Past Winners

Speech text

Dear:

Mr. Naotoshi Okada − President and General Director of Nikkei, Japan.
Delegates and distinguished guests
Representatives from the media and press agencies

Ladies and gentlemen,
First of all, I would like to give my most respectful greetings to all the participants attending the 20th Nikkei Asia Prize Award Ceremony today.
I was really surprised and quite emotional when Nikkei informed me that I am one of three Asian candidates to have achieved this prestigious award. This is a great honor not only for me but also the more than 5000 Vinamilk officers and employees who have been making ceaseless efforts for the future development of Vietnam and Asia.

Such devotion must have been recognized by Nikkei and the international community. Both Vinamilk and I will be greatly motivated and more determined to carry out the mission of becoming Vietnam’s No.1 symbol of the belief in nutritional and healthy products that serve human life.

Over its 40 years of development, from a state-owned enterprise founded in 1976, equitized in 2003, and listed on the stock market in early 2006, Vinamilk has grown rapidly and sustainably over 11 years of its equitization with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% per year in terms of revenues and profits. This has helped changing the image of Vietnam's dairy industry, promoting Vietnam’s national brand, and gradually expanding it regionally and globally to play its role in the development of Vietnam, creating a promising future for Asia as set out under the goals of the Nikkei Asia Prize.

I would like to donate all the awarded amount of JPY3 million through the United Nations Children's Fund?? (UNICEF) in Japan to children in Nepal suffering from the unprecedented earthquake. It is my personal desire as well as Vinamilk’s business culture to do our best for a better future for children in Vietnam and around the world.

My sincere thanks also go to Nikkei and the jury members of the Nikkei Asia Prize for giving me the opportunity to be here at today’s ceremony. Thank all the Japanese, Vietnamese and international press agencies for your interest in this special event.

I wish all of you good health, happiness, and success.
I wish an increasingly prosperous future for Asia.
Thank you very much.

Speech text

Ladies and gentlemen,

It is my great honor to receive the Nikkei Asia prize for science and technology. I would like to take this opportunity to thank NIKKEI for establishing such a prestigious prize and to the selection committee to recognize our achievements. I would also like to thank my 200+ colleagues of the Daya Bay experiment from 6 countries and regions and 40 institutions. In particular, I would like to thank Prof.s Jun Cao and Kam-Biu Luk, they made great contributions to this experiment and they are real heroes. I would also like to thank my family and in particular my wife, who sacrificed a lot in the past years to support my research activities.

My work is about fundamental particles. We now understand that our world is made up by only 12 types of elementary particles. Among them, three are neutrinos. You can immediately realize that how important and fundamental neutrinos are. Indeed, neutrinos are responsible for the formation and evolution of our Universe. It is at this country, Japan, neutrinos are found to have a peculiar property: neutrino oscillation. Namely, one type of neutrinos can change to another type during their flight. This discovery by the SuperKamiokande experiment in 1998, often called atmospheric neutrino oscillation, revealed a fundamental parameter of physics, called theta-23. This parameter describes neutrino transformation from one type to another. Prof. Koshiba was awarded the Noble prize for this great achievement. In addition, solar neutrino oscillation, represented by theta-12, is known through a major contribution by an experiment again in Japan, KamLAND. I actually had the honor to be part of this experiment, and got to know a lot of Japanese colleagues, including Prof. Atsuto Suzuki, the former spokesperson of KamLAND and the former director general of KEK.

For three types of neutrinos, you can have three ways of neutrino oscillation, described by these three parameters. So there is one more parameter, theta-13, yet to be known. One of the best ways to measure theta-13 is to use reactor neutrinos. We proposed such an experiment near the Daya Bay nuclear power plant in the south of China, and we managed to secure funding from Chinese government and afterwards, from the US government, and those of other countries and regions. Daya Bay experiment thus has become a real large international collaboration. We designed the experiment with a factor of 10 better the precision than previous experiments, and a factor of more than 3 better than our competitors in the world. This high precision turns out to be a key to win the race to measure theta-13.

The experiment was proposed in 2003, approved in 2007 and the construction lasted 4 years. In these 4 years, we built a 3 km long underground tunnel, 5 underground experimental halls, 8 neutrino detectors located in three water pools, together with custom-built readout electronics, a data acquisition system span over kilometers and a large analysis software package. In the Christmas eve of 2011, our detector began to operate and our first physics result was announced on March 8, 2012, only two and a half months from the operation of the experiment. For the first time, we concluded with a very high confidence level, that a new type of neutrino oscillation represented by theta-13, does exist. Although there were indications of non-zero theta-13 from other experiments, including the T2K experiment in Japan, this result still shocked the community since it came unexpectedly fast, the theta-13 value is surprisingly large, and the result from us was so precise. We are very proud of this great team, in particular many young staffs who worked on this experiment day and night tirelessly. On the other hand, this experiment couldn’t have been a success without tremendous support from local governments and the power plant.

Now we are working on a next generation neutrino experiment in China. The new international collaboration, called JUNO has been established with -60 institutions from 10 countries. This detector is designed to be 20 times larger than that of KamLAND, the largest liquid scintillator detector in the world. It has a size similar to that of water-based SuperKamiokande, and can measure the neutrino mass hierarchy. In addition, it can determine neutrino oscillation parameters to a level better than 1%, and study supernova neutrinos, geoneutrinos, solar neutrinos, and etc.

