Makoto Shinkai Receives Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Fine Arts
Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs announced the year’s winners of the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Fine Arts on March 1, including anime director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name., Weathering With You, Suzume). Also, manga artist Satoru Noda (Golden Kamuy) received the Rookie Award.
Since 1950, the Agency for Cultural Affairs has annually awarded the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Fine Arts and its Rookie Award to individuals who have made outstanding achievements or have opened new frontiers in 11 fields of the arts – theater play, film, music, dance, literature, fine arts, broadcasting, popular entertainment, arts promotion, critic, and media arts.
Winners will receive a certificate and a cash prize of 300,000 yen for the Minister’s Award and 200,000 yen for the Rookie Award. The award presentation ceremony will be held on Thursday, March 9 at a hotel in Tokyo.
As for why Shinkai received the Minister’s Award in the media arts category, the Agency for Cultural Affairs notes as below:
“Suzume” was a huge hit as soon as it was released, and was widely supported by the public as a truly national film. This film, which depicts the Great East Japan Earthquake, has been called one of Shinkai’s trilogy of disaster films, following “Your Name.” and “Weathering With You.” The film overwhelms us with its large scale and dynamic storytelling. The road movie that follows Miyazaki, Ehime, Kobe, Tokyo, and Tohoku is filled with the beauty of rural Japan and compassion for a bygone era, and the resistance of one high school girl who tries to get her loved one back makes us feel the magnitude and heartlessness of Mother Nature even more. With a worldview based on Japanese mythology and folklore, his animation style that depicts a “grand epic” is one-of-a-kind.
Makoto Shinkai:
Meanwhile, the reasons for Satoru Noda’s wining the Rookie Award in the media arts category are described as follows:
In 2022, Satoru Noda’s “Golden Kamuy” reached its eight-year conclusion after a very successful run. This work, set in Hokkaido and Karafuto at the end of the Meiji period, was a rare work that combined scale and speed with a complexity of countries, peoples, individuals, and various other layers. In particular, the variety of characters, including both friends and enemies, and the depiction of different cultures scattered throughout the story attracted many readers. We would like to give the Rookie Award to this work with the anticipation to creating more new stories from various histories in the future.
“Golden Kamuy” manga 1st volume cover:
Source: Agency for Cultural Affairs
©2022 “Suzume no Tojimari” Production Committee
©Satrou Noda/SHUEISHA
