Barrier-Free Expression

The Club’s Frederick Harris Gallery highlights the works of Japanese artists with disabilities through a monthlong exhibition.

Makoto Nakagaki and Ryuki Hayata spend their days creating elaborate paintings that burst with color and intricate detail. But unlike independent professional artists, they are paid steady wages to put brush to canvas.

Nakagaki is enamored with nature while Hayata specializes in cityscapes, depicting buildings he sees in photographs. Both are full-time artists at Pasona Heartful, and their work will be featured as part of a group exhibition, titled “Talent Knows No Handicap,” at the Club’s Frederick Harris Gallery from August 15.

“I love painting flowers and patterns,” says Nakagaki, whose acrylics echo the works of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. “Once I complete a painting, I’m thinking about what different patterns and colors I can use on the next one. That’s how I get ideas for painting one after the other, and I really enjoy it.”

Nakagaki produces her works at Pasona’s Art Mura studio. She joined Pasona Heartful in 2007 and spent years at the company’s Pan Koubou bakery, making bread, cakes and pastries to be sold at Pasona’s offices, before joining Art Mura, which was launched in 1992.

The artist is among roughly 600 workers with disabilities who found employment with the Pasona Group, a leading staffing and outsourcing agency. Most have intellectual disabilities, but some have hearing, mobility or other impairments.

“Our philosophy is that talent knows no handicap,” says Junko Fukasawa, president of Pasona Heartful, on a recent weekday morning at the Pasona offices. “We believe that employment is one of the ways to help disabled people who normally cannot enter the workforce.”

One of 66 subsidiaries of the Pasona Group, Pasona Heartful was established as Pasona Sunrise in 1989 to advance the employment of disabled people. It now has eight divisions that recruit disabled workers.

Applicants can find jobs in offices and bakeries, on art projects or even in agriculture. The company has organic farms in Chiba Prefecture and on Awaji Island, in the Seto Inland Sea, where workers grow rice, vegetables and fruit. For those who have an artistic bent, the company sells or rents out their artwork to businesses, such as hotel chains. The art is also featured in product design.

Companies are keen to participate as a way of meeting their targets under corporate social responsibility initiatives and the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.

The Japanese government stipulated in 1976—the same year Yasuyuki Nambu founded the Pasona Group—that businesses must hire a certain number of disabled workers. Yet despite the enhanced visibility of disabled people in politics, media and sports today, just 19 percent of working-age disabled Japanese are employed. That’s substantially lower than in the United States, where 30 percent have jobs.

Changing the status quo is what drives Nambu and the Pasona Group on its mission to build a society in which everyone is able to find a job they want and where diversity and opportunities for individual achievements are promoted.

“It’s often the case that businesses change greatly when they go public, and the philosophy of their founder may be lost,” explains Nambu. “We listed our company to preserve that vision and to keep the focus not on management but on helping those in our society who are facing challenges, and to solve the world’s social issues.”

The Art Mura project now has about 25 staff artists who have turned out thousands of works that have graced the walls of such venues as the Sakata City Museum of Art in Yamagata Prefecture, Haneda Airport and the National Art Center in Roppongi.

This month’s exhibition marks the group’s third show at the Club. Ryuki Hayata, in particular, is looking forward to it.

“I love painting buildings because I’ve made model buildings ever since I was young,” he says. “Since I joined the company in 2009, I’ve shown my works to my grandmother in Kumamoto. She praises them. I’m really happy to be able to show my art to other people.”