Of course all of the efforts cannot be made possible without supports from the governments. In particular, we are extremely happy that China can play a major role in fundamental science. You may all know that China had experienced a lot of tragedies in the past 200 years, and it is only now that we can think about making contributions to the mankind on earth. Basic science can not only bring us a lot of hopes for technology revolution and for a better life, but it can also bring us a better cooperative world. In particular, physical science has grown to such a large scale that international collaboration becomes a must. The European Center for Particle Physics, often known as CERN, is a great example. This center invented World-Wide-Web, which is now an essential of our lives. This center recently discovered the “god particle” ? Higgs, which completed our understanding of particle physics by a Standard Theory. This center actually helped Europe to recover from the world war II. I must say that we are now also facing great opportunities. Japanese physicists hope that the International Linear Collider will be built in Japan. I really hope that this effort can be strongly supported by Japanese people and the Japanese government. Asia can play a much bigger role on science, since we have the necessary scale of economy and we have plenty of brilliant people. We urge all the governments in Asia to promote more on science, in a way corresponding to its scale of economy and population.

I would like to thank Nikkei to promote science in Asia and I hope that more people will join us to support science. It will bring to us a better world.

Speech text

Thank you.

What an extraordinary honor this award bestows on the Asian Youth Orchestra. I only wish it were possible for all 104 members of this year’s AYO to be here today.

The Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture and Community is their award. Belonging to each of them and the more than 2,000 Asian Youth Orchestra members who have gone before them over the past 25 years. Not to mention the many Asian CEOs, corporations and individuals who have supported us all these years; Tony Kobayashi at Fuji Xerox, Shoichi Asaji at Nihon Building Service, Sumitomo Mitsui Bank and YKK to name just a few here in Japan.

This year the Nikkei Asia Prizes celebrates its 20th year. At AYO, this year marks our 25th year, and yet it seems only yesterday that my dear friend, the legendary violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, walked onstage in Kumamoto Japan as music director of the Asian Youth Orchestra to conduct our first concerts.

Some of you may know that Lord Menuhin was the first international artist to come to Japan to perform after world war two. In fact he performed in the Hibiya Kokaido, just across the street.

Time passes. Many of today’s AYOers were not even born when we started in 1990.

It’s amazing how we’ve managed, given the cultural, political and economic tensions that have come and gone over these many years.

100 or more young musicians, ranging in age from 17 to 27, each selected through competitive auditions held in 11 cities across Asia, close to a thousand candidates trying out each year, a staggering 22,000 applicants over the years, the successful 100 each year winning full scholarship opportunities for three weeks of study with master professionals from the great orchestras of the world − the Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Minnesota and San Francisco symphony orchestras, the Bergamo Italy Festival Orchestra, Milan’s La Scala Opera, the Vienna Volksoper, Brussels’ Monnaie Opera, the Triple Helix Trio and the Boston and Peabody music conservatories − these intense weeks of study and rehearsal capped by three weeks on tour performing in the great concert halls of the world.

Since its inaugural performances in 1990, this award-winning Orchestra has played some 366 concerts in Asia, Europe, the United States and Australia to an audience of more than one million concertgoers. Millions more have seen and heard the orchestra around the world on CNN, CNBC, NHK and Radio and Television Hong Kong.

2010 recipient of Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale Grant for Young Artists, the Asian Youth Orchestra has played more concerts in more cities in China than any other orchestra based outside the mainland.

AYO was the first international orchestra in 50 years to perform in Vietnam. The Orchestra premiered Academy Award-winning composer Tan Dun’s Symphony 1997 with cellist Yo- Yo Ma marking the territory’s reunification with China. The Orchestra has performed in the White House, at the United Nations, in New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Berlin’s Shauspielhaus, Sydney’s Opera House, and just about every major concert hall across Japan and Southeast Asia.

Lord Menuhin would be so very proud of what AYO has achieved and the role that this orchestra has played in the personal and professional lives of hundreds upon hundreds of wonderful young Asian musicians, and the prestige that comes with this Nikkei Prize.

It struck me when I was preparing these remarks that there are many ways to express our appreciation to the Nikkei Prizes committee, but as a youth orchestra, perhaps there are none better than through the words of our AYO members. Please allow me to let them speak:

“Today is September 4th. Five days have passed since the last day of AYO 2014. I did not write earlier, because in the first days when I got back home, I still somehow could not face the truth that, it is over.

"Flashback to the old years. I first listened to AYO concerts in 2011. Stefan Jackiw was the violin soloist. At first, I did not really care about the orchestra, just going because of the soloist. But after the concerts, for the first time of my life, I felt so impressed by an orchestra! I had to tell right then to my mother, 'Oh, imagine how it would be if I could play in that orchestra! I wish someday I can be there with them…'

"Time passed. After two years my teacher encouraged me to take the audition. I didn’t do well, and failed the scholarship. And that year, when AYO had concerts again in Hanoi, I listened with so many tears on my face, because I realized that I wanted to be a part of that wonderful sound so bad that I could not forgive myself for failing the opportunity.

