The Japan Foundation Award 50th Anniversary Messages from Previous Awardees - Korean Japanese Association

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2022 The Japan Foundation Award

Korean Japanese Association

[Korea]

Message for the 50th Anniversary of the Japan Foundation Awards

The Korean Japanese Association received the Japan Foundation Award on October 19, 2022, as the Foundation was celebrating 50 years since its establishment. We were incredibly impressed and moved. We had just carried out a variety of activities in the areas of private-sector exchange between Japan and Korea and Japanese-language education, so our gratitude that this was acknowledged with a highly prestigious award is still vivid today.

Photo of Song Boo Young

The Japan Foundation’s efforts to encourage mutual understanding, friendship and goodwill between Japan and other countries are widely known around the world. We hope that in the future people-to-people exchange activities fostered through the Japan Foundation will become bridges for further friendship between Japan and the world.

The Korean Japanese Association has renewed our resolve to focus on projects that expand the base for human exchange and Japanese-language education, especially for young people. In particular, we intend to concentrate on homestays and exchange activities between young people, in the sense of expanding person-to-person exchange and exchange activities on a family-to-family level, or grassroots exchange as it is called.

As Japan and Korea are neighboring countries, our environment allows us to share many possibilities and everydayness of life, and we understand that weaving bonds with each other will create a foundation for bringing peace and prosperity not just to our two countries but to the world. We now hope to deepen our role in forming connections in this area.

We greatly respect the contributions to the maintenance and development of harmonious external relations made by the Japan Foundation, which has now passed its 50th year, through its target work on mutual international understanding and cultural exchange with various countries. We hope to cooperate with the Foundation as an organization, with anticipation and esteem for further activities, together in the future.

Song Boo Young
Chairman
Korean Japanese Association

(Original text in Japanese)

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