THE NATIONAL UNION OF
JOURNALISTS OF UKRAINE
On June 8, the ceremony of awarding the winners and laureates of the 16th National contest titled Charity Ukraine 2022 – Charity In Defense Of Ukraine took place in Kyiv at the National Center for Business and Cultural Cooperation, Ukrainian House. Among the winners is the Japanese editor and public figure Jun’ichi Kowaka, who helped Ukrainian journalists during the war.
The candidacy of Jun’ichi Kowaka, editor-in-chief of the Japanese-language monthly Safety of Our Foods and Life/head of the Japan Offspring Fund, was proposed by the All-Ukrainian charitable fund, Journalist Initiative.
“Our hero and reliable partner-philanthropist lives in the million-strong city of Saitama in the Tokyo agglomeration,” said the honored journalist of Ukraine/founder and head of the Journalist Initiative Foundation, Liudmyla Mekh. “In cooperation with the management of the GREEN COOP corporation, which has its head office in the city of Fukuoka, the Japanese actively helped Ukrainian journalists during the war. Mr. Kowaka is the initiator of the Japanese project in Ukraine. Actually, the charitable activities of 2022 are part of a large project to help Ukraine, which has been going on for more than a decade. On the pages of the magazine edited by Mr. Kowaka, a lot of attention is paid to our country, to the issue of supporting Chornobyl disaster fighters, teachers, and children, mainly in areas attacked by the enemy during the attack of the Moscow aggressor.”
Over 100 journalists and media newsrooms affected by the war were provided various financial and material assistance from Japan in 2022. In particular, the assistance touched on the resumption of activities of local mass media in the de-occupied territories of Ukraine. Thanks to the help, more than 25 newspapers (as of May 2023) in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Kherson, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhia, and other regions have already resumed publishing in the areas liberated from the aggressor. In fact, Japanese colleagues and donors contribute to solving such a public problem in the information sphere by providing local press to residents of the de-occupied territories. This is what a creative union of journalists is mainly engaged in: it has maintained partner relations with the Japan Offspring Fund and Journalist Initiative Foundation for many years.
Japanese Jun’ichi Kowaka, winner of Charity Ukraine 2022 contest in Media & Charity nomination
Here are just a few facts from the partners’ activities: more than UAH 200,000 were used in establishing the prize fund for journalists-winners, laureates, and participants of the NUJU creative competition Information Front 2022. A special edition of the We Are From Ukraine! newspaper with a circulation of 20,000 copies was prepared for printing thanks to Japanese financial assistance. It was distributed free of charge both in Ukraine and abroad. Other types of assistance were also provided to teachers and media persons. Such assistance included cash payments, warm clothes, food products, vitamins, etc. The target audience for the Japanese charity funds of the Journalist Initiative Foundation and the NUJU are press workers, children, and families of the Chornobyl disaster liquidation veterans. The efforts of the charity providers are mainly aimed at supporting the population of the affected areas of the Zhytomyr and Kyiv Regions.
Special thanks for the support of the mass media is to GREEN COOP Corporation, in particular to its leading branch, in which Yoko Hidaka and Hiroaki Kataoka work. Thanks to their colleagues from the company’s regional directorates in the prefectures of Hiroshima, Kumamoto, and Nagasaki. For the good of Ukraine, Jun’ichi Kowaka contributed to attracting financial resources and provided a lot of his own funds – tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. As a producer, during the war, he organized a number of charity concerts of the Ukrainian violinist, now a U.S. citizen, Oleh Krysa, in Kyiv and Lviv, and then in Saitama. In Japan, famous violinist Chie Sawada, the head of the art association Japan-Ukraine, also played on stage together with the outstanding musician. Donations collected at the concerts aim to support young musical talents and media workers in the country, which currently resists the ruscist offensive.
Journalists also express their gratitude to associates of the head of the Japan Offspring Fund and sincere friends of Ukraine from Japan.
The awarding ceremony of the winners and laureates of the competition in Kyiv was attended by a member of the board of the Journalist Initiative/Honored Journalist of Ukraine, Nataliya Chereshynska, who accepted the awards for her Japanese colleague from Saitama on the stage of the Ukrainian House. The statuette and diploma will be handed over to the winner by Ukrainian media people.
Serhii Shevchenko, Journalistic Initiative
Photo: author and Nataliya Chereshynska
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