Japan

The Basque house of Tokyo is a house without a building. It has no premises: it meets wherever it needs to, holds its events in different places around the city and is open to anyone who wants to take part.⁵

For a time it was also left without its window on the outside world. Its website, in Basque and Japanese, went inactive after the Fukushima accident in 2011, and the centre brought it back in October 2013. That year, with Jon Verastegui as president, it gave seminars on Basque subjects at the Asahi Culture Center, a lecture at the Spanish embassy attended by more than a hundred people and a talk on Basque New Year customs that drew about sixty. It also welcomed the musicians Oreka TX and Michel Ducau, and at the November general meeting it renewed its board.³

Among its active members were Yuichi Shimanuki himself and Professor Sho Hagio, a Japanese specialist in Basque studies, who learned Basque at Waseda University with Professor Suzuko Tamura and at barnetegis (residential Basque courses) in Euskal Herria.³⁴ Hagio is also the author of the entry on the euskal etxea of Tokyo in the Auñamendi Eusko Entziklopedia.⁶