Weekend Beat: Her toys are fun for all kids

BY MOTOMI KOBAYASI, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

Touch whipped cream and it caves in. Raise your hand as high as you can--the sky remains out of reach. For a blind child, these facts are an obstacle to understanding. How can you explain the shape of the shapeless, the texture of the untouchable?

"But if it's a toy with a recognizable shape, you can learn all you need to know by feeling it with your hand," Reiko Takahashi, 39, says.

Blind herself, Takahashi is senior assistant manager of social and environmental affairs at toymaker Tomy Co. Her main responsibility is the development and distribution of toys that children with visual or hearing impairments can enjoy together with seeing and hearing children. Her advice has been instrumental in the making of 1,962 toy products, by Tomy and others.

She traces the origin of what became her life's work to an incident that occurred one summer evening when she was 10. She and a classmate at a school for the blind were in a park, deeply absorbed in an electronic baseball game. You didn't need sight to play--the console emitted sounds to signify "out," "safe," "home run," and so on. A boy they didn't know came over: "Can I play?"

His evident pleasure in the game was a revelation for Takahashi: "Blind kids and sighted kids aren't completely different after all; we can play and have fun together." The challenge was to bridge the worlds of the sighted and the sightless.

When her father was transferred to New York, Takahashi attended a public high school there. Unlike Japan, she found, the United States recognizes freedom and equality but demands effort and responsibility. On one occasion, as a participant in activities aimed at preventing child abuse, she was asked, "What can you do for us?" Somewhat taken aback, she replied, "I can play the piano, I can sing, I can read stories to the children." Good, she was told, that's what you'll do.

The episode struck her forcefully. U.S. society, she saw, is quick to acknowledge an individual's potential.

Back in Japan, Takahashi studied psychology at International Christian University. She wanted to do something useful with her life. She wanted to work with children. In 1993, she joined Tomy Co., which since the 1980s had been developing toys that children with and without disabilities can enjoy. Starting in market research, she was subsequently transferred to the department of her choice--product development.

"Accessible design" products and services indicate merchandise or facilities that can be used by anyone, regardless of physical disabilities. Examples are the bumps signifying an "on" switch, or the rough container surface that makes it possible to distinguish between shampoo and rinse, or the cellphone vibration that signals an incoming call. Similarly, toys appealing to both disabled and non-disabled children are "accessible design" products. The Japan Toy Association officially recognizes accessible design toys that meet its guidelines. Its seals show a guide dog and a rabbit, the former for toys easily used by visually impaired children, the latter for toys showing consideration for those with hearing impairments.

In 1980, Eiichiro Tomiyama, Tomy's founder and first chairman, set up an in-house research lab and directed it to develop "toys all children everywhere can play with." The marketing of accessible design toys, including games for the visually impaired, followed soon after. By 1990, the Japan Toy Association had a committee focusing on accessible design products. Before long the entire industry was turning out accessible design toys. At last a mechanism for the promotion of accessible design products, involving industry and government, was in place and spreading.

If you want to produce a picture book that emits sounds in response to touch, which sounds are appropriate to which situations? Takahashi, being blind, can base her proposals on living experience. The piles of postcards she's received from happy children enjoying toys she's had a hand in creating prove she's on the right track.

Not everything she's tried has worked. There was, for example, the attempt to produce a karaoke machine with song-specific cartridges. It proved impossible--a failure she takes in stride. "You don't have to do everything," she says. "It's enough to do what's possible."

Beginning this spring, the Japan Toy Association is offering a grand prize for Japanese toys in five categories, including accesible design. Among Tomy's entries are a couple of accessible design toys. It has been only two years since Tomy merged with Takara to form a single company. Takahashi's role in the new entity's ongoing quest for a distinctive corporate image is to help steer the course with persuasion and advice.

"I believe," she says, "that if children with and without handicaps can play and have fun together, they'll grow up into adults better able to build a better society. If my work can help create a society more people can live in comfortably, I'll be satisfied."(IHT/Asahi: March 22,2008)