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I am a monitor for the Japanese Television. This is one program review I wrote.

The “willing hands” series is about Japanese people who bring help around the World. This help isn’t necessarily, or directly, money. We live in the “Knowledge Economy”, meaning that for the leading countries, such as the U.S.A. and Japan, Knowledge has become the main production factor, demoting Capital and Labor. It is easy to understand that having better knowledge regarding some process can guide to a higher efficiency in resources consumption, or to some other quality gain, and that the Knowledge per se can be translated to money, by its licensing, for example. Hence, sharing Knowledge is sharing wealth. What may be not so immediate to understand is that one individual alone can share relatively simple procedures and still have vastly reaching effects – meet Seiichiro Murakami and the “Himono” Japanese process to dry fish.

For three years, the seventy years old Japanese Seiichiro Murakami travelled to Negombo, southern Sri Lanka, to teach how to dry fish, using the “Himono” approach. Sri Lankans have their native process, but is too salty and less hygienic, when compared to the “Himono” style, in which it is very important to cut the fish open using the knife “not like a saw”, but like a delicate slicing tool. It is also important to drain all the blood and then soak the fish in salt water. To do this properly requires lot of practice.

When Siichiro Murakami visited Rani – a former student, making a living of dried fish – he found that she wasn’t doing it exactly as he had taught. More importantly, he understood why not and adapted his news lessons to better fit the Sri Lankan reality. It happens that a structure to lift the fish off the ground may be too expensive for Sri Lankans…
 
Along the years, Murakami learned and adapted the “Himono” course to include lessons on how to build relatively inexpensive support meshes, on how to dry fish with wood ovens (because of Sri Lanka’s long rainy season), and on nutrition basics, for example to raise awareness about the relation between salt and diabetes. This conscious adaptation did bring people together.

In 2008, the “Himono” master travelled to Sri Lanka with his wife. He met knew students, many recruited by the previous ones and he wasn’t surprised with their 30 minutes delay for the first session: “time and punctuality are elastic concepts in Sri Lanka”.
3 years, 350 students, their gratitude messages album and examples like Chandralatha, a woman who perfected the Japanese style dried fish and has been supporting her family on that diet, are reasons for Murakami to be proud.

This documentary is interesting, entertaining and touching. It is interesting to learn about the “Himono” process and its regional variations and alternatives. It is entertaining because real people always perform like believable “characters” in a story. It is touching, because it shows that knowledge sharing can still happen on a very basic level.