The Japanese city of Yamaguchi dedicates a plaque to Amaia in tribute to her song

The town of Yamaguchi, in southwestern Japan, has installed a plaque dedicated to the Pamplona singer Amaia Romerowho titled one of the songs on his latest album after this Japanese city.

“Yamaguchi” was released last January as advance of the album “When I don’t know who I am”and in it Amaia refers to the park in her hometown with the same name, a Japanese-style garden designed to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the twinning between the Spanish and Japanese towns in 1980.

“There is a park in my Pamplona that I want to remember/ In Yamaguchi Park I should have stayed/ I wonder if in Japan a girl will cry like I have cried my loves at the San Juan festivities”, Amaia sings in her song, which accumulates more than 500,000 views on YouTube.

Yamaguchi City Hall, southwestern Japan, has wanted to return the gesture to the Spanish artist placing a plaque in a square called Espacio Pamplona and inspired by the city of Navarra, as announced this week through social networks.

The plaque includes a message handwritten by Amaia for the citizens of Yamaguchi and a QR code that links to a video where part of the song can be heard and a greeting in Japanese from the artist. The twinning between Pamplona and Yamaguchi comes from the history of Christianity in Japan, a country where the missionary and patron of Navarre San Francisco Javier evangelized this religion in the 16th century.

Yamaguchi was the first Japanese city where the Spanish Jesuit was able to settle and carry out his evangelizing work with the permission of the local feudal lord, after arriving in 1549 in Japan through Kagoshima, in the extreme south-west of the archipelago, and trying unsuccessfully to go to Kyoto, the former Japanese imperial capital.

The Japanese town has a church named after San Francisco Javieramong other places dedicated to the missionary and to the city of Navarra, like a clock that every hour on the dot recreates a scene from San Fermines.