The Concert of Japanese Koto and Flute

The Concert of Japanese Koto and Flute
On September 7 and 8, in Yangon, the Japan Foundation, Bangkok and the Embassy of Japan co-hosted a concert of Japanese Koto and Flute. The three visiting Japanese musicians, Mr.Hiroshi Matsushima(Flutist), Ms.Noriko Tsuboi(Koto player) and Ms.Keiko Suzuki(Koto Player), all of them currently residing in Bangkok, demonstrated the beauty of Japanese music by playing both tradtional and modern pieces. In two days, around four hundered people enjoyed this rare oppotunity to experience both sensitive and powerful tunes flowing from Koto (Japanese traditional harp)and Flute

.Altogether, the musicians played six pieces, one of which was "Midnight Rain" by an American Koto player, Elizabeth Falconer. This clearly indicates that the beauty of the sound of Koto is something universal, which transcends the boundary of traditional Japanese music. One of the audience, a young Myanmar student sent comments on this piece to the Embassy. She wrote, "As soon as this particular piece started, I heard the sound of rain instead of the sound of Koto. I heard various kinds of rain, sudden rain, heavy rain, thunder and wind. Through this concert, I came to like Japanese music very much."After the concert, the audience had the chance to interact with the three musicians. The Myanmar audience had many questions to ask such as how Koto is played, what kind of music scores they use, how many years they have been praciticing to reach professional level. Some famous Myanmar musicians were also included among the audience.The concert was a success in a sense that the music loving Myanmar people became interested in Japanese music and its unique instruments and that Myanmar and Japanese people were able to understand each other directly through universal language, namely music.

Japanese Flower Arrangement Show

Ikebana Demonstration (Japanese Flower Arrangement Show)
On May 30 and 31, in Yangon, Ikebana Demonstration was co-hosted by the Embassy of Japan and the Japan Foundation.The two visiting professors of *Ikenobo School, Mr.Yasufumi Sasayama and Mr.Masafumi Ishiwata demonstrated the beauty of this traditional Japanese culture by creating both classic and free style works.

In two days, these young and dynamic professors attracted around four hundred audience by not only the works themselves but also by their interesting and inspiring talks.At the workshop, the interested audience had the opportunity to experience Ikebana themselves under the guidance of the professors. Around eighty people, both young and old, men and women did their utmost efforts to create their own Ikebana work.Some of the comments of the participants are as follows."I was very impressed with the way even old leaves and branches are used to create new beauty.""Ikebana is truly different from other western and Myanmar style flower arrangement.

 Especially in western style, the arrangement of more flowers tends to be praised as more goregeous, however, I was struck with the simple beauty of Ikebana which is expressed by arranging a few flowers and leaves.""I wish we could have Ikebana lessons in Yangon."The Ikebana Demonstration was extremely meaningful for the cultural exchange between Japan and Myanmar in a sense that the audience became interested not only in the way flowers are arranged but also in the unique Japanese way of thinking and sense of beauty which is behind this most attractive traditional art of Japan.*Ikenobo is a school of Ikebana, or Japanese flower arrangement. It is the oldest school of Ikebana in Japan, having been founded in the 15th century by a Buddhist monk, Ikenobo Senkai. The school, currently headed by its 45th generation grand master, Ikenobo Senei, is based in the Rokkakudo Temple in Kyoto. Additionally, it has various chapters around the world. Please refer to Ikenobo official website for further information. (http://www.ikenobo.jp/english/index.html)

Manga ( Japanese cartoon)

Demonstration and Workshop on Manga ( Japanese cartoon)
With the cooperation of the Japan Foundation, the introduction and demonstration of Manga (Japanese cartoon) was presented by cartoonist Ms. Machiko Maeyama from Indonesia at a hotel in Yangon on 17 December 2007 . A hands-on training workshop on how to draw Manga was also organized after the demonstration.The event was patronized by more than 300 people comprised of Japanese Language learners and those who love cartoon.
 Ms. Maeyama presented the history and special features of Manga with PowerPoint presentation which was very much appreciated by the audience.About 30 participants including Myanmar cartoonists attended the workshop and Ms. Maeyama demonstrated Japanese Manga drawing techniques in detail. Myanmar cartoonists also demonstrated their skills which contributed to the cultural exchange between the two countries.