"And this year. So much pressure on my shoulders, not because of my parents and teachers, not because I am afraid of failing. The reason is, I am afraid I will never be able to play in AYO, live a life that is full of music − great, great music.

"But I made it! I expected for such a nice time ahead, I could feel something so, so different waiting for me. And actually, it was even more than I expected.

"All that time, six weeks living with music, AYO has digged into the deepest corner of my heart, and I could see exactly how much more I want to be a musician, a violinist. It opened such a deeper and wider way of feeling the music! Thank you so much. AYO has taught me so many things about music and orchestra playing that no one told me before.

"And, AYO has given me many friends from such far corners of east and southeast Asia, with many different cultures, different languages, but having the same passion for music. We have built beautiful friendships, shared a lot of things together, and they have given me inspiration in playing music too.

"Many thanks to general manager Mr. Lau, with Mr. Peterson and the stage team who took care for all of us, gave us such security that I am highly appreciated.

"And again, thank you Mr. Pontzious. Thank you so much for making for all of us a dream come true that we can hardly imagine before. It means so much for me, my family, my school and my country. And just for me, AYO gave me many laughs, tears, excitement, exhaustion, nervousness, happiness, surprises… because of everything.

"Thank you AYO! I will never forget!

"Hoang Ho Khanh Van, Vietnam"

Mr. Pontzious, “When I went to AYO I didn’t know how I would communicate with my teacher or my fellow orchestra members. But at the Rehearsal Camp Opening Ceremony, when we all played Elgar’s Nimrod, I knew for the first time in my life that I could communicate through music, and through my trombone. Thanks to your big efforts, I have the most precious moments in AYO.” Takahiro Ono, Japan.

Mr. Pontzious, “you have changed the life of every AYO member. The AYO experience has given us the chance to work with world-class musicians, to perform with fellow musicians who are now making a mark in their respective countries, and to make wonderful music. I am forever grateful.” Gina Medina-Perez, Philippines.

“AYO made my dream come true. It changed my life and my world. It influenced not only my playing but also my life. The influence is deep and unlimited. Thank you very much for your chance. I will never forget it.” Clement Wong, Singapore.

Mr. Pontzious, “I appreciate everything that AYO gave me. Incredible and unforgettable experiences. It was really a precious time in my life. I won't forget the memories of 2008-2010 summer.” Kim Ji Hyun, Korea.

And now this precious Nikkei Asia Prize, recognizing AYO not only for the music we make, but our work as cultural ambassadors across East and Southeast Asia, as well, acknowledging the power of music, the power of friendships and the power of pride in mutual achievement.

On behalf of everyone associated with the Asian Youth Orchestra, thank you, members of the Nikkei Asia Prizes committee, for putting the spotlight on our AYO.

Speech text / June 2, 2004

Honourable President, Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen

It is a great honour for me to receive the Nikkei Asia Prize 2004. When the news of my receiving the prize was communicated to me, it was quite a surprise for me. I was not expecting to win this prestigious prize. But being chosen for it made a big difference. This prize has inspired all of us in Grameen Bank for a very special reason. The name "Nikkei" represents the core of the economy and the media in Japan. Being recognised by Nikkei is like a dream come true.

We have been struggling all a long, since we began to lend money to the poor in Bangladesh in 1976, to convince the world that what we are doing should be accepted as an integral part of business. We have been arguing that it is absolutely wrong of the financial institutions to reject the poor people by assuming that they are not creditworthy. I wanted to demonstrate in one village that banking can be done with the poor people without collateral and without risking the money. My demonstration was successful. But nobody took it seriously because it was done in one tiny village. So I expanded my work to several villages.

It worked as good as the first time. But still I could not change the mindset of people. I continued to expand my work and created a separate bank, called Grameen Bank, to lend money exclusively to the poor people, mostly women. The bank became very successful. It drew attention of many countries around the world. Our methodology to lend money to the poor was adopted all over the world. But still mainstream banking stayed away from lending money to the poor.

I hope our receiving the Nikkei prize will bring a change in the conventional banking.

Grameen Bank has been a great experience of discovering reality around me. More and more I realised that whatever I learnt from the formal education system did not expose me to the reality of life of the poor. In many cases what is passed around as knowledge about poor people is actually nothing more than pure and simple make-believe stories. On top of it, we start believing in our own made-up stories, so much so that we refuse to accept the reality even if it stares at us in the face. We are quick to protect ourselves by dismissing evidence which does not fit into our made-up story.

The famine of 1974 in Bangladesh was a rude shock for me. A real life famine raging around you is quite a different experience than reading volumes about it. I found it terribly embarrassing to teach elegant theories of economics to my students telling them that solution to economic problems can be easily derived from those theories, while people are dying of hunger right outside the class-room. It did not take much time to see the emptiness of those theories in terms of their capacity to help the hungry people. Since economic theories could not help me to help the hungry people around me, I thought I should go back to the root and become a basic human being and try to help another human being without any acquired knowledge about it.

That's what I did. In the process I learned many things which I never knew before. I learned that poverty is not created by the poor people. It is not their fault at all. They are as human beings as anybody else. It is the system which turned them into poor. Existing system is built to reject them, and deny them opportunities. If we want to remove poverty from the world all we need to do is to go back to the drawing board and design a new system which allows everybody the same opportunity. Every human being is endowed with enormous potentials. Some get the opportunity to explore those potentials, and some don't get that opportunity. Those who remain unaware about their potentials, because of the lop-sided institutions we built, remain at the bottom of the social and economic ladder.

