Karen Iwata Helped Us Run the Tanabata Festival. Now We Are Sponsoring Her Show.

Karen Iwata had a big hand in our Tanabata Festival last July. She has worked with TEN TEN NYC on the Kawaii Holiday market, and she has run idol workshops. She is good company and she gets things done, which turns out to be a rarer pairing than it should be.

On 23 September we are sponsoring her show and doing the food and drinks. Here is what it is and why it matters to her.

Who She Is

Karen is from Sendai. She passed the AKB48 audition in February 2011, less than three weeks before the Great East Japan Earthquake, and she was twelve years old when it happened. She stayed with the group until 2016 and then moved into acting.

Since then she played Delphi in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Akasaka ACT Theater in Tokyo, from 2022 to 2023. That run was the first time the play had been staged anywhere in Asia.

She also took a photography degree at Nihon University's College of Art and finished it in 2023, and she still teaches photography in Tokyo. She came to New York in June 2024 on an artist visa, for three years, to study theatre.

The Play

10年後の君へ, Dear You in the Future. She wrote it, she directs it, and she plays the lead.

The story follows Emika, twenty-eight, whose mother died in the earthquake. She has been in Tokyo for fifteen years. Dreams keep sending her home, so she goes back to Miyagi, finds the friends she grew up with, and together they dig up a time capsule the group buried before any of it happened.

The word she uses for what she is working against is 風化. It means weathering, the way stone wears down in the rain, and it is the word Japanese uses for a memory going soft at the edges. She has been taking the show into schools so that children born after 2011 meet it somewhere other than a textbook.

This year it ran in Tokyo in early June, then in Natori and Kurihara. Both of those are in Miyagi. Both were hit.

The Twenty-Third

TEN TEN NYC raised the money to bring it over, and it is finally happening.

Middle Church, 50 East 7th Street, fourth floor. Doors at 6:40, an opening prayer and music performance at 7:00, the New York premiere screening from 7:30 to 8:30, and an informal gathering with the guests at 9:00.

Admission is free. There is a donation box at the venue for people affected by the Kumamoto earthquake on 28 July this year, which is a second disaster in a country still carrying the first one.

We are sponsoring the evening and running the food and drinks. It costs nothing to come.

Details are on the event page. Karen is @karen0513_ on Instagram, and her photography is at @karen_phot_o.