These were some of the comments from the participants; “We were surprised to know that Japanese Manga books have been published in many countries with translation into local languages”, “We were not aware that there are so many Manga magazines in Japan”, and “In Myanmar, majority of the cartoonists are male. It is interesting to learn that there are a lot of female Manga cartoonists in Japan ”. The audience seemed greatly interested in development of Manga in Japan .The Embassy of Japan plans to introduce Japanese Pop Culture such as Manga and Animation in addition to traditional Japanese Culture.

"Thway"film- written by Journal Gyaw Ma Ma Lay

The Embassy of Japan with cooperation of the Ministry of Information of the Union of Myanmar, held special shows of the first Japan-Myanmar collaboration film "Thway".

The film is based on a bestseller novel "Thway", written by a well-known writer Journal Gyaw Ma Ma Lay.The film was directed by Mr. Koji Chino, one of the masters of modern Japanese film world, who has devoted his passion to developing friendship between Myanmar and Japan, and it was casted by Japanese and Myanmar actors and actresses including Myo Thanda Tun（Ma Thwe Thwe）, Min Maw Kun（Maung Maung）, Akari Asou（Yumi Yoshida）, and Toshiyuki Nagashima（Toshio Yoshida）.

STORY:

 Yumi, a Japanese university student happenes to know one day that she has a younger brother（Maung Maung）in Myanmar who was born between her father, Toshio Yoshida and a Myanmar mother, Ma Thwe Thwe. Toshio was a former Japanese soldier sent to Myanmar during the World War Ⅱ. Brought by destiny, Yumi decides to visit Myanmar and to meet her younger brother, Maung Maung. Despite many difficulties, she can finally meet Maung Maung. But････
Beautiful but sad affection between Yumi and Maung Maung is described in the film.

*This film is Japanese/Myanmar language version with Myanmar subtitle.

KARIN & QUARTET Music Concert

KARIN QUARTET Music Concert ~Japanese contemporary music on traditional instruments~, co-hosted by the Embassy of Japan and the Japan Foundation was held on December 11, 2010 at Strand Hotel in Yangon.

The QURATET composed of KARIN (25 String Koto), Akihito Obama (Shakuhachi, a Vertical Bamboo Flute), Mami Ishizuka (Piano) and Aki-ra Sunrise (Percussion), all who came from Japan.The concert presented unique and exciting music, which was based on Japanese tradition but had an essence of music from the around the globe with contemporary perception.The seven hundred audiences in the hall sang, cheered and clapped their hands with the music.

On the following day of the concert, the QUARTET held a workshop at Gitameit Music Centre.The participants listened to and compared the rhythm and tone of Japanese traditional music and those of contemporary music.They also participated in creating a tune together using their own musical instruments.

The Embassy of Japan hopes to provide such occasions again to introduce various aspect of Japanese culture to people in Myanmar.

ပရိသတ္ေတြကို ဖမ္းစားႏိုင္ခဲ့တဲ့ ကုိရီးယားေဖ်ာ္ေျဖပြဲ

ပရိသတ္ေတြကို ဖမ္းစားႏိုင္ခဲ့တဲ့ ကုိရီးယားေဖ်ာ္ေျဖပြဲ
http://www.myanmar.mmtimes.com/2011/timeout/520/time02.html
ၿငိမ္းအိအိေထြး-အတြဲ ၂၆ ၊ အမွတ္ ၅၂၀ ( ၃-၉ ၊ ၆ ၊ ၂၀၁၁)
TALအဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖမႈ ျပကြက္တစ္ကြက္။ ဓာတ္ပံု - ေကာင္းထက္