The prime responsibility of human civilization should be ensuring human dignity for each and every member of the human society. But looking at the condition of the poor around the world we cannot say that the human society has accepted this responsibility with any seriousness.

Grameen Bank has turned out to be a very sound financial institution. It is owned by the borrowers of Grameen Bank. At present there are 3.5 million borrowers, 95 per cent of them are women. It is a bank basically owned by poor women. Currently it lends out nearly US $ 400 million a year. Its repayment rate is 99 per cent. It is financially self-reliant. It does not take any loan, or grant from any source. All its money comes from the deposits it collects from the borrowers and non-borrowers. It regularly makes profit. Last year it made a profit of US $ 6 million.

To encourage the children of borrowers' families to stay in school and perform well in schools, Grameen Bank offers over 6,000 scholarships each year to these children. Grameen Bank gives student loans to students who are in professional schools to become doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, etc.

To make sure Grameen's credit programme reaches the bottom-most, the bank has launched a programme this year exclusively focussing on beggars. The bank offers an option to the beggars. It invites them to carry a collection of popular consumer items, financed by the bank, when they go out to beg from rural households. They can do both begging and selling at their convenience. If their business activity picks up, they may quit begging. More than 9,000 beggars have already joined the programme. We are expecting this number to reach to 25,000 by the end of the year.

If a significant number of beggars quit begging within a year or so, this would be big demonstration of the inherent capacity of the poor people to overcome their problems with their own abilities given the support from appropriate institutions.

I strongly feel that we can create a poverty-free world. We can do it faster than we can imagine. Basic ingredient of overcoming poverty is packed inside every poor person. All we need to do is to help the person to unleash the energy and creativity inside the person. Once this can be done, poverty will disappear very fast. Only place in the world where poverty may exist will be in the poverty museums --- not in any human society.

We need to reconceptualise the business world to make sure it contributes to the creation of a humane society, not create and aggravate the problems around us. One way to do it will be to create social business enterprises, along with conventional business enterprises whose primary aim is to maximize profit. Social business enterprises are new kind of non-loss businesses which aim at solving social, health and environmental problems. Any one who will go into business for doing good to people we may call them social business entrepreneurs. Many social business entrepreneurs exist today, but there is no mechanism to make them visible, no mechanism to bring them in touch with individual investors who would like to invest in a social enterprise. Creation of a social stockmarket will be the logical answer to this match-making problem. Nikkei is the right organization to take an initiative in creating a social stockmarket.

I strongly feel that information technology can change the fate of the poor dramatically, if we can ensure access to information technology for the poor. Information technology has the wonderful capacity to empower an individual person. Micro-credit and information technology can create unprecedented opportunities for the poor people, particularly poor women. We have experienced it through Grameen Phone, the mobile telephone company that we created as a sister company of Grameen Bank. It brings mobile phones to the poor women of Grameen Bank to run a village level telecommunication business. Over 60,000 telephone ladies are running roaring businesses with these telephones and changing their lives and their children's lives by totally changing their outlook on life. Number of telephone ladies will increase to over 100,000 by the end of this year, who will be serving almost all the villages of Bangladesh.

In concluding my speech, I wish to express my gratitude to Nihon Keizai Shimbun for the honour you have granted me. By recognizing me and my work you have drawn world attention to the issue of global poverty and possibility of ending it once for all.

I accept the honour with great humility.

Thank you very much.

Speech text / June 2, 2004

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

I am greatly delighted and deeply honoured to be chosen as winner of the 9th Nikkei Asia Prize for Science, Technology and Innovation. As the first person from Thailand to receive the Prize in this category, I would like to acknowledge it not only as honour for myself, but also for my fellow team members, my institution - the BIOTEC Centre, and my country - Thailand, which together have enabled advanced research and development to be accomplished under relatively difficult circumstances of the developing world. Needless to say, the support of my whole family - present here - has also been an essential factor.

The Prize gives me further confidence in the ability of us Asians to solve our own problems through appropriate use of science and technology, and to spread the results of our innovations for the benefit not only of Asians, but of the world at large as well. The work which has brought me to this point is a long- standing quest to develop new drugs against malaria, based on our understanding of the basic biology of the parasites. Malaria is a big global health problem, causing illness in hundreds of millions, and deaths of more than one million people every year, mostly in the developing world. Put simply, it kills a person about every half a minute. It is an old disease which has been affecting mankind throughout history. Although there have been many drugs to fight against this disease, many of them have lost effectiveness because the parasites have become resistant to them. Therefore we urgently need to find new drugs.

In the old days, people found the cure for malaria in the bark of the cinchona tree, located through adventurous trips to the jungles of South America. In our effort to find new drugs, our work also took us on adventures, not to the wild jungles of the physical world, but to the jungle of our ignorance about the malaria parasite. We need to understand what the malaria parasites need to sustain their infectious power and what we can do to stop it. We need to know how the drugs which used to be effective lost their effectiveness, and what can be done to regain it. The drugs on which we have been working, known as antifolates, work through stopping the function of an important component of the parasite, which is the molecular "target" of the drugs. The parasite fought back by changing this target, so that the drug cannot find it. We therefore set out to find how the drugs interact with the parasite target, and how the parasite managed to change it so that it could be come resistant.

