暖心：一本《足球小将》成叙利亚难民儿童梦想的港湾
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在日本东京，来自叙利亚的留学生奥巴达•凯瑟马正在从事着将日本漫画《足球小将》翻译成阿拉伯语版的工作。据奥巴达说，儿童难民在颠沛流离的生活中缺少对于人生、对于未来的梦想，他想通过自己的努力，带给难民儿童一些精神食粮，鼓励他们拥抱希望和梦想。在日本集英社等多方努力下，阿拉伯语版的《足球小将》漫画书被送到难民儿童手中。奥巴达说他想给“孩子们带去一丝笑容……让他们忘记战争的糟糕记忆，哪怕不是全部，至少可以有一点帮助。”一起来听听这个关于梦想和希望的故事吧。 "The situation in Syria is terrible - so terrible that I think it stops kids from dreaming. But it's their dreams that one day will make Syria good again," says Obada Kassoumah. "I wish I could just give them a little bit of hope and make them believe that yes, they can have dreams."
Obada is a Syrian student in Tokyo who, by a mixture of chance and determination, has become the translator of Japanese manga comics into Arabic. And by another twist of fate, many of these Arab editions of football saga Captain Tsubasa have been donated to aid agencies and are being handed out to Syrian refugee children across Europe and the Middle East. For Obada, the project started as an unexpected translation job but has become something very personal and important. A narrow escape As a student of Japanese at university in the Syrian capital, Damascus, Obada received a scholarship to go to Japan for an exchange programme. That was in 2012, and the unrest in the country had already started. The situation got worse and worse and often he would be stopped by the police in the street suspecting that as a young man he might be a rebel fighter. When the situation got too dangerous, his parents decided to send him to live with his aunt in Jordan until he could leave for Tokyo. It was almost already too late - it was only through personal connections that he managed to cross the border. When his scholarship ended a year later, he was able to stay in Japan by enrolling as a regular student, and picked up a part-time job translating Captain Tsubasa. "I myself watched Captain Tsubasa as a kid on TV and I loved it," says 26-year old Obada. "It's a story about a kid having a dream to become a professional football player and working hard to make that dream come true." "And that's something beautiful, that's something you should make these kids see." Initially, adapting the books for the Arab market was a mere business decision by a Japanese publisher. But they were then approached by Prof Masanori Naito, a Middle East specialist at Doshisha University in Kyoto. Prof Naito had spent several years in Damascus as a doctoral student in the 1980s and was looking for ways to help people affected by the conflict. He suggested the publisher could donate some of the manga books to refugee kids. "The tragedy of Syria," he says, "is a very serious concern to me. Back then I worked in villages that are now held by the rebel forces." The original copyright holders in Japan, Shueisha publishers, were immediately ready to fund the donations, he said. Through co-operation with a number of international NGOs and Unicef, the books are now being distributed to young Syrian children in camps across Europe, Turkey and the Middle East who have escaped the terror and trauma of the civil war ravaging their home country. "It is very far from the reality they know," Prof Naito explains. "But for kids it is very important to be able to escape from reality for a while. And these books can also give them some hope for their own future." Manga he says, could even be "a tool of soft power against despair and radicalisation". A surprise from Japan One of the places where Captain Tsubasa now provides a small escape from reality is a refugee home in Berlin where just last week, the copies were handed out by German-Turkish NGO Wefa to around 60 refugees. "It was really something quite unique and we got a completely different reaction from normal," Ismet Misirlioglu of Wefa told the BBC from Berlin. "What the children usually get are of course clothes and food and so they were really surprised when we suddenly had Japanese manga books - in their own language," he says, laughing. "And you really could tell that from their eyes!" Wefa in Berlin is planning to give out more of the books in the coming weeks. A duty to help Back in Tokyo, Obada Kassoumah is still at work putting ever more adventures of Captain Tsubada into Arabic. He is currently translating volume seven out of 37. For him, going back to Syria is not an option. Instead, he will stay in Japan for now and finish his degree - he knows Syria will need his skills in the future and he hopes he can have a bigger impact if he works building links between the two countries. "I have friends who are fighting with the government and other friends who are fighting with the rebels," he says with a heavy voice. "We are all one family - and now they wish death to each other, trying to kill each other." But he hopes his translations will put a smile on the face of a Syrian child somewhere, trying to forget the terror of the past. "As a Syrian it's like my duty to help - and through this thing I can help. "This way the children can - at least for a bit - forget all the bad memories they have from the war." |