ေတာင္ကုိရီးယားႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ အထင္ကရ တိုက္ကြမ္ဒိုနဲ႔ ေခတ္ေပၚအက ေပါင္း စပ္ထားတဲ့ TALအဖြဲ႕ဟာ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ ကမၻာလွည့္ေဖ်ာ္ ေျဖေရး ခရီးစဥ္အျဖစ္ ေမလ ၂၉ ရက္ေန႔က ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံအမ်ဳိးသား ဇာတ္႐ုံမွာ ကျပၿပီး ပရိသတ္ေတြရဲ႕ ၀က္၀က္ကြဲ အားေပးမႈ လက္ခုပ္ သံကို လက္ခံရရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ျမင္ေနက်တုိက္ကြမ္ဒုိျပကြက္ဟန္ ပန္ေတြနဲ႔ မတူဘဲ ဇာတ္လမ္းဇာတ္ ကြက္ေပၚေအာင္ ဖန္တီးထားတဲ့ TAL အဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖမႈအဖြင့္က ေရွး ေခတ္၀တ္စုံ၀တ္ တိုက္ကြမ္ဒုိ ဆရာႀကီးနဲ႔ တပည့္ေက်ာ္ ႏွစ္ေယာက္၊ ေနာက္ တန္ခုိးရွိတဲ့ ဓာတ္လုံး၊ တန္ဖုိးရွိတဲ့ ခါးစည္းခါးပတ္ျဖဴနဲ႔ အတူ တုိက္ကြမ္ဒိုေလာကရဲ႕ အေတာ္ဆုံးလုိ႔ သတ္မွတ္ႏုိင္တဲ့မ်က္ႏွာဖုံးနဲ႔ စတင္ပါတယ္။
ေဒါသျပင္းျပင္းနဲ႔ တပည့္ေက်ာ္က အနီေရာင္၀တ္စုံ၊ အနီေရာင္အဖြဲ႕ကုိ ကုိယ္စားျပဳၿပီး အျပာေရာင္၀တ္စုံ၀တ္ အဖြဲ႕ကေတာ့ ဆရာႀကီး ရဲ႕ခါးပတ္ျဖဴ ခ်ီးျမႇင့္ျခင္းခံရသူပါ။ ဒါကုိမေက်နပ္တဲ့ အနီေရာင္၀တ္လူစုက မ်က္ႏွာဖုံးကုိ ရေအာင္ယူသြားသလုိ အျပာ ၀တ္လူငယ္ကုိ လည္း ဒဏ္ရာအနာတရျဖစ္ေအာင္ လွပတဲ့ တုိက္ကြမ္ဒုိတုိက္ကြက္ေတြနဲ႔ ဖန္တီးသြားပါတယ္။

ဒါေပမယ့္ ေနာက္ဆုံး မွာေတာ့ ႏွစ္ဖြဲ႕စလုံး အျပန္အလွန္နားလည္မႈရၿပီး ၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းသြားတဲ့ ဇာတ္သိမ္းခန္းနဲ႔ အဆုံး သတ္သြားေပမယ့္ ၾကားခ်ိန္ေတြမွာ တစ္ဖြဲ႕ခ်င္းစီရဲ႕ တုိက္ကြမ္ဒုိစြမ္းရည္၊ ကုိရီးယားမိန္းမငယ္ေလးေတြရဲ႕ ယပ္ေတာင္အကအလွအျပင္ ဇာတ္၀င္ခန္း တစ္ခုနဲ႔တစ္ခု ခ်ိတ္ဆက္ခ်ိန္မွာ ပါ၀င္ ကျပတဲ့ ေခတ္ေပၚဘီဘိြဳင္းအကေတြကလည္း ကျပခ်ိန္တစ္နာရီခြဲသာသာ အတြင္းမွာပရိသတ္ မ်က္ေတာင္ မခတ္ ႏုိင္ေအာင္ ဖမ္းစားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ "ကျပသူေတြ မ်က္ႏွာဖုံးတပ္ရတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းရင္းက ကုိရီးယားႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ ႐ုိးရာဓေလ့ ေၾကာင့္ပါ။ အဓိပၸာယ္က မ်က္ႏွာဖုံးေအာက္မွာ ဘယ္လုိေဒါသ ထြက္၀မ္းနည္း၊ ပူေလာင္မႈေတြရွိေပမယ့္ အဖြဲ႕၀င္ေတြ အကုန္လုံး တစ္သားတည္း ျပဳံးရယ္ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ေနတဲ့၊ တစ္စိတ္တည္း တစ္၀မ္းတည္းဆုိတဲ့သေဘာကုိ ေဖာ္ ေဆာင္တာပါ"လုိ႔ ကုိရီးယားတုိက္ကြမ္ဒုိ အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ဥကၠ႒ မစၥတာဟြန္ဂြ်န္ၿဖိဳးက ျမန္မာတုိင္း(မ္)ကုိ ေျပာပါတယ္။

