Message in Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Japan Foundation Awards

I wish to congratulate the Japan Foundation on the 50th anniversary of the Japan Foundation Awards from the bottom of my heart.

The Tokyo YWCA Japanese Mothers for International Students' Movement (JMIS) was a recipient of the Japan Foundation Special Prize in 2002, and we are extremely grateful for this high praise for our activities to support foreign exchange students.

The program began in 1961 as the result of exchange between a single exchange student and a single member of our organization, and developed into a volunteer activity that is divided into a foreign exchange-student support program, featuring home exchange and Japanese-language support, and an exchange-student grant program primarily based on a scholarship program. This program had been in operation for precisely 40 years when we received the Japan Foundation Special Prize in 2002. Exchange students faced a very different situation than that of today, and since then, we have reached out to society and engaged in activities to improve the situation. In 2021, almost 20 years later, we celebrated our 60th anniversary, but with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to take a new approach and tackle online activities, with which we were unfamiliar. As a result, today we continue to carry out meetings from home, online Japanese-language support, and other activities that we would never have imagined doing before.

The programs of the Japan Foundation based on standards of culture, language, and dialogue are sustained through an organization much greater in scale than our own. But our own grassroots JMIS program has promoted ongoing exchange activities that work for world peace by going beyond national and religious borders, in which individual exchange students become members of Japanese families, receive support in Japanese culture and language, and deepen the mutual understanding among nations.

Our Japanese-language support in particular is now hosted online, so that those who do not live in Tokyo and the surrounding areas can practice Japanese-language conversation, and we have been able to invite participants from local regions and overseas to our Japanese speech contests. While the number of exchange students who entered Japan in fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022 declined significantly, we have once again started vigorous activities since the beginning of fiscal 2023. Rather than going back to the same approach as before the pandemic, we now use a variety of convenient tools, such as hybrid online and offline events and the LINE social media service for Japanese-language conversation, through which we continue to provide further exchange and support opportunities in addition to our warm face-to-face exchanges.

We feel a close affinity to the immense contributions your prestigious Foundation has made to world peace, and we are grateful for the diverse benefits that we have enjoyed as a result.

There have been many challenges over the past 50 years, but I pray that you will continue to contribute and develop over the next 50 years, and continue to support small scale activities.

TAKIZAWA Eiko
Chair of the Committee for
"Japanese Mothers for International Students" Movement (JMIS)
The Young Women’s Christian Association of Tokyo

(Original text in Japanese)

"Japanese Mothers for Foreign Students" Movement of the Tokyo YWCA (Japan)