Established in December 1989, the Sasakawa Japan-China Friendship Fund will soon enter its 21st year. Throughout its operation, the fund has strived to keep abreast of the most pressing problems affecting China-Japan relations and the most effective remedial approaches available to a private foundation. For the Sasakawa China-Japan Friendship Fund, which was established in a time of highly strained relations between China and Japan, the first mission undertaken was the normalization of relations between the two countries. The fund applied all its power in an attempt to thaw the ice which had set upon China-Japan relations and promote a climate in which personnel exchanges could take place in various fields. Through a sustained effort, the fund contributed to overall restoration of bilateral relations, while accumulating experience for future projects and building a solid foundation for its activities. In the first half of the 1990s, the fund set as its most pivotal challenge supporting the transitional Chinese economy. It provided China with the necessary know-how to build a market economy, and to the same end designed and conducted a number of projects for information/personnel exchange and human resources development. Moving into the latter half of the 1990s, the fund felt that the relationship between the two countries had progressed past the stage of setting the stage for communication characterized by the slogan of 'friendship' and had rather reached the point where practical cooperation should begin. Taking as its new watchword 'From friendship to cooperation,' the fund set its sights on developing human resources to support China-Japan relations in the 21st Century, and construction of channels for dialogue between practitioners from both countries.
I believe the biggest challenge in China-Japan relations in the 21st Century is to establish an interdependent relationship between China and Japan based on a civilian-driven model. The peoples of these two countries, though living in the information age and inseparable in geopolitical terms, are able to understand each other only through a limited number of media sources. By learning about the people of a country with different history and customs, one gets to understand those people. The most important foundation for mutual dependence between China and Japan is this understanding and the mutual respect based upon it. Accordingly, I believe that supporting mutual understanding at the level of the civilian is the most important challenge for the Sasakawa Japan-China Friendship Fund, the largest private fund linking China and Japan. Towards mutual understanding between the people of China and Japan We believe that the following two methods are the most effective to promote understanding between the peoples of two countries. The first method is to provide an incentive for people to work towards an understanding between peoples and countries. The second method is to lay out the conditions required for understanding other people. The Sasakawa Japan-China Friendship Fund Steering Committee, as an institution that selects projects based on the insight and experience of experts well versed in the most important issues facing China-Japan relations, hopes, with your assistance, to construct outstanding projects.