"ေရွးေဟာင္းကုိရီးယား႐ုိးရာ တုိက္ ကြမ္ဒုိတုိက္ကြက္ေတြရဲ႕မူကုိ မေပ်ာက္ ေစဘဲ ေခတ္ေပၚကကြက္ေတြကုိ ေပါင္း စပ္ရတဲ့အတြက္ ပရိသတ္လက္မခံမွာ အရမ္းကုိ စိတ္ပူရပါတယ္။ အခုေတာ့ ကုိရီးယားႏုိင္ငံအျပင္ ပရိသတ္ေတာ္ေတာ္ မ်ားမ်ားကပါ လက္ခံအားေပး ၾကတဲ့ အတြက္ ေက်းဇူးတင္၀မ္းသာပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ႔လုိပဲ ေခတ္ေပၚနဲ႔ ေရွး ေဟာင္းတုိက္ကြက္ေတြ တီထြင္စမ္းသပ္ ႏုိင္တဲ့ အခြင့္အေရးကုိ ျမန္မာလူမ်ဳိးေတြ လည္း တစ္ေန႔ လုပ္ႏုိင္မွာ ေသခ်ာပါ တယ္"လုိ႔ ေျပာပါတယ္။ အဖြဲ႕၀င္ေပါင္း ၄၀ နီးပါးရွိတဲ့ TAL ကမၻာလွည့္ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖတဲ့ တုိက္ကြမ္ဒုိအက အဖြဲ႕ဟာ ႏုိင္ငံေပါင္း ၁၃ ႏိုင္ငံမွာသြား ေရာက္ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖခဲ့ၿပီး အခု ၂၀၁၁ ခုႏွစ္ မွာ ဗီယက္ နမ္၊ ထုိင္း၊ စပိန္နဲ႔ ျပင္သစ္ စတဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံေတြကုိ သြားေရာက္ဖုိ႔ လ်ာထား တယ္လုိ႔ သိရပါတယ္။

ေမတၱာတရားနဲ႔ ေလးစားမႈရွိဖို႔ ရည္ရြယ္က်င္းပတဲ့ ေဟာ္လိုေကာ့စ္ အမွတ္တရေန႔

ေမတၱာတရားနဲ႔ ေလးစားမႈရွိဖို႔ ရည္ရြယ္က်င္းပတဲ့ ေဟာ္လိုေကာ့စ္ အမွတ္တရေန႔

ေမစႏၵီ-အတြဲ ၂၆၊ အမွတ္ ၅၀၄ (၄-၁၀ ၊ ၂ ၊ ၂၀၁၁)

"When Words Fail" ပန္းခ်ီျပပြဲကို တက္ေရာက္ ခဲ့တဲ့ မစၥဆာရာ အတ္ဇ္မြန္။ (အေပၚ)ႏွင့္ 'လူစစ္ျခင္း'လို႔အမည္ေပးထားတဲ့ မစၥဆာရာရဲ႕ ပန္းခ်ီလက္ရာတစ္ခု။ပန္းခ်ီကားရဲ႕ေအာက္မွာ “Bergen-Belsen အက်ဥ္းစခန္းမွာ ကြ်န္မတို႔ မနက္တိုင္း ဆီးႏွင္း ထဲမွာ တန္းစီရတယ္။ သူတို႔က ကြ်န္မတို႔ကိုမနားတမ္းေရၾကတယ္။ လဲက်ေနသူေတြကိုလည္း ေရၾကတယ္..."လို႔ မစၥဆာရာက ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့တယ္။
ေဟာ္လိုေကာ့စ္ရဲ႕ အဓိပၸာယ္ကို ငရဲခန္း၊ ငရဲမီးလို႔ ဘာသာျပန္ၾကသလုိ စာေရးဆရာတစ္ဦးကေတာ့ ဥႆုံငရဲမီးလို႔ ဘာသာျပန္ထားတာဖတ္ဖူး ပါတယ္။

