Professor Okabe: 47 visits to Ukraine and a "Golden Heart" from Zelenskyy • NUJU

“Golden Heart” of Ukraine in Japan. This is exactly what can be said about Professor Yoshihiko Okabe – an authoritative Japanese scientist, Ukrainian scholar, and Honorary Consul of Ukraine in Kobe, whom President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded the “Golden Heart” award this summer for his great humanitarian contribution to supporting Ukraine.

“My colleagues and I had the honor to meet with Professor Okabe at the Honorary Consulate of Ukraine, which operates at Kobe Gakuin University. It was an extremely warm and, at the same time, businesslike conversation, which resulted in an important agreement: in the fall, an international NUJU photo exhibition on the work of Ukrainian war correspondents will open in Japan, and advocacy for Ukrainian journalists and media will be strengthened,” said NUJU President Sergiy Tomilenko, who heads the NUJU delegation visiting Japan.

The meeting was attended by Svitlana Karpenko, a well-known Zaporizhzhia editor of the newspaper Trudova Slava, Olha Vakalo, a journalist from Zaporizhzhia, and the president of the ALTER company, a Japanese cooperative organization supporting the visit.

The Ukrainian delegation presented to Professor Okabe the activities of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), including a network of Journalists’ Solidarity Centers (JSC), documentation of russian war crimes against journalists, and the revival of front-line newspapers. The members of the delegation transferred fresh copies of front-line newspapers and materials about persecuted journalists to the Ukrainian library at the Tadashi Matsuguchi Center for Ukrainian Studies.

It was especially important for Ukrainians to hear that the story of Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchina, tortured in russian captivity, caused a deep resonance in Japan and is now widely covered in the Japanese media. In general, Japan is calling on russia to release the captured Ukrainian journalists immediately.

Professor Yoshihiko Okabe is a special figure. Back in 1992, he came to Kyiv to understand the processes of the collapse of the USSR. Since then, he has visited Ukraine 47 times. His outspoken support for Ukraine and, at the same time, his principled position on the northern territories of Japan occupied by russia even led to Moscow putting him on its sanctions list. It is symbolic that Kobe Gakuin University is home to the region’s first Matsuguchi Tadashi Center for Ukrainian Studies. Starting this year, three Ukrainian students will study here at no cost, and the university has also joined the Global Coalition for Ukrainian Studies.