Fr Jorge Anzorena SJ was presented the 2021 Kazuhiro Kojima Special Award on 13 October in honour of architects who, through their efforts, “bring about a positive change for society through the creation of an architectural space”.
An architect, a teacher and a researcher with a doctorate from the University of Tokyo, Fr Anzorena has spent more than four decades of his life helping people support themselves, mostly through shelter in the most impoverished areas of Asia. For years he assisted the Jesuit Conference of Asia Pacific in housing projects for the poor.
Through his association with the Latin American housing advocacy group, SELAVIP, he traveled from slum to slum learning about new projects and approaches, identifying projects in Asia worthy of support, and, through his newsletter, communicated the best ideas to his subscribers throughout Latin America and Asia. His newsletter and annual pilgrimages connected like-minded organisations and people working in low-cost, low-income housing projects. One of the consequences of his networking was the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights founded by his friends in 1988 in Thailand.
His work garnered him The International Year of Shelter for the Homeless Award in 1988 from the Japan Housing Association, The Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding in 1994, and the Premio Francisco García Vázquez al Arquitecto Solidario in 1996. In bestowing him the 2021 Kazuhiro Kojima Special Award, the committee recognised him as the “sole Jesuit priest who mastered the architectural planning methods of Japan, and gave his life for the grassroots movement… to defend the human right to shelter”.
For all the recognition he has received, Fr Anzorena had only a humble desire: “I tried to find out how to combine the priesthood, architecture, and working for the poor.”
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1930, Fr Anzorena entered the Society of Jesus at the age of 20. As early as the first year of his novitiate in 1951, he had pondered being a missionary in Japan, alert to the appeals of Fr Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit Provincial in Japan, to join the mission there. “If you want to send me to Japan, I am willing to go,” he wrote his superiors. It would take about nine years before he was finally allowed to move to Japan, where he has since been a part of the Jesuit community there. Now 91 years old, he continues to assist in housing projects for the poor.