ဘယ္လိုပဲဘာသာျပန္ျပန္ အဓိက ကေတာ့ ေၾကာက္စရာေကာင္းလြန္း
တဲ့အျဖစ္အပ်က္ဆိုးႀကီးကို ေဖာ္ၫႊန္းေျပာဆိုတာပဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ၁၉၃၃ ခုႏွစ္ ကေန ၁၉၄၅ ခုႏွစ္ထိ ၁၀ ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္တိုင္ ဂ်ာမန္အမ်ဳိးသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္ဟစ္တလာဦးေဆာင္တဲ့နာဇီတပ္ဖြဲ႕ေတြ ဂ်ဴးလူမ်ဳိးမုန္းတီး ေရး၀ါဒကိုအေၾကာင္းျပဳလို႔ ကေလးသူငယ္ ၁ ဒသမ ၅ သန္းအပါအ၀င္ ဂ်ဴးလူမ်ဳိးေျခာက္သန္း ေလာက္ကို၊ရက္စက္စြာ သတ္ျဖတ္ခဲ့တဲ့ သမိုင္း တြင္ျဖစ္ရပ္ဆိုးႀကီးကို ဆိုလိုတာ ပဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
ဒီလိုျဖစ္ရပ္ဆိုးႀကီး ေၾကာင့္ ေသဆံုးခဲ့ရရွာတဲ့ ဂ်ဴးလူမ်ဳိးေတြကို အမွတ္ တရရွိတဲ့ အေနနဲ႔ ကမၻာ႔ ကုလသမဂၢအဖြဲ႕အစည္းႀကီးအပါအ၀င္ ကမၻာ တစ္၀န္းလံုးမွာ ရက္တစ္ရက္သတ္မွတ္လို႔ ႏွစ္စဥ္၀မ္းနည္းျခင္းအထိမ္း အမွတ္ပြဲေတြက်င္းပၾကတယ္။အဲဒီေန႔ကေတာ့ ဇန္န၀ါရီလ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔။
ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွာလည္းေဟာ္လိုေကာ
့စ္ ၀မ္းနည္းျခင္းအထိမ္းအမွတ္အျဖစ္ အစၥေရးသံ႐ံုး၊ ဂ်ာမန္သံ႐ံုး၊ ျပင္သစ္ယဥ္ေက်းမႈဌာနနဲ႔ ကုလသမဂၢ
ျပန္ၾကားေရးဌာန တို႔ ပူးေပါင္းၿပီး ေဟာ္လိုေကာ့စ္ကေန အသက္မေသ
ဘဲ လြတ္ေျမာက္ခဲ့သူတစ္ဦးျဖစ္တဲ့ အသက္ ၇၈ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ ဟန္ေဂရီ ႏိုင္ငံဖြား မစၥဆာရာအတ္ဇ္မြန္ရဲ႕ ပန္းခ်ီလက္ရာေတြနဲ႔ ျပပြဲေလး တစ္ပြဲ ကိုစမ္းေခ်ာင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္မွာတည္ရွ
ိတဲ့ ျပင္သစ္ယဥ္ေက်းမႈဌာနမွာ ဇန္နဝါရီ
လ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔ကေန ၂၈ ရက္ေန႔ အထိ က်င္းပခဲ့ကာ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔မွာ ေတာ့ ေသဆံုးသြားသူေတြအတြက္ ဖေယာင္းတိုင္ထြန္းညိႇကာ ဂုဏ္ျပဳ ခဲ့ၾကတယ္။

