A new collaboration with our Japanese friends at Bird Theatre is underway!
TOWA MURA by Tom Pow, ‘In the Making’ – LAUNCH OF THE MINI DOCUMENTARY.
In July 2025, the acclaimed Bird Theatre travelled from Tottori Japan, to spend two weeks in the Galloway countryside with a Scottish writer, actor and five musicians. Why?
Bird Theatre operates in a rural context in Japan’s least populated prefecture, a place which has many parallels with rural D&G. The same challenges, the same reasons people choose to stay, leave, or arrive.
Bird Theatre had connected with D&G writer Tom Pow and the musicians of The Galloway Agreement after twice inviting them to perform their show ‘The Village and The Road’ at the International Bird Theatre Festival. Whilst in Japan, Tom researched for his book of poetry ‘Ghosts at Play – Poems from Rural Japan,’ which was the basis of his script for Towa Mura.
The crux of the play is inspired by a real news report in which a village in Japan met to debate its future – whether to sell itself for landfill or to continue its decline. Set in an imagined village, the play presents ‘an argument,’ one that is carried by memory, myth, and imagination as well as by the dilemmas an ageing rural population faces as it chooses its fate. It is as important for the villagers of Towa Mura to respect and to honour its past and its present – what will be lost – as well as what it might have to gain.
Bird Theatre were in rural SW Scotland to develop Towa Mura, a play written by a Scotsman, about the Japanese experience of rural living and depopulation. Then they presented a ‘work in progress’ to a Scottish audience at the CatStrand, who could clearly see their own life stories in the play.
Towa Mura has become a deep international collaboration, performed by actors from Scotland and Japan, with original music written and performed by The Galloway Agreement, and direction by Bird Theatre’s founder Makoto Nakashima.
The audience feedback from the presentation was overwhelming including:
‘One of the best theatrical experiences I have ever had. Stunning in its emotional impact, its quality, & its originality.’
‘Everywhere in rural areas, the familiar ghost of what used to be there can be felt. The themes in the play were exactly about that’.
‘I felt very touched by the feeling of losing something every time I go back to see my parents... less & less the village of my childhood, apart from the sand which is still there.’
We are proud to present this short documentary by Thornhill based film maker Emma Dove. Filmed during the development of Towa Mura at CatStrand in rural Dumfries and Galloway, this captures a unique Scotland–Japan collaboration between writer Tom Pow, The Galloway Agreement, and Bird Theatre, Tottori. Blending theatre, live music and two languages, the project explores urgent questions of rural depopulation through story, song and memory. Featuring rehearsal footage, behind-the-scenes moments, and audience reflections from the work-in-progress sharing, the film offers a glimpse of an intercultural production in the making.
Many thanks to our funders, Creative Scotland and The Japan Foundation, for enabling this wonderful project to happen.
For two weeks across July & August 2025, three actors, the director and two translators from Bird Theatre worked with Tom Pow and The Galloway Agreement, along with actor Stephen McCole, at CatStrand, funded by Creative Scotland and The Japan Foundation, and began the process of exploring the new play. This presentation of the work in progress at CatStrand on 6 August 2025 could have sold out twice over, such was the interest in and enthusiasm for this project.
The company hope to continue the development together and tour the new play in Scotland and Japan in 2026.
The Japan story continues - following our visit to Bird Theatre in 2023, they invited us to collaborate on adding a Japanese themed scene to The Village and The Road. This new scene was based on research on rural depopulation that Tom Pow did whilst we were in Japan in 2023, and online research with Bird Theatre’s help across 2024. We wrote new music to accompany Tom’s new words, and took the adapted show back to Japan in September 2024. This time we performed it at Bird Theatre, and at Cheriver Hall in Shimane prefecture. Tom’s research also resulted in him writing a book of poems, ‘Ghosts at Play’, which was printed in a dual language format, English and Japanese, and which we launched with an event at the British Council in Tokyo while we were there.
As well as performing The Village and The Road, The Galloway Agreement did some concerts, and were lucky enough to also do a wonderful collaborative concert with two Japanese musicians, KITSU Kaori (shamisen) and HIGUCHI Keizan (shakuhachi).
The trip was funded by Creative Scotland, The British Council, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and a Tottori City Grant for Arts and Culture Projects.
The Japan story is not yet over! We are planning a future collaboration, watch this space!
Here is a link to the Bird Theatre website: https://www.birdtheatre.org/engekisai/index_en.html
First visit to Japan:
In September 2023, The Galloway Agreement and Tom Pow took their theatre show about rural depopulation, The Village and The Road, to Japan to perform at Bird Theatre, Shikano, as part of the Bird Theatre Festival.
Below is a gallery of photographs from the trip, and some translated comments from the post show talks, which contain many memories of rural life in Japan.
The talks are here:
This trip was partly funded by Creative Scotland, for which we are very grateful.
