I am standing on the summit of Mount Mocchumu-dake on Yakushima Island, off the southernmost tip of Japan’s Kyushu Island. I’m here to do some hiking among Yakushima’s famous forests of giant cedar trees,but on this day, my attentionis occupied by something else: a US military helicopter buzzing the coastline, searching for servicemen who have been missing since an Osprey military aircraft crashed into the sea the previous day.
This is my first trip back to Japan since 2017, when I graduated as a Peace Fellow from the Rotary Peace Centre in Tokyo. Observing the US military helicopter circling the waters off Yakushima, I am reminded again of Japan’s place in the precarious geopolitics of the region, its often-controversial military alliance with the US, and why this is such a compelling country to host a Rotary Peace Centre.
Peace through sport
In 2015, I was fortunate to be selected as a Rotary Peace Fellow at ICU in Tokyo. I left the UK for Japan in the summer of that year, leaving behind a sports community project in London that I had focused on for over a decade, with the aim of taking a step forward in an area of work – sports development – that I’d been involved in throughout my professional career.
Sport has always played an important role in my life. Growing up in the English countryside, sport provided the motivation to meet up with friends, giving us purpose and a source of fun. My obsession with basketball convinced my parents to lay a small patch of concrete in our garden and install a post and net. This homespun court provided a space to hone my skills and to host games with friends and other local basketball fanatics.
This early realisation – that through sport and sporting spaces, I could bring people together – had a powerful impact. Since 2003, I have been involved in sport at a grassroots level, focused on designing and funding sports programmes and community sports infrastructure. Through these experiences, I have gained an understanding of how sports initiatives can contribute towards social, economic, and environmental objectives.
The Rotary Peace Fellowship encourages applications from working professionals; in my case, I made the change from a practical to a theoretical approach to sports development. I’m grateful to my sponsor club, Saint Pancras Rotary Club, and also to Rotary District 1040, particularly Richard Hazlehurst, for supporting and endorsing my application and helping me to navigate the submission process.
Rotary Peace Centre in Tokyo
Arriving on campus at the International Christian University in Mitaka, Tokyo, I was struck by the humidity, the shrilling cicadas and by the beauty of the trees surrounding the campus buildings.
With the encouragement of my advisor at ICU – Professor John Maher, a sociolinguist with a love of football (soccer) – I focused my thesis on ‘sport, peace and relational space.’ I explored these themes in the context of Myanmar’s national sport, chinlone, a non-competitive game played with a cane ball. Alongside the core subjects such as International Politics and Ideas on Peace that I studied during the programme, I found planning and conducting my field research, and writing and defending my final thesis to be particularly rewarding.
My trip to Myanmar coincided with a period in the country’s history when it was open to reform. However, despite the peace talks at the time, violence and conflict continued between many of the 135 different ethnic groups that make up Myanmar, the most extreme being the treatment of the Rohingya in the Rakhine State.
During my research I travelled to the 88th WASO Chinlone Festival in Mandalay to conduct interviews with players and festival organisers. The festival hosts 900 teams from across the country and is run in accordance with chinlone’s motto: “Harmony, give and take, supporting one another”. During my time in Mandalay, I came to understand chinlone and the spaces where it is played as representative of what peace scholar John Paul Lederach refers to as ‘relational spaces’, or spaces where the not like minded and not like situated can interact. Lederach views relational spaces as central to the process of building peace.
In total, I spent five months in Myanmar, completing my research and a work placement with Bridge, a creative agency specialising in social impact. Sadly, the country is today once again riven by conflict following a coup d’état in 2020.
On my return to Tokyo, I collated my research and prepared to defend my thesis ahead of submission. My thesis title was Peace, Sport and Relational Space: Lederach’s Web in the Analysis of ‘Chinlone’ in Contemporary Myanmar.
Return to London Life
Through the Rotary Peace Fellowship, I saw first-hand how sport can contribute towards building cohesive communities in the most extreme circumstances, like Myanmar. It also gave me the time and space to explore theories of peacebuilding practitioners. More broadly, understanding how personal, professional and business networks can support the success of a project was a key lesson from my time as a peace fellow. In 2018, after returning to the UK, I was keen to find a role where I could apply my experiences at the intersection of sport and development.
Shortly after my return, I began working as a sports project coordinator for a community association in Newham, in east London, where I engaged with people experiencing homelessness and supported them to participate in sports activities.
During this time, the UN Special Rapporteur for extreme poverty, Philip Alston, toured the UK and visited Newham. Reducing poverty was one of the legacy goals of the 2012 Olympic Games, which Newham helped host, and although some areas of the borough saw improvements in deprivation following the games, especially those near where sports venues had been built, local activists say it was not evenly spread. In 2019, child poverty in the area was the third worst in the UK.
In May of 2019, I began working at Bankside Open Spaces Trust, the environmental charity that manages Marlborough Sports Garden, and today, nearly five years later, I am the Head of Sport and Development.
My work is centred on managing a free activity programme targeting families in Southwark who face the issues associated with poverty and urbanisation. Most do not have access to a garden at home and a lack of space and funds makes it hard to access sport and fitness, resulting in some of the worst rates of obesity among adults and children in England.
Alongside this, I’m now project managing the £4.2m capital redevelopment of the site. In 2021, the sports garden was awarded £1.125m of funding from Southwark Council and we have been working with architects Cullinan Studio to develop plans to upgrade the facilities and boost its impact and income through a new sustainably built and run sports hub. Planning permission for the scheme was granted in 2022, and we’re working towards securing full funding for the project. The vision is for the site to become an exemplary sports initiative – an environmentally sustainable facility contributing to the health and wellbeing of some of the United Kingdom’s most deprived communities.
I view Marlborough Sports Garden as a platform to demonstrate how sports development can play a central role in creating peaceful and sustainable societies, and I’m grateful to the Rotary Peace Fellowship for strengthening my skills and ambition as I pursue this vision.
International Christian University Rotary Peace Center 
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