"When Words Fail" လို႔အမည္ေပးထားတဲ့ ပန္းခ်ီပြဲဖြင့္ပြဲကို လက္ရွိ
ေနထိုင္ရာ အစၥေရး ႏိုင္ငံကေန ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကို လာေရာက္ၿပီး တက္ ေရာက္ခဲ့ တဲ့ မစၥဆာရာဟာ ဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္ အတြင္း သူ႔အသက္ ၁၁ ႏွစ္အရြယ္မွာ နာဇီတို႔ရဲ႕အႀကီးဆံုးေသမင္းတမန္ အက်ဥ္းစခန္း Auschwitz နဲ႔ တျခား စခန္းေတြမွာ မိသားစုနဲ႔အတူ ပင္ပန္းဆင္းရဲစြာ ေနထိုင္ခဲ့ရၿပီး အဲဒီမွာ ဖခင္နဲ႔ အစ္ကိုသံုးဦးဆံုး႐ႈံးခဲ့ရသူပါ။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ သူၾကံဳေတြ႕ခဲ့ရတဲ့ ေၾကာက္စရာအျဖစ္ဆိုးေတြကို ေႏွာင္းလူေတြသိရွိႏိုင္ဖို႔အတြက္ ပန္းခ်ီအႏု ပညာကေနတစ္ဆင့္ တင္ျပ ျခင္းဟာ အေကာင္းဆံုးလို႔ထင္တာမို႔ ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြဖန္တီးၿပီး ကမၻာတစ္၀န္းမွာ ျပသ ခဲ့တယ္လို႔ မစၥဆာရာက ဆိုပါတယ္။
"ပန္းခ်ီစဆြဲတဲ့အခါမွာ အတိတ္က အဲဒီေနရာကို ျပန္ေရာက္သြားတယ္။ အဲလိုျပန္သြားဖုိ႔ သတၱိလိုတယ္။ ဘာလို႔ လဲဆိုေတာ့ ဒီအျဖစ္ ႀကီးကို ေၾကာက္တဲ့ စိတ္ေၾကာင့္ပဲ။ ကြ်န္မလည္း ကြ်န္မရဲ႕ အတိတ္ကိုမေမ့ဖို႔ ၾကံ့ခုိင္ဖို႔လိုတယ္။ကြ်န္မ ဒီသတၱိေတြကို ပန္းခ်ီကရ တယ္" လို႔ မစၥဆာရာက ျပပြဲဖြင့္ပြဲေန႔မွာ ေျပာ ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ျပပြဲမွာ ေနာက္ဆံုးစားရေသာ ထမင္း တစ္နပ္၊ လူစစ္ျခင္း၊ ဘုရားစင္ကို မ်က္ႏွာမူလ်က္၊ ဟန္ေဂရီႏိုင္ငံရထားပို႔ေဆာင္ေရး၊ညီေနာင္ ေသြးစက္ အစ ရွိသျဖင့္ ေခါင္းစဥ္ေတြေပးထားတဲ့ ပန္းခ်ီကားေတြဟာ ၾကည့္႐ႈသူေတြကို နံ႐ိုးအၿပိဳင္းၿပိဳင္းထေနတဲ့ ဂ်ဴးလူမ်ဳိး ေတြရဲ႕ ပံုစံ၊ ပါးလႊာတဲ့လႊာ ေပါင္မုန္႔ တစ္ခ်ပ္ကို တစ္ရက္ႏႈန္းနဲ႔ စားရတဲ့ သူတို႔ဘ၀၊ အဆိပ္ေငြ႕ခန္းထဲမွာ ေတာင္လို ပံုေနတဲ့ ၀တ္လစ္စလစ္ အေလာင္းေတြရဲ႕ ပံုရိပ္ေတြကို မ်က္လံုးထဲ ျမင္ေယာင္လာမိေစကာ ရင္နင့္ေစသလို လူသားအခ်င္းခ်င္း တစ္ဦးအေပၚတစ္ဦး အႏိုင္ ယူကာ ထိခိုက္နစ္နာေစ တာမ်ဳိး မလုပ္မိေစဖို႔လည္း သတိရမိ ေစပါတယ္။

