2022.Jun.07

REPORTS

Report on a Visit to the Dialogue Diversity Museum “Dialogue Forest (Taiwa no Mori)”

On March 30, 2022, several members of the B’AI Global Forum visited the Dialogue Diversity Museum “Dialogue Forest (Taiwa no Mori),” known as the first diversity-themed museum in Japan. The concept of this museum, which allows visitors to connect with others through communication using all their senses and to experience diversity while enjoying entertainment, was first introduced in 1988 by the German philosopher Andreas Heinecke who developed the idea of “Dialogue in the Dark (DID).” DID, a journey through darkness guided by people with visual impairment, who are the “masters” of this environment, has spread to more than 50 countries around the world, including Europe, and was later joined with “Dialogue in Silence (DIS),” in which participants enter a world without sound and enjoy dialogues through facial expressions and body language with the assistance of deaf and hard of hearing guides & trainers, and “Dialogue with Time,” in which participants are guided by an elderly person over 70 years old and think about aging and life while experiencing physical conditions similar to those of elderly people. In Japan, DID was first held in 1999, and the “Dialogue Forest” opened in 2020 as a permanent exhibition. In March 2022, when B’AI visited, DID and DIS were being held, so we experienced these two programs in groups.

 

Dialogue in the Dark (DID)

 

The number of the participants in DID was six. On this day, a person with visual impairment from abroad guided us through the darkness. To begin with, he handed out canes to us and showed us how to use them. After deciding on nicknames to call each other inside, we finally entered the complete darkness.

The 90-minute journey started with the scene that we were leaving Tokyo to visit the attendant’s grandfather’s house in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. The room was literally pitch-black without a single dim light, so even after staying inside a few minutes, we still could not see anything.

The first thing we did in the darkness was playing catch. We sat in a wide circle on a grassy area and played catch; one person threw the ball rolling on the floor and one of others received it. The persons who were supposed to receive the ball did their best to tell the thrower “I’m here” with their voice and clapping. At first the ball was received better than we expected, but eventually a few people failed to receive it and the ball rolled out of the circle. When this happened, it was difficult to find where the ball was. It was surprising that the attendant knew where the ball was.

After a bit of play, our journey shifted into high gear. In a situation where eye-sight is not available, other senses are relied upon. We used our hands to find a wall and tapped the floor with the canes to see if it was safe to step onto it. It was hearing acuity that was particularly reliable at that point. With the attendant’s guidance, the person at the front of the line shouted “this way,” and the next person then proceeds in the direction from which the voice was heard, passing it on to those further behind. To find the right direction and move safely without bumping into each other, it was essential to keep talking and support each other. On the other hand, there was also an aspect that unusual relationships emerged as a result of unintentional light physical touch among people and calling each other by nicknames.

While the journey, the floor changed from grass to something slippery and then to something fluffy. Braille blocks and handrails appeared in places, and in those areas it was possible to walk with an easy mind. And the final part of the journey was a train ride in the direction of Iwate Prefecture. It was not easy to grasp the seat map, even though the interior of the model train should not be so different from that of the real one that we normally use.

Finally, we arrived at the grandfather’s house in this journey. We went into the warm kotatsu with the intention of taking a break and waiting for the grandfather, who had gone out. There was a letter from him written in Braille on the table. We tried to read it, but could not understand what it said because we had never learned Braille. Moreover, our fingertips, which have never used such delicate senses, could not even make out the shape of each letter in the first place.

During the warm kotatsu time, we exchanged our thoughts on today’s experience and also heard of the attendant’s story, who has lived in an invisible world. He spoke about the current state of social systems and infrastructural facilities around disability and the lack of awareness among people, and said he would like to conduct research in Japan on education and work as the basis for realizing diversity and inclusion, and the technology that supports this.

The final part of the program was a game of tag in the dark. While the short experience did not alleviate our anxiety and fear of not being able to see, we were able to walk around with a much wider steps than we had at the beginning of our journey.

 

Dialogue in Silence (DIS)

 

The number of participants in DIS was seven. An attendant, who is hard of hearing and a “master” of the soundless world, took us around several rooms.

Participants were required to wear headphones upon entering the room, and conversation among participants was of course prohibited. The first room we entered was the room for dialogue using hands. All the participants gathered around a cylindrical table with a shiny top and played together to create large patterns and communicate with each other using the shadows created by holding their hands over the table.

