What does "Merry" mean to you? Ask this simple question to people on the street, record their messages and smiling faces, and use them to make posters. This is the basic concept of Koji Mizutani's ongoing project "Merry." In recent years Koji Mizutani, originally a graphic designer, has conducted this non-profit project in Harajuku, Kobe, New York, and London. At the same time, he has held exhibitions and published books about the project.

"Merry" is not a project in which artists and designers exhibit their own works. Its aim is to provide opportunities for various people to get together and, through active participation, share concepts which have infinite potential for development. This description may give the impression that this "Merry" is just another "participative project" in which all kinds of people can take part, but it has a deeper significance: it clearly shows a positive attitude to the present age and a desire to share this outlook. In this respect, it provides a welcome antithesis to the prevailing view among Japanese artists and intellectuals that it is "cool" to take a negative or ironical attitude.

The Merry Project conducted in Kobe as part of the events promoting recovery from the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 gave full play to this concept of directly expressing a positive outlook. In just a few moments, this earthquake disaster in Kobe caused not only great loss of life and immense material destruction but also untold psychological damage. The question of how to recover from this tragedy is something that no conscientious person can ignore, even if they did not experience it directly. Koji Mizutani is deeply sensitive to this issue and has conducted the Merry Project in Kobe over several years. His posters combining photographs of the smiling faces of people in Kobe with frank messages expressing their hopes and dreams are filled with a relaxed and natural carefreeness that one never encounters in commercial posters, which are usually artificial and arbitrary in their design. The most striking thing about the Merry Project in Kobe is the positive attitude that people take towards the future in order to recover from unhappy events in the past. Of course we cannot forget past tragedies, but we have to get over them and live in the "here and now." Above all, the Merry Project in Kobe encourages us to have the positive vision we need to live in the present with courage and hope.

This vision of living positively in the present is essential not just for those who experienced the Kobe earthquake disaster but for contemporary Japanese society as a whole. Many Japanese people are dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and find it impossible to remain positive. A mass media that delights in exposing the wrongs committed by others and the successive disturbing incidents in which people try to relieve their frustration through crude acts of impulsiveness reflect this situation. These problems tend to be blamed on aspects of the social structure, such as economic recession or corruption in politics and education. But surely they also stem from the weakness of the Japanese, who always avoid confronting personal problems. I cannot help thinking that the primary cause of the unhealthy state of Japanese society is our closed mentality. Even if there are faults in the social structure, it would surely be possible to make things better if individuals had a more positive attitude. Amid this sense of crisis regarding Japan, Koji Mizutani realizes the importance of reviving in us a more positive mentality and sharing it widely through communication. The Merry Project is a concrete manifestation of this aspiration.

Mizutani's vision is not confined to Japan but embraces the whole world. One example is his Merry Project in New York. As the catastrophe of September 11 and subsequent terrorist attacks and wars have clearly shown, discord rather than calm, hatred rather than friendship are still deeply entrenched throughout the world even in the 21st century. Most of these problems are so embedded in past history that people have found them hard to forget. But if we could rid ourselves of past hatreds and look forward positively, we should be able to find a way out of this critical situation, even if the process is slow and gradual. The underlying concept of the Merry Project can directly confront this global sense of crisis. If a project recording the smiling faces and messages of people with different customs, religions and morals could bear fruit, it would undoubtedly provide us with opportunities for thinking about the world as a whole. And this polyphony of "merries" would remind us of something very important: We cannot make the whole world the same, but true polyphony is never discord.