Using the techniques of molecular biology and structural chemistry, we obtained the structures of both the original and changed targets, could see how the drugs bind with the target and stop its function. We could further see how the parasite evolved by changing the target, so that the old drugs could no longer work. More importantly, we could also see how to hit the changed target effectively. We now have the information and strategies needed to design and make new drugs which will be effective against the resistant parasites.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

What I have told you may sound like a neat adventure, just a matter of finding solutions to some problems and reaping the reward of success. In fact, science is never that easy. Behind a successful experiment are ten others not so successful, or even outright failures. In a developing country, we are handicapped further by lack of people and resources necessary for doing good research. When I started my research career, I was given an empty lab! But I was already better off than many scientists in developing countries, who have even no lab to start with. My first grant support was $300, a sum which did not go very far even in the cheaper age of the early seventies. No wonder so many scientists from developing countries decided to work in advanced places away from their homeland. For many who stay home, there are so many hurdles to overcome, and so many distractions to lure them away from the laboratory. However, I have always been committed to working as an active scientist in my country, in spite of many difficult conditions. Our path is full of obstacles slowing us down, but these also make our journey a challenging one. Eventually, with our sustained efforts we could win international grants for our work, our research group could grow in our country, and could contribute significantly to our society and the world at large.

I realized quite early in my career that science and technology cannot be done in vacuum. It needs good infrastructure, and understanding and support from the society. Like many developing countries, Thailand still lacks these elements, but there are potentials for building them up. Important though the international support programmes may be, they are not sufficient and can be meaningful only in the early phase of development of a country. Eventually, each country must rely mostly on its own resources to nurture the growth of its science and technology, which will in turn give benefits back with value worth many times that of the investment. I therefore devoted substantial effort towards the goals of strengthening the management and support of science and technology in Thailand. Over the years, the effort paid off in helping to make big improvements in the research management and funding areas, with establishment of such agencies as the BIOTEC Centre which I helped to create, the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), of which I served as the first President, and the Thailand Research Fund, for which I had a part in planning. The big challenge for me was not only to help to create and run these agencies, but to be able to come back to research at full force after some years in management positions. This was possible since I always kept my research going, with thanks to the many colleagues and students who share the same goals and interests.

The universal nature of science, technology and innovation means that they are connected all over the world. Because of this connectivity, development of science, technology and innovation brings benefits not only to the country of origin, but to all countries. It is therefore very appropriate for Nikkei Asia Prizes to include science, technology and innovation as a part of contributions to stability, development and the enrichment of people's lives in Asia. I am very gratified to see that our work has been recognized by the judges as fulfilling the goals of the Prizes. The Prize will give me further strength to carry on with the unfinished tasks both in the search for new effective antimalarial drugs, and in striving for better science and technology status in Thailand as a whole.

Thank you very much.

Speech text / June 2, 2004

Oute fa'atulou atu i le Mamalu ma le Paia o lo'o alala i itu e fa o lenei Maota. On behalf of my Aiga (Families), I greet this distinguished gathering.

Firstly, I thank, most sincerely, Mr Gaishi Hiraiwa, Chairman of the Nikkei Asia Prizes selection committee and the members of his committee for selecting me for this generous Prize for Culture . I thank also Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., (NIKKEI), the sponsors of the Prizes. It is the most prestigious award I have ever received. It is a wonderful honour and recognition of the work I and other Samoan and Pacific writers have done. I will always be grateful to NIKKEI and the Japanese people.

I grew up in a small country, Samoa, a Polynesian group of islands that is linked through geography, history and culture to Asia and the other island countries that are scattered across our magnificent ocean, the Pacific. Our Polynesian ancestors came down from somewhere in S-E Asia through parts of Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia and took some 4000 years to explore and settle the Pacific. In their daring exploration of our great ocean, sea and sky became the governing elements in their lives. Unlike those who come from large bodies of land, they saw a world without limits. They used their knowledge of the ocean currents, winds and stars to navigate their lives by and create a wise and extensive oral literature. My writing springs from that oral literature. For over thirty years I have been writing about Samoa, my adopted country Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Pacific, the Region that I love and which is one of the most culturally diverse areas in the world. Through my writing I hope I have helped - in a modest way - to story, define, and bring into being the peoples and cultures of those countries and that Region.

My journey as a writer began with my grandmother, parents and other elders who raised my brothers, sisters and I on the ancient knowledge and ways of Samoa. Much of those were handed to us orally through stories and oratory. Mele, my dynamic grandmother, was an authority on Fa'a-Samoa, the Samoan Way. She fed us on our history, our genealogies that connect us to our Gods and each other and the universe and nature. She was also a spellbinding storyteller who filled and shaped our lives with her stories. She died, many years ago, at the age of ninetyfour, but she is still with me as the greatest storyteller I have ever known. I carry her and Samoa whereever I go and in whatever I write.

