About

Portrait of Yoshimi Shirakawa

As a nurse and as a worker in international cooperation, I have consistently stood on the front lines of life: clinical practice in a surgical ward, disaster relief in Paraguay and Honduras, and the analysis of social structures through public health (MPH). What I confronted through these experiences is the reality that some lives cannot be protected within the frameworks of institutions and statistics — and that lives quietly slip through those gaps.

My practice releases "care" from the confines of the medical profession and reweaves it in new forms through art-making and bodily acts. I believe there are worlds that open up through perspectives that resist impossible situations, through slight shifts in how we see.

For me, making art is not an act of self-expression. It is a practice of making visible the weight and dissonance of the field that words and data cannot capture, and of re-asking how we relate to the world. From the one-way relation of "those who aid / those who are aided" toward relations of making together — where participation itself renews relationships and widens how we engage with international cooperation. Through my work, I want to create the places and occasions for this.

Clinic & Research

After acute care nursing, completed an MPH at Teikyo University; approaching "life" from both statistics and the bedside.

International Cooperation

Exploring locally rooted care and resilience with JICA (Paraguay) and AMDA (Latin America).

Social Practice

Founded Global Health JAPAN in 2025, intervening in medical-information asymmetry as social practice.

Bodily Inquiry

Experiencing resilience beyond human-centrism through extreme practices such as 100 km ultramarathons.

Biography

1983Born in Tochigi, Japan
2006Graduated from Shakai Hoken Funabashi College of Nursing
2012JICA Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers, Paraguay
2017MPH, Teikyo University Graduate School of Public Health
2018Academic support staff, Department of Health and Social Behavior, The University of Tokyo
2019AMDA-MINDS, disaster relief in Latin America
2025Founder and Director, Global Health JAPAN
2025Diversity on the Arts Project (DOOR), Tokyo University of the Arts