by Christine F. Godinez-Ortega, OPI
The Sumitomo Foundation of Japan’s Program Officer, Akinori Matsunaga visited the MSU-IIT on July 2, 2015 to meet with the Institute’s researchers and deans and directors at the Institute Boardroom.
During his brief visit, Matsunaga presented the programs and application process in the application of projects for possible funding by the Sumitomo Foundation.
The Sumitomo Group of Enterprises started as a copper refinery business in Kyoto, Japan during the 17th century, when they obtained a concession from the Tokugawa Shogunate. In commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Sumitomo’s Besshi copper mine, the Sumitomo Foundation was established as a non-profit grant-making foundation of the Sumitomo group.
Matsunaga later distributed application forms and information documents about the Sumitomo Foundation. For the year 2014, the Sumitomo Foundation received a total of 22 applications from the Philippines but only six were awarded research fellowships and one of them is the OPI Acting Director Dr. Christine Godinez Ortega.
Most of those who attended the briefing either had studied or had conducted researches in Japan. The visit of Matsunaga was hosted by the MSU-IIT Office of Publication & Information (OPI).
OPI’s Godinez Ortega received a Sumitomo Research Fellowship in 2014 for her study “Lessons from the Folk: A Study of Setting of Selected Folktales from Japan and Selected Folktales from Mindanao”.
The research project looked into the setting or environment of the folktales from a green perspective using Ecocriticism or the Green Studies Approach, one of the emergent approaches in Literary Criticism that began in the US in the 1980s and in the 1990s in the UK.
It explored how setting moved narratives forward and looked into how culture sprung from setting, how it influenced the behavior of the characters that have been in turn shaped by cultural values, religious beliefs and individual characteristics, and how they coped with the environments they lived in. The study hopes to help make man see the urgency of the preservation of the biotic community in our eco-critical times.
For more information about the Sumitomo Foundation research projects click on this link: www.sumitomo.or.jp/e/ – (by the Office of Publication & Information (OPI) )
Topics : Sumitomo Foundation Japan