On Tuesday, September 1, forty second-year students from Takahata Town Third Junior High School in Yamagata Prefecture visited Palaceside Building and gave a choral performance = photo at top. Simple and heartwarming — "voices of angels," indeed.
Takahata is a town of about 24,000 in southeastern Yamagata, known for thriving agriculture. Producers and residents there founded the "Blue Oni Club" two years ago to support each other's lives through rice-centered farm products and farm experiences. They have been spreading information with seminars and sales of crops at "Mainichi Media Cafe" in MOTTAINAI STATION on Palaceside Building B1.
Takahata Third Junior High also won the 2014 Environment Minister's Award (top prize) in the Ministry of the Environment's "Tohoku ESD Program Challenge Project" (honoring groups in the six Tohoku prefectures working on environmental education and conservation), launched after the Great East Japan Earthquake. Their project — "Let's PR Takahata by buying organically grown vegetables and local specialties and selling them on our school trip" — had students plan sales, sell on the trip, and review results themselves, thinking about links between Takahata's environment and industry where organic farming is promoted.
Waseda Environmental Juku (director: Tsuyoshi Hara, Mainichi guest editorial writer) helped establish the Blue Oni Club; with Hara, a Mainichi alumnus, as a tie, The Mainichi Newspapers has provided the "Mainichi Media Cafe" venue and covered Takahata's efforts.
Through that relationship, the students came on this trip to pay a courtesy visit to The Mainichi Newspapers and also sell organic vegetables; a choral performance was added
as part of the school trip.
At 12:30 p.m., organic vegetable sales began in the free space beside the west entrance on B1; many tenant employees gathered, and edamame, sweet potato, pumpkin, potatoes and more sold out in about fifteen minutes = photo at right. Watermelon broke on the way, so it was cut up for samples.
From 1:30 p.m. for about twenty minutes, they sang on the west entrance stairs — "My Own Road," "Furusato" and "Ashita e" in succession — to loud applause from about fifty listeners.