The next room was a dialogue room using facial expressions. Participants put their faces out among the grid-like fences that surrounded the round screen. The screen showed photographs and paintings of the faces with multitudinous expressions. While looking at their expressions and reacting to them, the participants’ own faces appeared as if they were one of the paintings in the frame.

Next was a game using hand gestures. There were about 20 boxes that looked like a mailbox in the room, and various hand figures were painted on the cover of each box, such as a clenched fist. The participants experienced even one of the hand figures could express various things by changing the movements and angles of the same hand figure. For example, with a hand with all five fingers separated like a rake to imitate playing the piano or cello, or to portray animals such as bears.

After we experienced games to communicate by using only hands, facial expressions, and gestures and learned the method of dialogue without auditory sense, we moved to the next step. The participants told their partners to place the blocks and toys as same as those in the given pictures with the communication methods that we experienced so far, but it was not easy. The result was completely different from the picture.

Up to this point, the dialogue between the participants and the deaf person was conducted through gestures, but in the next room it was to add sign language to the dialogue. The participants tried various methods of communication, such as asking the attendant various questions with the help of a sign language interpreter, or using drawing paper and pens to convey their intentions. The participants were also able to try sign language dialogues by referring to panels drawn easy sign languages on the wall of the room.

In the last room, the guide delivered us the massage. His passionate desire to make society bloom through dialogue was very well conveyed to those of us who have been engaged in a series of dialogues without sound.

 

Lecture by Mr. Shinsuke Shimura

 

After the hands-on learning programs, Mr. Shinsuke Shimura, Founder of Dialogue in the Dark Japan, gave a lecture on the theme “Creating Darkness and Silence in the City: Learning from Diversity and Innovation.”

Mr. Shimura began by referring to how much discrimination and prejudice has overtaken today’s world and people have been divided as a result of the widespread outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, and stressed how important it is that diverse people with different opinions have dialogues with each other on equal footing and with respect, removing the various invisible barriers that aggravate conflicts. He also mentioned this was exactly the spirits that Andreas Heinecke, the creator of Dialogue Forest, had in mind when he developed DID.

According to Mr. Shimura, society is changing from separation to integration and further to inclusion. Taking sports spectator seating as an example, he explained separation refers to the installation of separate seats for disabled and non-disabled people, integration refers to the installation of some seats for people with disabilities within seats for non-disabled people, and inclusion refers to making it possible for disabled and non-disabled people to sit anywhere they want. He said that the aim of the Dialogue Forest is inclusion, and innovation is necessary in order to accelerate the change towards inclusion. The followings are the attempts made by the Dialogue Forest to put this innovation into practice: to create a social entertainment rather than a facility to simulate the experience of disability, to focus on people’s strengths rather than their weaknesses, for example, people with visual impairment have a very good sense of touch, which enables them to demonstrate their great abilities in areas such as the production of towels with a good tactile impression and vessels that are easy to hold, and to keep dialogues with relevant ministries and agencies again and again to realize the Dialogue Forest in Japan, despite the difficulty in obtaining permission for such a facility due to the lack of precedent.

The discussion continued with the question of what diversity means. Mr. Shimura presented a picture of three people of different heights watching a baseball game over a wall and explained the difference between equality, equity and liberation. Equality is that everyone is given a step stool of the same height, regardless of height, and as a result there can be someone who cannot watch the game even if the stool was used; equity is that everyone is given a step stool of a different height according to their height so that all they can watch the game; and liberation is that the wall itself is removed. Mr. Shimura said that he would like to work towards eliminating the walls to achieve true diversity. He also used the example of a wall made of uniform brick blocks and a stone wall made of stones of various shapes and sizes, and said that the society was shaped like a brick block wall in the period of rapid economic growth, when the idea of diversity did not exist, to build consensus easily with no friction, but the stronger society would be one with diverse people, like a stone wall, as the discomfort and frictional forces would grip and strengthen society as a whole.

During the Q&A session that followed the lecture, the participants listened about the motivations of the people who have visited and their reactions after the experience. In particular, Mr. Shimura mentioned the differences between Japan and other countries in terms of children visiting the museum; while there are a lot of group applications from schools in Japan, visits to the Dialogue Forest are included in the school curriculum in many other countries. Not only that point, but in most countries the operation itself is also run by the government. He said that this could be possible through the consensus within those countries that raising awareness of diversity is necessary for the country to become stronger. It seems that the challenges for Japan, where it is not even easy to get support from the government, were very heavy.

