Anything that can help hospital patients relax and reduce the stress they and their families are feeling is bound to be popular. These days, this includes planetarium shows.

Although just how planetariums are enjoyed depends on the individual, some audience members can self-reflect and think about the universe and their lives.

A planetarium show was held at the Medical Center for Child Health of Kyushu University Hospital in the city of Fukuoka in summer last year.

The windows and doors of an about 73-square-meter playroom for child patients were covered with black paper. The space had been turned into a makeshift darkroom for an audience of about 20, comprising children and their family members.

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The lights were turned off, and an image of a million stars was projected onto the ceiling.

“Wow,” the audience members exclaimed in low voices.

Takayuki Ohira, who produced a planetarium that holds the Guinness World Record for the most stars, spoke to the audience.

“These stars are in the night sky at 9 p.m. Although this is a real part of the universe, we can’t actually see such a large number of stars. This is mainly due to air pollution, city lights and the limitations of human sight.”

On the day, Ohira, 46, told the children the story of Orihime (Weaving Princess Star) and Hikoboshi (Cowherd Star), which meet once a year during the Tanabata star festival.

Afterward, he said there are countless stars and planets in the universe, including Earth. He added that there may be similar ones to Earth among them.

The show lasted 20 minutes and the audience felt as if time had passed quite quickly.

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Ameri Momii, 7, who had been hospitalized for more than half a year, said: “The stars were beautiful. I felt like I was really under the night sky, and I was excited.”

The show was organized by Kazutaka Okuda, 22, a third-year student at Kyushu University’s School of Medicine. He has been engaged in attempts to reduce the stress of patients by holding space productions at hospitals.

He came up with the idea of using a planetarium when thinking that it would be good to “use images of the endless night sky inside hospital wards, which tend to make patients feel cooped up.”

Because Ohira and others took part in the event as volunteers, the only costs were for renting the machine and other related devices.

Similar planetarium shows have been held at St. Luke’s International Hospital in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, and the University of Tsukuba Hospital in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, with the cooperation of Ohira.

At the St. Luke’s International Hospital show, a live piano performance created a fantastical mood during the explanations of the stars. The patients enjoyed this combination.

The show at the University of Tsukuba Hospital was also warmly recieved. When asked for their impressions, one patient said, “My worries about my disease have halved.”

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“I forgot my pains and anxieties during the event,” said another, while an elderly patient explained that his mind was calm when he thought about the endless universe.

“I felt as if I was standing alone under a night sky. The time I spent quietly thinking about my life was meaningful,” said another of the senior patients.

The planetarium show’s effects even extended to the patients’ family members, with one saying: “I’ve been exhausted because of care work, and have been depressed, but I was healed.”

A medical staff member, meanwhile, hopes another show will be held because “it provided a sense of healing and left a positive impression on the patients.”

Hospital patients often cannot go out due to their poor health condition, and this can raise various anxieties. Yasuhiro Ito, a professor of physiology at Fujita Health University, said: “Even a planetarium for home use can lower the heart rate and activate parasympathetic nerves. These effects can relax people.”

Okuda plans to hold planetarium shows in hospitals in the Kansai and Tohoku regions from April this year, in addition to those in Tokyo and the Kyushu region.

Memo

Planetarium creator Takayuki Ohira was born in Kawasaki in 1970. He graduated from the Nihon University graduate school of science and technology. In 2004, he jointly developed the “Megastar-II cosmos” planetarium projector with the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. The 5.6 million stars it projects earned a Guinness World Record.