Toshihiro Takami
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Toshihiro Takami (高見敏弘; 1925–2019) was the founder of the Asian Rural Institute (ARI) in Japan. Takami was a Christian pastor assigned to a disaster relief project in Bangladesh after the floods of 1970. Discerning a dearth of capable and committed local leaders, he determined to establish an institute dedicated to providing them with training and skills to increase their capacity to serve their people. In 1973, he founded the Asian Rural Institute or ARI.
In his youth, Takami was sent by his parents to a Zen monastery in Kyoto. At the age of eighteen, just months before the end of World War II, he enlisted in the Japanese Navy and briefly attended radar school. In 1951, Takami found work as a cook for a Christian missionary where he began to study Christianity. Soon after, he was baptized. A youth organization in the United States then sponsored him to attend Doane College in Nebraska. By 1960, he had earned his bachelor's degree, graduated from Yale Divinity School, and become an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, Japan.