Throughout my life I have learned from other writers and the literatures of the world. I was thirteen when I went to boarding school and later to university in New Zealand and experienced a culture very different from mine. I became fluent in another language, English, and through that fell in love with much of the world's literature in that language. The influence of that literature and many of its authors combined with the indigenous influences of Samoa made me the writer I am today. As a young writer I was enthralled by the work of Japanese writers and film makers such as Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, and Akira Kurosawa. And later by the novels of Kenzaburo Oe. To those writers and filmmakers I will always be indebted.

When I was finishing my university studies in New Zealand in the early 1960s, I was told by some writers there that, because Samoa was small and remote, it would not provide me with enough material for writing novels. What I soon discovered when I returned to my country was that Samoa was small geographically but, like other countries, it has a long and rich history and a complex culture of relationships between people, between people and society, between people and nature and the environment, and between people and the cosmos, the fertile stuff for novels, enough material to explore and write about for the rest of my life.

In that journey to try and understand my own people and the locations I belong to, I have come to understand a little about human beings every where, about our differences and similarities, about the inner darknesses and light that seem to govern our behaviour, and about love and courage and self- sacrifice that are common to all humanity.

That journey has also enabled me to appreciate and live with the huge contradictions that we and our lives are. In Samoan mythology, when the Supreme God, Tagaloaalagi, created us and our islands, He gifted us agaga (soul), poto (cunning, wit), masalo (doubt), loto (spirit), atamai (intelligence), and finagalo (will). Those marvellous gifts make for contradiction: they not only make us capable of enormous love and creation, healing and invention, but also of selfish arrogance, cruelty and violence. That contradiction is at the heart of all our cultures, philosophies, and literatures. I grew up in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, a time of incredible invention in technology and science and the arts yet a time of unbelievable violence and suffering, brutality and injustice. Every where we look today we see a tragic continuation of that. As writers it is our duty to bear witness to that.

There is much in globalisation that I admire and support. But some of it is a continuation of colonialism. Some powerful nations continue to seek free and cheap access to all the markets and resources of our planet. In that unrelenting quest, our environment and small powerless cultures and peoples are being threatened with erasure. However, we are witnessing a defiant refusal by them to give up their individual ways, languages, beliefs, and the right to be themselves. Within countries some minority groups refuse to be assimilated into the faceless mass national cultures. Again, as writers we must bear witness to their wondrous defiance.

This is my third visit to Japan. My first two visits had a profound effect on how I perceive other people and cultures trying to adapt to and cope with modernity and radical foreign influences. I used some of the material from those visits in a novel, OLA, which was published in 1991. I want to end with one of the poems I included in the Japanese section of OLA:

My Mother Dances

Through the shadows cast by the moon tonight the memory of my mother dances
like the flame-red carp I watched
in the black waters of the lake
of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto.
Such burning grace.
Though I'm ill with my future
and want to confess it to her,
I won't. Not tonight.
For my mother dances
in the Golden Pavilion
of my heart.
How she can dance.
Even the moon is spellbound
with her grace.

Ia alolofa Atua ma fa'amanuia mai i lenei Saugiga, ma lenei Laumua, ma lenei Atunu'u loto alofa.

May the ancient Gods bless this Ceremony, this great City, and this illustrious Country.

Soifua

Speech text / June 4, 2003

1. Greetings

Honorable Mr. Sugita Ryoki, president of Nihon Keizai Shimbun,
Ms. Urvashi Butalia, who won the Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture,
Dignitaries from Japan and abroad, and
Ladies and gentlemen,

I am Hun-Jai Lee.

It is the utmost honor that the South Korean structural adjustment I initiated has received such high recognition and been given one of the most prestigious awards in Asia.

Let me thank Mr. Gaishi Hiraiwa, who led the selection committee, and all of its members, for allowing me to take rank with 21 winners of the Nikkei Asia Prizes in the past and present. I also wish to express my deepest gratitude to Nihon Keizai Shimbun for giving me an opportunity like this.

It is a great pity that the fellow winner Dr. Yang, recognized for his achievement in technological innovation, could not be here today due to the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

It is not exactly appropriate for me to receive this honor as my personal achievement.

The honor should be extended firstly to the people of the Republic of Korea, who have endured a multitude of pains and demonstrated the spirit of fortitude in the process of facing and overcoming the nation's economic crisis. My thoughts go out to the people of our nation, who participated in the gold collection campaign to help the government increase its overseas assets, despite great sufferings from massive unemployment. The primary factor behind overcoming numerous difficulties to achieve structural adjustment, was the existence of national consensus that there was no alternative but to go down that path, however painful it might be.

Another person who truly deserves the honor is President Kim Dae-Jung, who made the brave decision to take a politically unpopular policy, acknowledging the harsh reality of South Korean economy in the process of overcoming the nation's currency and financial crisis. Allow me to pray for a quick recovery of his health.

Looking at past examples of countries having overcome crisis, leadership, especially future-oriented leadership, holds the key for successful structural adjustment.

I wish to also share this honor with my colleagues, junior government staff and private-sector specialists, who fought a lonely battle, with all their might, to fulfill given duties in the spirit of dedication and conviction to overcome the crisis and reform fiscal structures.

The new principles and systems we created, have provided the foundation for further developing the Republic of Korea into the 21st century.

