Japanese island to become home for British people's messages to absent friends

                             

Heartfelt letters to deceased relatives and pets are just some of the many messages which have been collected and displayed as part of an unusual Japanese art project taking place in London.
Artist Saya Kubota, 28, is asking people to send letters to her “Missing Post Office” (MPO).

It is designed to allow people who do not actually have the address of someone—perhaps because they have died or moved away—to still send that message and express their feelings. The MPO accepts all correspondence and on any subject, and the letter does not even have to be addressed to a specific person.

For the last few months, people up and down the country have been posting letters to the MPO and the correspondence is on show at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in London, a British charity which supports links between Britain and Japan.


The British project is born out of the MPO which Kubota established on the small island of Awashima which sits in the Seto Inland Sea in Kagawa Prefecture.
It runs on exactly the same lines as the UK project and, in Japan, she has collected more than 14,000 letters.

Speaking in London recently, Kubota explained she opened the Japanese MPO inside the premises of the island’s former post office.
The project was part of the 2013 Setouchi Triennale, a contemporary arts festival held on Awashima and neighboring islands.

It is run by retired post office worker Katsuhisa Nakata, 81, who collects the correspondence. It is open twice a month and visitors are able to read the letters and if they think they are the intended recipient they can take the message away with them.
Kubota likens the letters arriving at the MPO to the flotsam and jetsam that washes up on to the island’s shores.

And she describes sending a letter or postcard to the MPO as like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea.
Kubota said, “The huge amount of letters received has been beyond my expectation and it makes me ask why do people write letters to which they can’t expect a reply?”
She says the MPO only has space for another 6,000 letters and she may have to look at closing the project.

Kubota describes first arriving on the island in 2012 and walking into the unlocked and disused post office. She says she “floated” in there like a piece of sea debris.
In 2015, Kubota spent half a year studying in London and she started to learn more about the British postal system and how it influenced the Japanese service.

She thought it would be a nice idea to mark that connection by opening up a British version of the MPO in London.
And Kubota has enlisted the help of a retired postal worker Brian Payne to oversee the U.K. project. The British correspondence will be sent to the Japanese MPO when it closes on Feb. 22.

Payne said, “I think it’s a brilliant project. Some of the cards are very sad and others very happy. I’m very touched by them. I don’t think there’s any difference in the letters written in the two countries, they are all about the same things.”
A visitor to the exhibition, Gerrard Russell, said “I think it’s a fantastic idea to write off to someone who is missing and the letter is going somewhere. It allows you to get rid of your grief and angst, for example. The letters are very poignant.”