It is with great pleasure that we congratulate the Japan Foundation on this the 50th anniversary of the Japan Foundation Awards.

The Suntory Foundation was established in 1979 in order to contribute to the development of academia and culture in Japan and the world. Since our establishment, we have put great efforts into communicating internationally from Japan, including by hosting international symposiums in both Japan and America. We also launched our Support for Overseas Publication program to support the publication of foreign-language books about Japan in the same year that our organization was founded, through which we have worked to spread understanding of Japan overseas. It was a great honor and encouragement that we were awarded the Japan Foundation Special Prize in 1998 in recognition of these activities.

Furthermore, after receiving that award, we came to work with the Japan Foundation to cohost a series of workshops and symposiums for international exchange entitled “The Earth is a Stage” in such places as Nagano, Toyama, Saga, and Tokyo in 2003 and 2004. It is a great asset for us that we were able to create an opportunity to share the importance of communicating internationally throughout Japan.

Meanwhile, through our Support for Overseas Publication program, to date we have provided grants for over 344 publication and translation projects in 30 languages, including English, widely introducing scholarly achievements on Japan and Japanese culture throughout the world. In recent years, we have also hosted an international research and exchange program entitled “Japan in a Global Context” to discuss the problems faced by modern Japan, such as the declining birthrate, aging population, and energy, with researchers from overseas, and we widely make the results of the program open to the public on our Foundation’s website and other media.

The state of the world has changed significantly over the past half century, but we would like to express our great respect for the encouragement that the Japan Foundation has for people and organizations promoting international understanding and friendship. With pride in our own receiving of this prestigious award, we intend to continue to take on new challenges in order to support cultural exchange between Japan and the world.

Suntory Foundation

(Original text in Japanese)

Awards and Special Prizes: Recipients List 1996 - 2023