On the other hand, when asked if there were any plans to adopt technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) into various programs in the future, Mr. Shimura replied that, if possible, he would like to set up AI attendants in parallel with human attendants. If this were to happen, it would bring us one step closer to realizing the potential of AI, which was also discussed in the lecture, i.e. to extend what humans can do and to make people happy by accepting diversity in society.

This visit made us realize that although we usually talk about the importance of diversity and inclusion, there are still many barriers in society and difficulties in the lives of minority people that we had not noticed before. It was an opportunity to realize once again that dialogue with diverse people and places that enable such dialogue are desperately needed in order to realize diversity that does not end up with just a slogan.

 

Impressions of the student participants

 

◆ Matthew Sueda（MA Student, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo ）

Dialogue in the Dark was a powerful experience; navigating through complete darkness was difficult, but with the help of our wonderful guide we learned how to play catch, manoeuvre on and off a train, and even play tag, without relying on our eyes. Working together through these activities sparked conversations on diversity and disability, and helped to foster an awareness of some of the challenges that blind and visually impaired individuals face when navigating everyday spaces. I would highly recommend Dialogue to colleagues and other students.

 

◆ Asuka Ando (PhD Student, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo)

I am a hearing person (CODA, Children of Deaf Adult/s) with deaf parents. I have already known about Dialogue in Silence because of my research on sign language and people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and I am very grateful to have had this opportunity to experience it. In Dialogue in Silence, participants were guided by an attendant who is deaf and communicated through gestures—not sign language—to do the tasks. The tasks in each room included aspects of sign language linguistics, and as a person studying sign language linguistics, I learned that “people who do not know sign language can be informed of the fun of sign language linguistics in this way.” At the end of the session, there was time for dialogue with the attendant with the help of a sign language interpreter, in which I thought the purpose of this session was to make the participants realize that what they had been using so far was gestures and not sign language.

In the lecture by Mr. Shimura, I was impressed by his words, “it is easy to give people the tools to go over the wall, but it is difficult to take down the wall.” I believe that we must start by finding the walls that exist in our society whether in order to overcome them or remove them. Surely, there are still many invisible walls in this society.

 

◆ Charisia ONG（MA Student, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo）

In the realm of media studies, there is much focus on visual culture, a reflection of the privileged position that sight not only occupies in our lives, but also in the way we conduct our research. But the world of this visual hegemony ceased to exist the moment the lights were turned off by our guide, who was non-Japanese but spoke impeccable Japanese, and whom we found out was visually impaired only halfway through our tour in the darkness. To be honest, navigating my way through our route in the dark was frightening in every sense of the word, and it was a severe discomfort that I could not get used to despite our guide generously sharing tips with us on how to feel the way ahead of us with our walking sticks. There was so much comfort in bumping into another participant, because that was the only reassurance that I was not alone in that blackened darkness. The dialogue that we had in the dark was hearing from our guide about his struggles living as a visually-impaired person in his home country and Japan, but rather than focus on the struggles, he had much more to say about how he hoped to continue doing research that would raise awareness of the struggles of the visually-impaired as well as his hopes for a society that had the potential to be so much more inclusive and understanding of these differences. There was so much strength and optimism as our guide spoke; it made a huge impact on me. The relief that I felt, and I believe the others shared, when our guide opened the door to let a tiny sliver of light into the room at the end of the tour, was incredibly uplifting. I had felt so lost in the darkness but yet that sense of disorientation had opened up the eyes of my heart to a whole new world I could never have imagined experiencing. It made me think about the Master’s thesis that I am writing, thousands and thousands of words about the affective qualities of Japanese television drama, but it was an aspect that would remain inaccessible and unrelatable to those like our guide, who, by the way, has a PhD. Alongside a more inclusive society in terms of our living environment, as researchers and members of the academic world, a more pertinent thought that occurred to me was wondering what we could do to make the way we do academic research more inclusive and accessible beyond just the realm of the visual? While I am still contemplating the answer to that question, for now, I hope that as many of us can attend this exhibition as possible, that our eyes may be truly opened to what we are missing as a result of a society that has been constructed around the privilege of sight.