"စၾကာပံုရွိတဲ့နာဇီသေကၤတကိုကြ်န္မေရးဆြဲဖုိ႔ အႀကိမ္ႀကိမ္ႀကိဳးစားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အဲလိုႀကိဳးစားလိုက္တိုင္းမွာ ကြ်န္မရဲ႕ရင္ထဲက ေဒါသမီး ကို မထိန္း ႏိုင္ခဲ့ပါဘူး။ ပန္းခ်ီကား တစ္ခ်ပ္လံုးက ကြ်န္မကို ရပ္တန္႔ေစခဲ့တယ္" လို႔ ညီ ေနာင္ေသြးစက္ပန္းခ်ီကားခ်ပ္ထဲမွာ ေရးသား ေဖာ္ျပထားတဲ့ မစၥဆာရာရဲ႕ စာသားေတြကို ဖတ္မိတဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက လူငယ္တခ်ဳိ႕ အထူးသျဖင့္ ပန္႔ခ္ခေရဇီတစ္ေတြ ဆြာစ တစ္ကာလို႔ေခၚတဲ့ စၾကာပံု နာဇီသေကၤတကို တံဆိပ္ေတြ၊ ခါးပတ္ေတြနဲ႔ လက္ကိုင္ပ၀ါေတြမွာ ႐ိုက္ႏိွပ္ၿပီး ဖက္ရွင္အျဖစ္ ၀တ္စားၾက တာကို သတိရလိုက္မိတယ္။ တစ္ဆက္တည္းမွာပဲ သူတို႔ တစ္ေတြ ဒါကို မသိလို႔ပဲ၀တ္တာလား၊ သိလ်က္နဲ႔ပဲ ၀တ္တာလားဆိုတာကို လည္း သိခ်င္ခဲ့မိတယ္။
"ငယ္ငယ္တုန္းကေတာ့ ဒီနာဇီတံဆိပ္ေတြ၊ ရင္ထုိးေတြကို စုခဲ့တယ္။ မိဘေတြ၊ ဆရာေတြ၊ ဆရာမေတြက ဒါဟာမေကာင္းဘူလို႔သာ ေျပာေပမယ့္ ဘာေၾကာင့္ မေကာင္းဘူးဆိုတာကိုေတာ့ တစ္ခါမွ ရွင္းမျပခဲ့ဘူး။ အေၾကာင္းရင္းကုိ ေသခ်ာမသိေတာ့ အဲဒီတုန္းက လူငယ္ဆိုေတာ့ မလုပ္နဲ႔ဆိုပိုလုပ္ခ်င္ခဲ့တယ္"လို႔ ပန္႔ခ္ခေရဇီျဖစ္ သလို ပန္႔ခ္အဆို ေတာ္လည္းျဖစ္တဲ့ ရဲေငြစိုးက သူငယ္စဥ္က ဆြာစ တစ္ကာေတြ ၀တ္ဆင္ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပံုကိုေျပာျပပါတယ္။
ရဲေငြစိုးလိုပဲ ပန္႔ခ္ခေရဇီတစ္ဦးျဖစ္ တဲ့ ကုိသက္ခိုင္ကေတာ့ "ဒါေတြမသိ ခင္က ဒီသေကၤတဟာ မ်ဳိးခ်စ္စိတ္ကုိ ကုိယ္စားျပဳတယ္လုိ႔ ထင္ခဲ့တယ္။ ဟစ္ တလာရဲ႕မိန္႔ခြန္း၊ ဟန္ပန္အမူအရာ ေတြ၊ သူရဲ႕ဟိတ္ဟန္ေတြကို အားက်ခဲ့မိ တယ္"လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။
ေနာက္ပိုင္းေဟာ္လိုေကာ့စ္နဲ႔ပတ္သက္တဲ့စာအုပ္ေတြ၊ ႐ုပ္ရွင္ေတြကိုေလ့လာျဖစ္တဲ့အခါ နာဇီသေကၤတနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး စြဲလမ္းမႈလံုးဝ မရွိေတာ့ ဘူးလုိ႔ သူကေျပာပါတယ္။
ဒါေၾကာင့္ ျပင္သစ္ယဥ္ေက်းမႈဌာန မွ ဒါ႐ိုက္တာ ဖဘ္ရီးစ္ေအတိရမ္းက ဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္အတြင္း ကံဆိုးမိုးေမွာင္က်ခဲ့တဲ့ ဂ်ဴးလူမ်ဳိး ေတြရဲ႕ ျဖစ္ရပ္မွန္ကို အမ်ားျပည္သူေတြ က်ယ္က်ယ္ျပန္႔ျပန္႔ သိရွိေစဖို႔ ရည္ရြယ္ၿပီး ေဟာ္လိုေကာ့စ္ အမွတ္တရေန႔နဲ႔ ပန္းခ်ီျပပြဲကို က်င္းပ ရျခင္းျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ဆိုပါတယ္။
မစၥဆာရာကလည္း လူငယ္ေတြ အေၾကာင္းရင္းခံကို ေသခ်ာမသိဘဲ အတုယူမမွားေအာင္ သူ႔ရဲ႕ျမန္မာျပည္ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း ပုဂၢလိက ေက်ာင္းေတြ က ေက်ာင္းသား၊ ေက်ာင္းသူ တခ်ဳိ႕ကို ေတြ႕ဆံုခဲ့ၿပီး သူၾကံဳေတြ႕ခဲ့ရတဲ့ျဖစ္ရပ္ မွန္အတိတ္အေၾကာင္းေတြကို ေျပာျပခဲ့ သလို တစ္ဦးအေပၚတစ္ဦး ေမတၱာ ထားၾကဖို႔နဲ႔ ေလးစားမႈရွိဖို႔ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။
"ကေလးတစ္ေယာက္က ကြ်န္မကို ေမးပါတယ္။ ဒါကို ခြင့္လႊတ္လုိ႔ ရလားတဲ့။ ကြ်န္မအတြက္ ခြင့္လႊတ္ႏိုင္ေပမယ့္ ေသဆံုးသြားတဲ့ ကြ်န္မအေဖနဲ႔ ေမာင္ႏွမသားခ်င္းေတြအတြက္ေတာ့ ခြင့္မလႊတ္ႏိုင္ဘူးလို႔ေျဖခဲ့တယ္"လို႔ မစၥဆာရာက ဆိုပါတယ္။
ခု ..ေဟာ္လိုေကာ့စ္ရဲ႕ အေၾကာင္း သိၿပီဆိုေတာ့ မစၥဆာရာ အတ္ဇ္မြန္ ေနရာမွာ သင္သာ ဆိုရင္ စၾကာပံုရွိတဲ့ နာဇီသေကၤတကိုျမင္ တိုင္း ဘယ္လို ခံစားရမလဲ ...။

