Date and time: October 10th (Thu.), 2019 14:00-16:00

Venue：Main Conference Room, third floor at IASA

Speaker : Christopher GERTEIS (Associate Professor, IASA)

Title: The Problem of Politicized Philanthropy: The Marketing of Social Values since the 1970s

Chairperson： SONODA Shigeto (Professor, IASA)

Language： English with English PPT (QA: Japanese or/and English)

Abstract：
In this talk Christopher Gerteis will examine how philanthropist Sasakawa Ryoichi was by the early 1970s bringing considerable resources to bear on what he decried as a morals crisis amongst Japanese youth. Sasakawa was himself the product of a Meiji-era morals education curricula that had been a cornerstone of wartime assertions of the supremacy of the Japanese people, the divinity of the Emperor, and the duty of unbridled self-sacrifice for the Empire. After his release from Sugamo prison in 1949, as head of the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation (known today as the Nippon Foundation), Sasakawa commonly advocated for a return to traditional morals education that would educate Japanese children in the traditions, manners and customs central to the shushin curriculum of the prewar and wartime era. While Sasakawa’s impact was blunted by scandal and frivolity, as head of the philanthropic arm of a vast gambling monopoly he nevertheless controlled material resources sufficient to accomplish a great deal of his goals. His legacy includes significant children’s educational foundations that advocate an array of curricula from martial arts education to water safety. All include elements of his 1970s morals education campaigns. Perhaps more significantly, the ideals that underpinned Sasakawa’s philanthropic legacy overlapped with the rightward swing of mainstream domestic politics and resurgent acceptability of ultranationalist ideals. The concomitant far-right political agenda benefited from Sasakawa’s largess — and garnered the support of sympathetic politicians, public persons, scholars and artists — by buttressing the popular notion that ‘Grandpa Sasakawa’ was a well-intentioned and sweet old man.