From the Foundation

On October 25, the Toyota Foundation hosted a grant award ceremony for this fiscal year’s recipients of grants in the Asian Neighbors Network Program and Research Grant Program. For fiscal 2007 a total of 39 projects are being funded in the Asian Neighbors Network Program. Grants are going to 53 Research Grant Program projects, with additional grants going to special subject research: 10 projects in the “Preservation, Compilation, and Annotation of Indigenous Documents in Peripheral Regions of Asia” category, 3 projects in the “Making Grants Come Alive” category, and 4 grants in the “Jiang Nan, Yong-Honam, Setouchi” category.

At the ceremony, representatives of the selection committees for each program made remarks on the selection processes they had overseen. One theme common to all their explanations was the question of how to go about taking the results of research and applying it more broadly to society.

Toyota Foundation President Atsuko Toyama addressed the recipients of this year’s grants, telling them: “We hope you will make effective use of the grant money, producing valuable results that can be put to work in creating a richer human society.”

Two grant recipients stepped forward to represent all recipients and accept certificates from President Toyama. These were Kazuhiro Arai of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, who received a “Preservation, Compilation, and Annotation of Indigenous Documents in Peripheral Regions of Asia” special subject Research Grant for his project, “Seeing the Indian Ocean from Private Houses: Preservation and Exhibition of Indigenous Documents in Hadramawt, Yemen”; and Yasuharu Kawashima of the group Tools for Self Reliance Japan, recipient of an Asian Neighbors Network Program grant for the project “Improving Communication and Constructing a Network in Sri Lanka between Native Singhalese and Migrant Tamils Through the Joint Construction of a ‘Battery Charge Center.’”