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| Report (Press Briefing): Promoting Japanese Culture Overseas (February 4, 2011) |
 FPCJ invited for a press briefing Mr. Seiichi Kondo, Commissioner of the Agency for Cultural Affairs and former Japanese Ambassador to Denmark, who has been spearheading “cultural diplomacy” as the new leader of Japan’s cultural administration since taking office in July 2010. A total of 38 people including foreign journalists (13 reporters from 8 countries/regions), embassy representatives, and FPCJ supporting members attended.
Mr. Kondo started his briefing by stating that, while Japan is ranked among the highest in the world in objective criteria such as GDP and longevity, the country is ranked 90th in a survey on “people’s happiness,” and he pointed out, “In my view, one of the reasons for the gap is that our society has been so preoccupied with economic growth since World War II, forgetting about the importance of culture.” Mr. Kondo continued, “Although economic growth should be a means to pursue happiness, the Japanese started thinking that economic growth itself was the standard to measure the quality of their lives and the country. And now people have lost confidence, faced with a decade-long economic stagnation and catch-up by emerging countries like China. On the other hand, for the past 50 to 60 years, the Japanese have not been given opportunities to appreciate culture and arts. These should be the main objective of life, but in Japan, economic growth became an objective in itself.”
Mr. Kondo said, in order to narrow the gap, changing people’s mindsets through education in school classrooms, households, workplaces, and the whole society is needed, together with implementing a new system. About the government’s education policy, he said, “Japanese school education has concentrated on producing workers of good quality but standardized, and it has deprived students of the opportunities to be exposed to real good arts and culture and to develop the ability to appreciate them. By exposing children more to arts and culture, we could prevent the students who are not good at their studies from dropping out of school or committing school violence, and give them confidence and help them develop bright, original, non-standard ideas. If Japanese society comes to have many such unique talents, Japan will be a more vigorous society, create new industries, and promote its soft power.”
In the final part, Mr. Kondo introduced two government policies to promote arts and culture. One is a measure to provide children with the opportunities to experience arts and culture by sending artists to schools, and the other is one to promote international exchange of artists. Mr. Kondo particularly mentioned the “artist in residence” project, which gives overseas artists opportunities to come and stay in Japan for a certain period and he calls it “one of the most important projects,” and added, “I want them to stay in Japan to create, to perform, to mingle with Japanese people and Japanese artists, getting inspiration from Japanese people, Japanese arts, and Japanese cultural heritage.” The Commissioner explained that the agency is trying to pursue the new elements described above on top of the traditional policies to promote culture and arts, and that has made the agency’s total budget proposal for the next fiscal year a record high of 103.1 billion yen. Mr. Kondo concluded, “Still nearly two thirds of the total budget is spent for the protection of cultural heritage now. In the future, I want to maintain the absolute level of the budget for the protection of the cultural heritage, but also increase vigorously the budget for promotion of arts and culture in order to implement policies including those I described above.”
The Q&A session dealt with such topics as the role of so-called Japanese subculture such as manga and anime for promoting Japanese culture overseas. |
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