Princess Akiko Calls for Elevating Traditional Japanese Culture; World Forum on Japanese Culture Kicks Off

By Ayako Hirayama / Japan News Staff Writer

14:44 JST, June 9, 2025

ATAMI, Shizuoka — Princess Akiko of Mikasa stressed the importance of cultivating fertile soil for traditional Japanese culture to live on without the need for protection, during a recent event that kicked off the World Forum on Japanese Culture.

The forum, which was established to convey to the world the distinctive characteristics of Japanese culture, held its inaugural sessions at the MOA Museum of Art in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, on May 31, with about 500 people in attendance.

In the first session, Princess Akiko delivered a speech titled “Japanese Art: Untold Stories,” in which she said that traditional Japanese culture will become “a thing of the past” unless it is incorporated into modern society and people make use of it.

“Culture should come alive in our everyday lives,” she said. “Japanese culture is supposed to be closely connected to our everyday lives, not something merely appreciated.”

The princess said she realized how little she knew about Japanese culture when people often asked her about it while she was studying at the University of Oxford. That realization led her to study Japanese art and eventually launch “Shinyusha,” an initiative that provides children with opportunities to experience authentic Japanese culture through workshops. Topics include making Japanese tea in a traditional manner and wearing kimono — practices that are no longer common in everyday Japanese life.

The princess said that the goal of the initiative is to plant “seeds of memories.” She hopes that the children will have pleasant memories of the workshops and that they will recall those memories in the future, thereby building a feeling of affinity toward traditional culture.

She called for a “bottom-up style” of cultural preservation, in which each person naturally strives to protect their culture, rather than a “top-down style,” in which authorities choose what to keep and protect.

“If you don’t know why something is important, you don’t care to protect it,” she said. “What we can do now is use our own efforts to build a future for preserving our precious Japanese culture.”

In the second session held on the same day, Masatomo Kawai, a professor emeritus at Keio University, gave a keynote lecture on the uniqueness of Japanese culture. He said Japanese culture has been nurtured through finding harmony between nature and people, while in the West, culture and science have developed through efforts to overcome nature.

A similar point was addressed in the discussion that followed involving four experts: Kawai; Kazumi Murose, a lacquer artist designated as a living national treasure; Harvard University Prof. Yukio Lippit; and Tokugo Uchida, director of the MOA museum.

During the discussion, they affirmed the importance of seeking “coexistence between nature and society” in the 21st century amid global challenges such as division, conflict and environmental issues. Murose said that Japan, through its long history, has incorporated aspects of overseas cultures into its own to create new values and traditions to pass on to the next generation.

Lippit said culture is not something each country should discuss independently, and that common values are important for getting even people overseas to feel like they want to carry on Japanese cultural heritage.

World Forum on Japanese Culture

Organized by Harvard University′s department of History of Art + Architecture, the MOA Museum of Art, the Japan Arts Council and the Cultural Affairs Agency, the forum aims to elevate the appreciation of Japanese cultural values globally. Leading figures in traditional arts, traditional crafts, science and other fields are invited to speak, providing various perspectives on Japanese culture.

Recordings of the forum’s lectures and discussions will be made open to the public in multiple languages: English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Thai. The recordings are planned to be made available online through about 20 institutions in 10 countries, such as the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University.

The third session is scheduled to be held in August and will feature Ryoji Noyori, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and Seiichi Kondo, a former director general of the Cultural Affairs Agency, as speakers.