Japanese Traditional Dance & Music Performance/ Japanese Food & sake presentation

Japanese Traditional Dance & Music Performance/ Japanese Food & sake presentation

The Embassy of Japan in cooperation with Yangon Japanese Association
presented the performance of Japanese traditional Dance & Music at
Park Royal Hotel, Yangon on October 22, 2011.

This event was organized to express appreciation for the generous
support offered to Japan after the Great East Japan Earthquake form
the people of Myanmar and to show Japan’s will and strength towards
the reconstruction from the aftermath of the earthquake.

At this event, professional artists of International Dance Club and
Minyo Umewaka-kai performed various Japanese traditional dances and
folk music including pieces originating from eastern Japan. Beautiful
IKEBANA (Japanese traditional flower arrangement) by U George San Tun
and photographs by JENESYS Alumni Network with their wishes, prayers
and support to Japan were also exhibited. The audience also enjoyed
watching KAMISHIBAI (Japanese picture storytelling) regarding disaster
prevention and tasted Japanese foods and sake after the performance.
In total 460 people came and there was much heated atmosphere.

The success of this event hopefully gives momentum to strengthen not
only the mutual friendship between Japan and Myanmar but also Japan’s
reconstruction from the aftermath of the earthquake.

Creating objects of beauty from clay

 Fused pots used as a vase capture the attention of a visitor at a exhibition held by the Myanmar Ceramic Society at the International Business Centre in November. Pic: Aye Zaw Moe
Creating objects of beauty from clay
By Sann Oo
http://www.mmtimes.com/no400/t001.htm

WHEN U Aung Myint, a modern artist and the secretary of the Myanmar Ceramic Society displayed a ceramic pot that had been deformed while being baked in a kiln and pronounced it a sculpture, the audience reacted with surprise and amazement.
Ceramic ware that was damaged while being kiln-fired litters the area around Twante, a township about 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Yangon that has been a centre of ceramics production for hundreds of years.
But U Aung Myint believes that with minor modifications, the damaged pots can transformed into art objects.
To emphasis the point, he displayed two pots which had fused together while being fired in a kiln and would normally be discarded.
“I will try to create something with this,” he told the audience during a presentation at the inauguration of the Twante Ceramic Society’s learning centre on December 22. “It can be a flower or, if I make a hole in the base for an electric cord, it can be a beautiful lantern.”
About 20 percent of ceramic ware is damaged in the firing process and members of the society are hoping to turn objects that would otherwise be discarded into highly-valued works of art.
“During the baking process, some ceramics can be damaged or deformed because of overheating, but we regard these objects as naturally-created sculptures,” the chairman of the Myanmar Ceramic Society, Dr Myo Thant Tin, said at the inauguration.
Dr Myo Thant Tin said the idea of using ancient techniques to create contemporary works of art could help to generate greater interest in the production of ceramic ware in Myanmar.
The MCS, which has about 100 members, was formed in 2000 with the objectives of preserving production techniques which were in danger of disappearing and promoting the creation of works of arts, which can fetch high prices on international markets.
“We can make normal ceramic ware into highly valued objects through artistic creativity,” said U Zaw Than, a vice president of the MCS.
U Aung Myint radiates enthusiasm about his mission to create a higher profile for ceramic arts in Myanmar.
“Artists use various mediums, and I am interested in clay and earthenware,” he said.
“If earthenware is damaged while being baked it is normally thrown away; but we want to turn it into a vase or a sculpture, we can use deformed ceramic ware to create art.”
U Aung Myint urged artists to be courageous and dare to express their feelings in their creations.
Dr Myo Thant Tin said conceptual artists often acknowledge the role of nature as a source of creativity and there was no reason why those who create ceramic ware should not be similarly inspired.
He said the MCS was considering calling ceramic ware that had been deformed while being fired as ‘glazy.’

“It is a combination of glaze and crazy,” Dr Myo Thant Tin said.
He said turning simple, ordinary ceramic ware that has no artistic value into fine art objects can be a lucrative.
“Ceramic ware is the result of a combination of the four elements which are earth, water, fire and air; when we create a replica of the ancient wares, the value rose ten times, or hundred times,” Dr Myo Thant Tin said.
The MCS is hoping not only to increase the value of ceramic ware but also to show the world the creativity of Myanmar artists who prefer to work with the four elements.
The society is seeking the join the Seal of Excellence (SEAL) program for handicrafts products in Southeast Asia. The program was established jointly by UNESCO and the ASEAN Handicraft Promotion and Development Association in 2000 to establish quality standards and to enhance international awareness of handicrafts from the 10 ASEAN countries.
The society hopes that its efforts, and its membership of the SEAL program, will help to protect and preserve Myanmar’s rich tradition of ceramic ware production and help to increase the earnings of those who like to create works of beauty from clay.
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