Profile and Contact

Itsushi Kawase is a filmmaker, anthropologist, and Buddhist monk currently living in Kyoto, Japan. He was born as the fifteenth heir of the successive Shin Buddhist temple in the village of Gifu in 1977. He studied anthropology at Ritsumeikan University and the University of British Columbia.

He pursued his musical career, practicing improvisational performances with various artists in Japan, Canada, and India during the late 1990s. In 2001, he initiated the long-term anthropological research on hereditary singers known as Azmari and Lalibala (Lalibalocc) in northern Ethiopia under the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University, where he received an M.A. in Area Studies. He has intermittently spent a period of two and half years in northern Ethiopia, living with these singers and producing several documentary films and academic articles on their musical activities and social transformations.

He has been exploring the possibility of conveying the anthropological knowledge through an active on-screen engagement in a documentary on the phenomenal field by communicating, and occasionally arguing, with the people in the film. His films were screened in numerous university lectures and international film festivals inside and outside Japan. His research field has recently disseminated to Washington D.C., which has the majority of the Ethiopian Diaspora community, and Japan, where he is exploring certain traditional strolling performances for comparing them with that of Ethiopia.

In 2007, he conducted the filmmaking of the ethnic dance performance scene in Addis Ababa as a part of UNESCO/Norway funds in the trust cooperation project “Ethiopia-Traditional Music, Dance and Instruments.” He also worked as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Visual Communications, Komazawa Women’s University.
Itsushi Kawase is currently a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

For inquiries about screening, talks or guest lectures contact:
► kawase@jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp