The drummer, the saint and the cherry trees
A Polish folk drummer has sent thanks to a 95-year-old Japanese schoolteacher whose cherry trees took root in a convent founded by a companion of Maximilian Kolbe.
When Mateusz Dobrowolski heard the story of Masatoshi Asari this week, he recorded a message of thanks to him in Hokkaido. “Asari-san, we have just heard about your effort to commemorate the atrocities of the second world war and to make sure they never happen again,” he said. “We want to express our deepest solidarity with this idea. I want to thank you for your efforts with this song.”
Hajda Banda, the four-piece group for whom Dobrowolski plays frame drum, was rehearsing in west London for its concert at Kings Place on 8 October. The song was the Kyiv Waltz. The waltz is regarded as Kyiv’s unofficial anthem. The poet Andriy Malyshko and the composer Platon Maiboroda wrote it in 1950 as a gift for graduates of the Kyiv Medical Institute, who had written to Malyshko asking for a song to remember the city by. The pair finished it in about a day. The institute is now Bogomolets National Medical University, whose graduates are among the doctors treating Ukraine’s wounded today. It is a song about Kyiv in May, when the chestnuts flower, and in it the blossom stands for youth and happiness. For years its refrain was the call sign of Ukrainian radio.
Asari, a retired primary-school teacher, has bred 116 varieties of cherry and spent half a century giving them away: first to countries Japan wronged in the second world war, then to people suffering in wars in which Japan had no part. In the late 1980s he sent hundreds of trees to Poland, then still under communist rule. For more than three decades nobody knew what had become of them. Then the writer Naoko Abe found three alive in a convent garden at Strachocina, a village in the far south-east of Poland, close to the Ukrainian border. “It is a miracle,” Asari said.
The convent explains the trees, and Maximilian Kolbe explains the convent. One of Poland’s best-known modern saints, the Franciscan ran a friary in Nagasaki in the 1930s and died at Auschwitz in August 1941, having volunteered to take a condemned man’s place. The sisters at Strachocina belong to an order founded in Japan in 1949 by Mieczysław Mirochna, a Polish friar who had gone there with him.
Asari, who as a boy lived near a forced-labour camp, cites Kolbe’s courage. Many Poles know Kolbe’s story; few know that it runs on into Japan.
Dobrowolski’s instruments wear his convictions openly. One of his frame drums shows a saint holding a British-made NLAW anti-tank weapon: devotional imagery put to the service of Ukraine’s defence.
Asari’s next gift goes to Ukraine. Thirty saplings of four of his varieties are growing at Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium. In spring 2027 a convoy from Britain intends to carry them to Kremenets Botanical Garden in western Ukraine, together with ambulances, medical supplies and prosthetic limbs. Asari calls it perhaps his final peace gift.
Hajda Banda’s music comes from the same borderland. Founded in 2021 by the Belarusian violinist Daria Butskaya, the band plays dances and songs from Podlasie in eastern Poland, from western Belarus and from the Polesye marshes, where Poland, Belarus and Ukraine meet. The region was partitioned, Russified and redrawn for two centuries. Its songs outlived the empires that ruled it. The band plays them on village instruments only: fiddle, hammered dulcimer, three-row accordion and drum.
Dobrowolski’s own instrument nearly vanished too. Maciej Szajkowski of Warsaw Village Band reckons perhaps five frame drums were made in Poland in the whole of the 1990s. Drum makers have told Dobrowolski that about 500 have been sold in the past ten years. He learned the oberek drumming of the Radom and Opoczno country largely from archive recordings of village players now dead, and now teaches it in Warsaw.
Five drums became five hundred. Three trees survived at Strachocina. Thirty more are waiting in Belgium.
References
Naoko Abe, The Martyr and the Red Kimono (Penguin, 2024): Kolbe, Mirochna, Asari’s gifts to Poland and the search for the Strachocina trees.
Naoko Abe, “Naoko meets with Masatoshi Asari in Hokkaido, Japan”, naokoabe.com, 26 March 2025: the three surviving trees at Strachocina, NHK’s report, and Asari’s “It is a miracle”.
Naoko Abe, “‘Sakura diplomacy’: One tree, two men, three wars”, The Japan Times, 1 May 2026: Asari’s 116 varieties, the Kalmthout saplings and the Kremenets planting.
Takanori Suzuki, The Hokkaido Shimbun, 27 May 2026: the thirty trees for Ukraine and Asari’s wartime research into prisoners of war at Hakodate.
Masatoshi Asari, message on receiving an honorary MSc, Keele University, 14 July 2026 (read by Naoko Abe): “perhaps my final cherry blossom peace gift”.
Roman Jagoda, “Matka Boża w kimonie”, przydroznekapliczki.pl; and the Strachocina parish website (strachocina.przemyska.pl): the convent, Fr Mirochna and the Franciscan Sisters of the Militia Immaculatae.
Kings Place, listing for Hajda Banda, Songlines Encounters Series, 8 October 2026; and Songlines reviews of Hajda! (June 2024) and Niepraudzivaya (May 2025): the band, its line-up and repertoire.
All Mazurkas of the World festival (festivalmazurki.pl), frame-drum workshop listing, November 2025: Dobrowolski’s biography and Radom–Opoczno drumming.
“Kyivskyi vals”, Kyiv Past and Future (kyivpastfuture.com.ua) and Ukrainian Wikipedia; Encyclopedia of Ukraine, “Maiboroda, Platon”; Kyiv City Museum, “Kyiv Chestnut Trees”: the Kyiv Waltz (Malyshko and Maiboroda, 1950), written for graduates of the Kyiv Medical Institute, now Bogomolets National Medical University.
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