Miwa Natori

BY Mutsuko Murakami

Miwa Natori, 57, could have been one of Tokyo's most trendy people still with glamorous careers and posh lifestyle. A daughter of a famous Japanese photographer, Yonosuke Natori, she was educated in her teenage in Germany. After she built an expansive network with media and advertising contacts, acting as their coordinator in Europe, she ran a European antique shop in Tokyo's posh Roppongi area. Many Japanese women of her generation took her as a model of talented professsional woman working across borders.

Gone are all these years of partying, designer brand goods, shuttling between Japan and Europe and urban social life. Miwa now lives modestly in Chiang Mai, Thailand, far away from all the urban attractions. And many of her peers back in Japan admire her now for a different reason. They not only admire but also respect her for her latest activity and support her cause. Miwa is now committed to run a home for 27 HIV-infected Thai children aged from 2 to 12.

"I do not mean to run an orphanage," she cheerfully says.
"I just have a big family of diverse conditions, sick or healthy, Thai or Japanese, who I happen to take care of." And, Miwa says, she has never felt more fulfilled herself.

Her encounter with these children was incidental. Visiting Chiang Mai in 1997 to check on local textile for her business, she was taken by her old friend, a German doctor, to a local hospital outside the city. Some 150 people queued up there to get their monthly stipends from the government for being infected with HIV.

With little knowledge about AIDS sprawling in Thailand-where an estimated 1.2 million people, or one out of every 50 Thais, are HIV-infected--- she was shocked. She was deeply moved, witnessing young mothers dying of AIDS and leaving behind their prenatal-infected infants.

She shortly proposed a Tokyo NPO-Child Earth Fund-- to open a home for those children in Chiang Mai. In November 1999, she opened a home and welcome, initially, 10 children. Her friends joined her in part from Japan and Europe on her call to duty to help her.

It since has been years of "trials and errors", says she. She recruited local staff with proper qualifications hard way. Straight-forward, proactive and super-efficient herself, she was challenged by cultural differences in communicating with the staff, about 20 of them, whose pace is slower and thinking less rigid and often traditional. To prevent the HIV-infected clients from developing AIDS, she gave top priority to cook best meals and found a local doctor to help the home.

Yet the children already with AIDS ballooned passed away one after another-10 lives gone. But since AIDS "cocktail" was made available for them as regular medication and no kid has died for the past 16 months.

In 2001, she branched out from the NGO so that she can apply her own ideas to the home management. She wanted to raise money on her own initiatives by encouraging children to create craft and art for sales instead of being thoroughly dependent on donations. She won consent of Giorgio Armani Japan office for continuing support for her new institution, named "ban rom sai (meaning "under the Chinese Banyan tree)".

With support of her artist and designer friends, the children were led to enjoy paintings, craftsmanship, pottery and textile dying and weaving. She organizes shows in Tokyo every year, the latest in December, where most of their artifacts are sold out. She spoke actively in media, which ended up bringing with more support from her country folks.

"I would like the children to enjoy life fully by creative work, which provide them means for living, too," says she. Affectionately called Mei (Mother) Miwa by them---she herself is a divorcee with a daughter--- she goes off occasional extravagances like in old days. She would take them to town for a movie or eating out at restaurant or get the entire children and staff down south by a chartered bus to a beach to have fun.

She is aware that many of her female peers back in Japan wish they could work for social betterment like Miwa does; so that they could also feel they are worthy and helpful to others.

"I am counting on them and their potential as a hopeful breakthrough from the male-dominated, strictly regimented Japanese structure," says she. "Japan can do far more if the administrators should hand down one third of their job to NGOs and let women run them with flexible leadership," she assures. Her friends back in Japan should be giving a big nod to her notion.