Governmental Seminar
Speaker: Hiromitsu Yagi (Secretary-General, Kumamoto International Foundation)
Title: Kumamoto International Foundation (KIF)’s challenge to promote internationalization of Kumamoto City
Date&Time: 11 Jun. (Thu.) 25 June. (Thu.) 2015, 13:15-16:30
Venue: Lecture room1 (3F), Medical Education & Library Building
Summary:
Kumamoto City considers international exchanges to be one of its most fundamental and important administrative priorities and, starting with its friendship and sister city relationships, the city of Kumamoto has worked to promote international exchanges in a variety of different fields.
Particularly in recent years, local communities became to have diverse needs for international exchanges from such aspects as an increase in the population of foreign residents and citizens’ large interests in foreign countries.
As such, the Kumamoto International Foundation was established in March of 1993 in order to further deepen mutual understandings and friendships beyond borders of nations, and activate local communities with the help of the energy and creativity by citizen involvement as well as to effectively and positively expand international exchange activities in the future.
In 1999, the “Kumamoto Internationalization Guide” was published with the vision of realizing a peaceful society for all people to live comfortably. Then, the Guide was updated in 2010, to make the city globalized with full of vitality. The two main focuses are to develop various grass-roots international activities, and to promote multi-culture society for all the people regardless of nationalities to live comfortably.
In compliance with the Guides, KIF promotes fostering individuals to be globally minded, and go stories to contribute to the international society from a citizen level, with various programs as consultation service in various languages (English, Chinese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Tagalong), Japanese class, disaster prevention, seminar and workshop to raise awareness of global issues, volunteer activities and so on.
At this lecture, following topics will be brought up:
(1) What is the status of non-Japanese residents in Kumamoto?
For example about visa, nationality, transition for years, comparison to other cities, and prefectures, etc.
(2) What are the problems non-Japanese residents face here due to differences of languages, cultures and customs.
(3) KIF’s projects to solve the problems as above, such as consultation service, Japanese class, etc.
(4) About Kumamoto City International Center (KCIC) as the center of internationalization of Kumamoto city.
