JF Waste?

[Aaron Gerow]

Thanks again to Mark for the long post.

Two quick comments:
>
> The point by the former ambassador jibes with what I have read:  
> funding for Bunkacho has had the lowest priority in the weakest  
> ministry in the government. The JF appears to be an independent  
> administrative agency under Bunkacho, but conspicuously, it is not  
> shown on Bunkacho's org chart along with the other IAIs. What is  
> their relationship, exactly?

The JF is not linked to the Bunkacho. As they say on their home page  
they are " special legal entity supervised by the Foreign Ministry"  
that "was subsequently reorganized as an independent administrative  
institution". All the news reports I've seen/read still talk about it  
being under the supervision of the MOFA and this link confirms that:

http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/annai/shocho/dgh/
>
> $B!=(B If Bunkacho were compared with its European counterparts,  
> the budget for the British Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Media is  
> 11 times that of Bunkacho's. The French Ministry of Culture and  
> Communication has a budget 14 times that of Bunkacho. In terms of  
> per capita spending, Japan spent 478 yen per person in 2001, while  
> England spent 2,592 yen and France 4,334 yen.

A university president wrote in the Asahi today that the percentage of  
the national budget spent on culture in France is 0.9%, in Korea 0.8%  
and in Japan 0.12%. Pretty lamentable.

I hope some of these stories generate discussions on what the cultural  
policy should be.

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
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