Toshihiro Takami

Toshihiro Takami is the founder of the Asian Rural Institute (ARI) in Japan.

As a Christian pastor assigned to a disaster relief project in Bangladesh, Toshihiro Takami witnessed the desperate survival struggle that followed the murdering floods of 1970. Discerning a dearth of capable and committed local leaders, he determined to establish an institute dedicated to providing them training and skills to increase their capacity to serve their people. In 1973, "in response to God's calling," he says, "we moved to found the Asian Rural Institute," or ARI.

Takami's youth was marked by hardship and war. To educate him beyond grammar school, his impoverished parents apprenticed Takami to a Zen monastery in Kyoto. At the age of eighteen, just months before the end of World War II, he enlisted in the Japanese navy and briefly attended radar school. Hard times followed as he fended for himself and his family in post-war Japan, mostly as a manual laborer. But in 1951, Takami found work as a cook for a Christian missionary. He began studying Christianity. Soon he was baptized. A youth organization in the United States then sponsored him to attend Doane College in Nebraska. By 1960 he had earned his bachelor's degree, graduated from Yale Divinity School, and become an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Japan.

Back in Japan, for ten years Takami taught practical theology and directed the Southeast Asia Christian Rural Leaders' course at the Tsurukawa Rural Evangelical Seminary in Tokyo; work that led to his eye-opening field assignment in Bangladesh and the founding of the Asian Rural Institute.

Takami designed the institute's curriculum around intensive, small-scale, organic farming, and animal husbandry, linking these activities to building a vibrant community. All participants, including staff, engage daily in dirty-hands chores at the institute. And all take their turns preparing food for the group's common meals. "Sharing food is sharing life," is one of Takami’s most well known phrases. ARI participants also share in decision making. The difficult process of achieving consensus among a group of strong-minded, quick-to-action people, Takami believes, helps ARI's rural leaders become more effective change-makers in poor communities.

Christian in inspiration, ARI is ecumenical in practice. All faiths are welcome. Its first class included participants from Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, and Japan. In subsequent years, as the institute's six-hectare campus north of Tokyo grew with new facilities, men and women from virtually every country in Asia, and eventually many in Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas, joined its unique nine-month rural leaders training course. Takami deliberately kept ARI small, accepting only about thirty participants a year. Yet he cast the institute's net so wide that today over 1,000 graduates are spread across the world, where they are working as rural extension workers, teachers, farmers, pastors, and social workers; working for their people.

Takami resigned as ARI director in 1990 but continued to serve for many more years as a teacher and board member. He has dedicated the whole of his life for the last thirty years to ARI and to the training of grassroots local leaders. "To me," he says, "the local level is the highest level."

Honors and Awards:

1974 Honorary Doctor of Divinity – Doane College, Crete, Nebraska
1991 Honorary Doctor of Divinity – St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota
1996 The Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding (often referred to as the Asian Nobel Peace Prize)