New Delhi | Japan Festival

As part of the Japan Festival, dance, film, and music programmes are being organised by the Japan Foundation and will be held from October till December 2017 across multiple venues in Delhi. This year has been marked as a year of ‘Japan-India Friendly Exchanges’, and it is also the 60th anniversary of the Cultural Agreement between India and Japan signed in 1957.

Kaoru Miyamoto, Director General of the Japan Foundation, New Delhi, says, “On this occasion, we hope Indian audiences will enjoy the various aspects of Japanese culture, which is a blend of traditional values and the modern spirit. We also hope that this continuous people-to-people exchange will continue to promote mutual understanding between the two countries.”

The Festival begins in October with Makoto Kuriya’s Creative Jazz Ensemble. Kuriya is considered a revolutionary in the Japanese music industry. This is followed by a Japanese traditional music concert by Wasabi, a group renowned for making traditional Japanese instruments appealing to young people in Japan.

The Festival will also host the screening of a series of new films from Japan and a retrospective of Akira Kurosawa’s films. The first film being screened, Her Mother, directed by Yoshinori Sato, has been selected for screening at the Dharamshala Film Festival 2017. The director will be present for an interaction after the film screening. By popular demand, four of Akira Kurosawa’s films will be screened - Seven Samurai(1954), Throne of Blood (1957), Yojimbo (1961), and Red Beard (1965). For the first time, the Japanese Film Festival will present the largest selection of new Japanese films. Fifteen films have been selected from among the best releases from Japan, handpicked to give Indian audiences a sense of the range in contemporary Japanese cinema, and will include features, documentaries, and anime.

The programme closes in December with a collaborative performance by Goyokai, a traditional Japanese dance, with Kathak and Indian classical music. Goyokai comprises of five highly celebrated Japanese traditional dancers. Each dancer originates from different schools and family lineages of the Japanese traditional dance, Nihon Buyou.

The Japan Foundation was established in 1972 by special legislation in the Japanese Diet and became an Independent Administrative Institution in October 2003. The mission of the Japan Foundation is to promote international cultural exchange and mutual understanding between Japan and other countries. The New Delhi office of the Japan Foundation was established in 1994 and is the only office located in South Asia. It is active in three focus areas: Arts and Culture, Japanese Studies and Intellectual Exchange, Japanese-Language Education Overseas.