The Activities of the Japan Foundation
Dialogue: Japanese Studies and Intellectual Exchange Education Overseas
Intellectual Exchange
In order to provide opportunities for experts to engage in dialogues on global issues and topics, and to further deepen their intellectual exchanges, we support international conferences and symposia, as well as mutual visits by public intellectuals. We seek to make a contribution toward global development and stability by promoting mutual understanding in international society, and by fostering the next generations necessary to advance future intellectual exchange.
Inviting Chinese Intellectuals to Japan
To deepen an understanding of Japan and to build an intellectual network (between Japan and China), the Japan Foundation invites influential young and mid-career researchers and intellectuals from China to Japan. Xu Jin, senior Economics Editor and Chief Financial Commentator of the Financial Times China, who was invited to Japan in FY2016, published Bu milu, bu dongjing (If You Haven't Lost Your Way, You're Not in Tokyo). Meanwhile, Ma Guochuan, chief editor of Caijing magazine (finance and economics magazine) who was also invited in FY2016, published the Rise of Japanese Empire: The Story of Meiji Restoration. Through these publications, these two intellectuals widely communicated across China the results of their research in Japan.
Xu Jin (right) poses for photos with a reader.
Ma Guochuan gives a lecture commemorating his publication at a bookstore in Tianjin City.
Sayaka Murata: Toward the World Stage
The Japan Foundation offices in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Spain invited Akutagawa Prize winner Sayaka Murata to recitations and talk events held at such locations as the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA), University of Iowa, New York University and Casa Asia (Barcelona Headquarters). Soon after the publication of her award-winning novel Convenience Store Woman in English and Spanish-language versions, also made possible by the assistance from the Japan Foundation, each event created a sensation, including in the media, and this also helped the novel be selected as The New Yorker's Best Books of 2018.
(c) Grove Atlantic
Sayaka Murata signs a book at the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA).
Grant Program for Social Science, Research and Education on Contemporary Japan
INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales)/Paris Diderot University Paris 7
Aiming to promote an understanding of contemporary Japan in the field of social science, this program supports the release of online lectures, the organizing of open lectures for the general public and translations and publications, organized by a consortium formed by the above-mentioned two institutions that have long years of achievements in Japanese studies in France. The postdoctoral fellows in charge of these programs include a winner of Prix Shibusawa-Claudel, while past fellows have subsequently found academic positions in universities. This program thus contributes to the development of human resources who will undertake future Japanese studies.
An open lecture at INALCO