2. Lessons of structural adjustment

Today, I wish to share with you what I have felt during my struggle to overcome the nation's currency and financial crisis.

Firstly, I have found it more desirable to separately handle macroeconomic policies for controlling the economy, and structural adjustment policies for resolving inconsistencies within financial systems. It is a common experience among countries that underwent financial crisis that improving the macroeconomic environment does not necessarily resolve systemic problems. What's more, putting off the task of structural adjustment, citing economic stagnation, would only expand the problem instead of eluding it.

A government should not resort to an austere policy of artificially manipulating the interest rate or exchange rate, in order to encourage structural adjustment. Such a policy is not only low in legitimacy but also doubtful in its effectiveness.

For example, the 1997 financial crisis of South Korea stemmed from excessive and non-performing debts in the corporate sector. The initial government measures, combining high interest rates and austere budget, ended up worsening the situation.

This has some relevance in the recent argument in Japan about the priority between anti-deflation measures and structural adjustment. The two goals are not interchangeable or sequential. They should be pursued simultaneously.

Secondly, I have come to realize that companies and economies are organic entities that can only survive through adapting to environmental changes. Re-engineering can solve most problems if you opt to respond to each challenge as they come. This is why the term "structural adjustment" is positioned as daily expression in a country that has established economic flexibility, e.g. the United States.

Yet, in South Korea and Japan, the term "structural adjustment" is perceived as some kind of catastrophe. This is because we have long left inconsistencies and inefficiencies un-addressed to a point where the use of drastic measures is unavoidable, thus causing significant damage and pain.

Under such a situation, a nation must destroy various economic and financial practices it has long been accustomed to, and reform the real economy as well as financial structures. In extreme cases, the nation may have to resort to structural revolution, totally abandoning its conventional system of economic administration, and building a new one from scratch.

The greatest difficulty of it is the extreme pains all of the nation's economic entities must suffer as they undergo such revolutionary changes. The pain of unemployment and subsequent social uncertainties may rock the national system from its foundation. This is why it is always the best option to constantly conduct structural adjustment, addressing individual problems swiftly as they emerge.

Thirdly, if structural adjustment is required in a terminal state like this, it is important to enforce it with determination and discretion regardless of the serious pains it accompanies.

Overseas experts on structural adjustment, including staff of international organizations, advised South Korea to implement it in an orderly and sequential manner.

Since various problems that necessitate structural adjustment are mutually linked, once full-scale structural adjustment begins, hidden problems tend to emerge simultaneously. Stunned and bewildered, people often try to cover up such problems. Yet, we must endure the pains and calmly sift through the problems one by one.

The South Korean capital of Seoul is a major city with a population of over 10 million. The Paldang Dam on Han River in northern Seoul provides the enormous amount of water consumed in the city.

In order to ensure health of Seoul residents, we must enforce the system of water quality control, preventing harmful materials from entering the reservoir. However, at the bottom of the reservoir lies a thick layer of harmful sediments accumulated over many years. Processing the sediment is an urgent task that needs to be implemented separately from the operation of the water quality control system.

There are two options. One is to ignore the problem and put off taking any measures as long as possible. However, the cost of rectifying the problem in the end would be beyond imagination. Or the problem may deteriorate to a stage beyond repair however much money you are prepared to spend.

The other option is to clear the sediment. It is the correct course of action from a long-term point of view, and must be done at some point in the future. However, it is not the most desirable option from a short- term perspective. The operation would cause all harmful substances to rise to the surface, making the reservoir's water unfit for human consumption for some time.

Structural adjustment poses the same issue. Implementing it would inevitably cause shock and confusion, as well as the need for short-term sacrifice. At the heart of the structural adjustment policy is the choice between continuing to drink potentially hazardous water while leaving the accumulated sediment undisturbed at the bottom of the reservoir, and swiftly taking countermeasures to achieve truly clean water despite immediate inconvenience on a serious scale.

The fourth point I wish to make, precisely in view of such attributes of structural adjustment, is the strong importance of leadership backed by the sense of commitment and communication with economic entities.

Most people support the general concept of structural adjustment, but oppose specific details that force them to accept sacrifice. In order to achieve structural adjustment successfully, a government must seek public understanding, frankly laying out its side effects, development process and future outlook, including how all economic entities must bear some pain, and how the entire process may take longer than people may anticipate.

Structural adjustment can be likened to the conventional endoscopic swallowing test, in which a patient must suffer nausea while observing the monitor, rather than endoscopy conducted under anesthetics, in which test results are given after a brief sleep.

Then, why do we have to undergo structural adjustment that delivers so much pain? It is like surgery to remove a leg. The surgery is performed not because having one leg is better than having two, but because keeping the leg will lead to a situation whereby both legs must be removed.

Unlike the human body, economy has a strong power of regeneration. Once the factors impeding a positive economic cycle are removed, new jobs and industries of high added value will emerge, just like new skin is formed over a wound. When the general public understands and accepts this, the operation of structural adjustment can be achieved smoothly and effectively.

One thing I want to stress is the fact that a mistake is a mistake, and that letting time pass by would not correct the situation.

When a company or financial organization loses its competitive edge and public confidence, there is a limit as to how much it can do to revive itself.

