Author: Maggie Coetzee The cosplay community in South Africa has existed for well over fifteen years, and may have started small, but saw a drastic climb during recent years as marked by South Africa becoming the first African country to participate in the World Cosplay Summit back in 2018, and then shortly thereafter in The…
Author: Emma Ruiters In recent years, Japanese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been rising in African countries. A new development has been that Japanese FDI has been flowing to information and communications technology (ICT) & Digital Technologies. African countries are growing rapidly which is likely underpinning rising investment, but African economic development is already demonstrating…
Author: Daniel Bugan Stellenbosch University Japan Centre on Wednesday (7 December 2022) hosted a seminar that shed more light on Japan’s Science and Technology (S&T) ecosystem and policy, and its efforts to expand its international S&T footprint and deepen collaborative networks among scientists and researchers. The seminar, in collaboration with the Embassy of South Africa…
Author: Scarlett Cornelissen Science and diplomacy tend to be regarded as vastly different spheres, but together they are a bridge to connect and help realise the Sustainable Development Goals, thus contributing to the betterment of humanity and the planet. So stated Professor Motoko Kotani, science and technology (S&T) co-advisor to Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs,…
Author: Scarlett Cornelissen On 3 March 2022, in association with the Embassy of Japan in South Africa, we hosted a webinar on ‘Towards closing the gender gap in economic participation: Perspectives from Japan and South Africa.’ The context for the webinar was two-fold. First, International Women’s Day was celebrated on 8 March 2022. As prelude,…
Author: Sue Segar In 2013, whilst attending a conference in Yokohama, the leading Japanese immunologist and vaccine developer, Professor Yasuhiro Yasutomi, told the South African singer and humanitarian, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, (also a speaker at the conference), that his life’s goal was to find a vaccine for HIV. The 5th Tokyo International Conference on African…
Stellenbosch University Japan Centre (SUJC) was launched on 11 August 2022. The launch ceremony, which took place at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, formalised long-standing partnerships in research and student and staff exchange between Stellenbosch University (SU) and academic institutions in Japan. For more than two decades SU academics have been part of collaborative…
On 23 November 2022, Prof Scarlett Cornelissen was a panellist on a Chatham House webinar on ‘Africa-Japan relations and evolving multilateralism’. Your can read more about the panel discussion here.
Already by the morning of 28 September 2022, exactly 50 students from Stellenbosch University had registered for the info session on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET). The JET programme is a Japanese government sponsored exchange programme that aims to improve foreign language teaching in schools and to promote international understanding. The info session…