Peace Music Festa! Henoko (art work by pokke104)
*Main visual art work by pokke104.
Massa AquaFlow, as his real name Masaaki Hirano with two his friends, had organized this music festival. The festival was held in a on the beach in Henoko, adjacent to the US base and a planned new base construction site. Aiming was to make people see the beatuiful ocean that we would lost for the additional huge base.
The aim was make young people in Okinawa to face what we are going to lose by standing the right place where additional huge base is going to bekonstructed over beautiful ocean.
The festival was held 1 day in 2006, and 2 days in 2007.
It was a long time ago and I don’t have enough archives on hand, so I’m speaking from memory…
In 2006, over 700 people got together at the site with a hundred of volunteer.
In 2007, the festival size got more than double broad range of music genre. Part of the musicians are with famous and came from mainland.
The town Henoko is small town, So we try not to disturb the locals. But many things backfired on us. There, emotional clashes were born that almost created an accident. In both side of pros and cons.
The successor to the event spent many years attending to the local community and the relationship improved, but I was in a deep state of shock, unable to do anything about the resolution of the problem.
I took action on the base issue and spawned new divisions. I learned firsthand that this was the base issue. But then, for a long time, I was speechless.