Izumo Kawabe: The Young Filmmaker Reflects on Moving to Singapore From Japan

“I’m from Shibuya in Tokyo, Japan. It’s one of the busiest and liveliest parts of Tokyo. It’s a very hectic area with lots of tourists coming in. The place where I grew up is especially famous for its fashion. You can also find many architectural companies there.

My parents are architects, so I guess I had a lot of art input from them. As a kid growing up in Japan, I was very into the arts and creating stuff. I started drawing when I was three. I also did 3D models and played the guitar and drums from a very young age.

When I was 11, we moved to Singapore. I can’t say it was my choice. We migrated because of my mum’s job. My mum studied abroad, so she knows how to speak and communicate in English. I guess she wanted that for me as well.

I was hesitant to move to Singapore at first. I didn’t speak English, and all my friends and family were back in Japan. I felt isolated in Singapore. For the first two years, I didn’t really pay attention in class. I played a lot of online games and questioned why I was here.

I got into this very comfortable routine of going straight home after school to watch movies. I had developed a passion for filmmaking, and I started making travel-related content for my YouTube channel. I guess that became my coping mechanism living in a different country.

Nine years ago, there wasn’t a lot of information on filmmaking in Japanese, so I started to actively learn in English. I attended filmmaking seminars by Apple, and even started my own filmmaking club at XCL World Academy , which was the international school I went to.

Filmmaking became a serious career option because of my mentor Eric Khoo , a renowned filmmaker in Singapore. I’ve been working under him for five years now. I was his storyboard artist, bilingual script supervisor and behind-the-scenes videographer on different projects.

When I went to Japan for Eric’s film Spirit World , I saw a whole village of people working together to create this film. Stepping into that professional world made me realise that I wanted to do this for life. That motivated my decision to go to film school in New York.

Mother’s Recipe is actually a video I submitted to apply for film school. It tells the story of a Japanese boy who had just moved to Singapore. He wandered into a hawker center and forged this unexpected bond with a cook through the universal language of food.

Because it’s such a personal project, I wanted someone who could capture the feelings of my experience moving here. I needed to work with someone I know, so I casted my younger brother as the main actor.

Thanks to Mother’s Recipe,I was accepted into the NYU Tisch School of the Arts . The film also won Best Short Award – in the under 25 category – at the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia . That’s significant because it’s an Academy-qualifying film festival.

What’s really amazing is that the winner of the award got the opportunity to be aired on Japan Airlines . Mother’s Recipe was actually shown to passengers as part of their in-flight entertainment. It’s crazy.

I am very appreciative of the awards, but status or popularity is not my ultimate goal or objective in this industry. I think connecting with people through my work and reading really warm comments from them means more to me.

However, getting recognition means having more credibility as a filmmaker, and that creates more opportunities to work on bigger and better productions. That is why I decided to revisit Mother’s Recipe.

I’m currently busy with the post-production for the full version of the short film. Because the first one was for a university application, it had a limitation of five minutes. But I had so much I wanted to tell, five minutes wasn’t really enough.

So after going to NYU for a year and learning new skills that could make it better, I have decided to come back to it and tell a full story this time. My crew and I didn’t sleep for a whole week to make this, so I’m excited for the audience to see it.

Do I consider Singapore home? That’s a very complex question to answer. Having lived in many different parts of the world now, I would say that home is not a specific place, but where the people you love are.

What I do love about Singapore is how different people come together here, unlike Japan which is super monoethnic. When I went to international school in Singapore, I realised everyone is kind of an alien like me, and we’re aliens coming together to form a community.

Singapore forced me to step out of my comfort zone, and it’s only now that I realise how important that is for you to grow as a person. Singapore opened doors and let me down paths to where I am now. I’ll always love Singapore for that.” – Izumo Kawabe

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15 January 2026
In Artists, Filmmakers