In March, with the completion of my second master’s degree, I have counted 10 years of my life working in aquariums. Here I would like to look back on what I have been working on and organize what I would like to work on in the future.
In the first part, I will write about my encounter with aquariums and my activities within volunteer organizations.
Encounter with Tokyo Sea Life Park
Over the past 10 years, I have been supported by many people and have learned many things through each of my activities. I am sincerely grateful to all the people I have met. First of all, I would like to express my great appreciation to all of you.
While there may be a significant reason that “being involved in a public aquarium is a very narrow career path,” many people who work in public aquariums say that they had “a lot of luck” in becoming a staff member of a public aquarium in one voice.
It was also a supernatural coincidence that I could meet all the volunteers and the employees of Tokyo Sea Life Park, and I appreciate all the people I have met. I consider everything happened by chance, and everything was also an inevitable coincidence.
Although I had not had much interest in animals in the past, I introduce two reasons in response to people often asking me why I have started volunteering. Because (1) I had happened to find recruitment information for volunteers at Tokyo Sea Life Park, which I had visited sometimes, and (2) I had been motivated to take some kind of action to give back to society in whatever way I could since I had acquired 253 units in four years of an undergraduate degree at that time, which was enough for me to graduate twice. I have not spoken much about them because it sounds like a typical pretty word, but I have thought so frankly and without exaggeration.
In addition, the reason why it was Tokyo Sea Life Park was that it was one of the ideal public aquariums for me, since “I do not feel comfortable with the entertainment shows of the animals, because it seems like taming the animals.” Also, because I am a “pervert” who looked at the ideal swimming forms of penguins and tuna from the viewpoint of fluid dynamics since I have majored in physics and studied complex systems, Tokyo Sea Life Park was an aquarium that provided me with a sense of the wonder of the natural ecosystem that gave birth to them.
Encounters with Stakeholders
However, no matter how motivated I have been to try to participate in volunteer activities, I might not be able to write this article today without “a chance encounter,” which was another supernatural external factor after that. At the time of application, I was living in Minami-Osawa, Hachioji, and there were objections that it would be impossible for me to continue commuting to Edogawa Ward, which takes almost two hours on one way, but the senior volunteers kindly welcomed me and allowed me to guide freely and spontaneously, which was the beginning of all “mistakes.”
Then, at the end of the fiscal year (March 2013), I have had the opportunity to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium (reference), the most excellent aquarium in the world, with the director of Tokyo Sea Life Park at that time and to contact the education officers of Tokyo Sea Life Park, who taught me how interesting it is to “observe animals with a point of view,” by focusing on “observing living animals.” These two significant encounters have absolutely “changed the course” of my life and ultimately led me to this point in my life today. I do not like to use the word “miracle” too easily, but this is undoubtedly a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. I was able to spend time enjoying “observation of the living animals” together with many aquarium visitors. As I learned about the depth of wildlife and nature, I realized the magnificence of the aquarium professionals who were familiar with them, so I was completely fascinated by the bottomless world. Thus, when I was in graduate school, I spent about 600 hours per year on aquarium activities.
After I started working as an engineer for an information technology company, my interests expanded beyond Tokyo Sea Life Park to the whole aquarium industry, and I had many opportunities to contact people involved in aquariums and zoos both in Japan and abroad. However, at the same time, I also had to confront my feelings of “I do not feel comfortable with the shows of the animals,” which led me to “animal welfare” and “animal rights.” This eventually led to a strong motivation to work on my master’s thesis research.
Community Empowerment
Before discussing my research, let us delve into the properties of volunteer organizations as a community.
The volunteer organization to which I belong has members with really various brilliant talents. It is not whether they have some extraordinary skills or not, but rather that they are of different ages and occupations, all of them having their own individual specialties and cheerful willingness to make use of them. When I have been involved in the recruitment and training of new volunteers for a period of time, I have carefully focused on extracting from the members not only their interest in animals and human communication but also their initiative “to make use of something their own particular area of expertise.”
Of course, it is not easy to integrate different interests and motivations while utilizing such various personalities and generate a force for promoting their activities as a single organization. This is precisely a situation that is common these days, where there is diversity but not enough to be included. Furthermore, although the volunteer organization in which I belong is not a part of the aquarium company but an independent organization, we have to collaborate closely with the aquarium and carry out our activities.
The year I became a participant was only about five years after the volunteer organization had been established when the organization was still in the developing stage of creating the form of its activities through trial and error. I had been actively participating in the activities in such a situation, and in my second year of volunteering, I was picked as one of its core members to organize the development of its activities. Of course, I could make no excuses for my lack of employment experience, but in fact, there were many things that went not so well, and I caused a lot of inconvenience to the members. Nevertheless, I proceeded through trial and error by studying the know-how of volunteer coordination and community management from an outside NPO. I sincerely appreciate everyone for their warm support during this process and for their willingness to work together with me to build up our activities.
Furthermore, with the comprehensive support of the staff in the education section of the aquarium at that time, we both reconfirmed that “observation of living animals” was the central axis of our activities and a structure where all members could find their individual roles and contribute to our activities was gradually developed. I was also given the opportunity to report such the importance of considering the properties of volunteer organizations as a community to a workshop on aquarium education as a way of returning the favor to the aquarium staff at that time who cooperated with us.
Activities in the New Year
Recently, Tokyo Sea Life Park has been frequently closed due to the Corona disaster, and our volunteers have been forced to seek new activities in the new normal. I believe that the most important thing is “to design various ways of engagement” in this situation. We must gather our wisdom collectively and work on what is necessary one by one to overcome the difficulties to keep the volunteer organization and the aquarium as a warm place to which each member can return anytime, even if they leave our activities for a while.
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