wednesday, with the participation of artists from Santiago and followers of the various expressions of spirituality and traditions of the Asian nation.

One of the main activities was the collective exhibition Flight from the East (Vuelo del este). A song for peace, at the Provincial Center for Plastic Arts and Design, which was attended by the Chargé d’Affaires of the Japanese embassy, ​​Naoki Yokobayashi.

Precedents of these days are the celebration in 2013 of the centennial of the arrival of the first Japanese settled in this city, Keniche Fujishiro, who founded a family that perpetuates that legacy, evident in the book “A Japanese in Santiago de Cuba: a love story”.

Written by his granddaughter Lidia Sánchez Fujishiro, historian and professor at the Universidad de Oriente, the text was presented in the preamble to the beginning of the commemoration of the 400 years of the Japanese presence in Cuba, in 2014.

Six years later, the researcher from Santiago received the Order of the Rising Sun, Silver Rays, conferred by the Japanese government in response to her efforts for the knowledge and dissemination of that ancient culture.

In her words of thanks, Sánchez Fujishiro evoked her grandfather, as one of the many men and women from that country who for almost half a century came to Cuba in search of progress and with the hope of returning to their beloved land.

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