When this happens, such entities with compromised competitiveness end up intermingling with more healthy companies and financial organizations, with healthy operations trying to help rotten operations, and eventually end up rotting themselves.

Offering rotten apples and fresh apples together in a basket would make it impossible to sell them at a fair value. Rotten apples must be discarded without hesitation, so that fresh ones can be sold on their own. The same logic applies to structural adjustment, and it has to be applied quickly. Hesitation would only cause the rotting to spread, leaving no fresh apples to sell.

Needless to say, the process will require a political leadership capable of making brave decisions and securing public acceptance for their share of the burden. Structural adjustment is a policy that does not readily attract public support, forcing people to give up their vested interest. It may very well shake the political foundation of the leadership.

It is precisely because of this that many countries have failed to achieve full structural adjustment or repeated failures. And this is why it is extremely important to have leadership with frank communication and commitment.

3. Suggestions to Asian neighbors, particularly Japan

I have offered my opinions formed in the process of overcoming the financial crisis of South Korea. Today, has South Korea solved all problems that caused its financial crisis, and secured the foundation for stable economic development? My answer to this question is still pending.

In my opinion, the country has only just finished cleaning up the old wastes that had been accumulated for many years. Efforts are now underway to develop and establish a system for preventing new wastes from accumulating again.

Numerous infrastructures are needed to achieve sustainable growth in the national economy. Many tasks remain to be implemented, including expanding the social security system, improving the flexibility of the labor market, preparing a system for transparent corporate management, building a matured system of local autonomy, and introducing a pluralism-based competition system.

Although many problems remain unsolved, the case can be considered as a successful example, with the country swiftly and bravely addressing its currency and financial crisis, and overcoming the difficulties to stabilize the economy. Yet, can Japan and other Asian nations take the South Korean example of structural adjustment and apply it in solving their domestic problems?

My answer is NO. Just as the policy package for financial crisis in Latin America was not suitable for South Korea, diagnosis and treatment formulated without identifying the true nature of domestic economic problems could only jeopardize the situation even further.

Above all, Japan and South Korea are totally different in the scale and complexity of financial structures. We also have different political systems and cultures. Our current problems are also attributed to different factors.

While Japanese problems have emerged in the maturity stage of successful economic growth, South Korean problems have arisen from the loss of drive as the country attempted a high level of growth beyond its capacity.

When the currency crisis struck South Korea, I had the opportunity of reading "Roma-jin no Monogatari (Tales of the Romans)" by Nanami Shiono. In the introduction for Volume II "War with Hannibal", the author said that historians should judge historical persons or events solely on the basis of whether they were in line with the demands of the time.

Traditional society before the Industrial Revolution had knowledge that formed the basis of added value and competitive capacity. In the industrialized society that followed, since such knowledge was held by competitors, the approach of learning and improving through benchmarking proved effective.

In the knowledge-based society of the 21st century, the key to competitive edge lies in the capacity to foresee the future.

We must now look ahead into the future, rather than reflecting back to our past. In this sense, the 21st century can be described as the age of severance, in contrast to the 20th century dubbed the age of uncertainty.

South Korea followed in the footsteps of Japan in achieving the Industrial Revolution. Yet, we clung to our own myth of success despite the fact that the success formula had already hit the limit, and missed the opportunity for taking a fresh path, thus heading straight into a crisis. The group that held vested interest under the old system refused to accept any changes, and brought reform attempts to a failure.

Since Japan recorded a series of remarkable successes throughout the 20th century, it may paradoxically experience just as much difficulties for transformation.

Now, concluding my speech...

I feel the Japanese economy is not only for the people of Japan. Whether the Japanese economy performs well or not will affect areas far beyond immediate Japanese concerns. The Japanese economy represents a significant proportion of the global economy, with direct links to the economies of East Asia in particular. Japan not only supplies production technologies, management and capital, but also provides the demand and sales routes, in other words the market itself, to countries in this region.

Japan appears to keep on postponing the urgent task of structural adjustment, while its economy remains in a protracted stagnation in the absence of vitality, leaving surrounding economies in frustration. Let me take this opportunity to express my sincere hope that Japan will overcome the current difficulty, and re- emerge as a nation of hope, ironing out the creases of East Asian economies.

I will wait, in enthusiasm, for the day of accomplishment in Japan's economic and financial reforms, backed by the reform philosophy of Prime Minister Koizumi and commitment from Financial Services Minister Heizo Takenaka.

Finally, let me repeat my deepest gratitude for selecting me for this great honor. Thank you.

Speech text / June 4, 2003

Dear friends and colleagues,

It is a great honor for me to be awarded Nikkei Asia Prize which has great influence on the development of science in Asia and beyond. It is a great encouragement for my colleagues in China. I would take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to the staff and friends in Nikkei and solutes to all distinguished guests.

We are known to be new comers in genome sequencing. Four years ago, facilities to do the job did not exist yet. However, China made the voice of "We are on your side by joining you" and became the latest contributor to the international Human Genome Project, placing itself alongside France, Germany, Japan, UK and USA. Now we are advancing from 1% contribution to HGP to 10% contribution to the following international HAPMAP project.

The sequencing of the Super Hybrid rice is our second leap forward. To choose rice as our next target has its practical, logical and scientific reasoning. Rice is a good model organism to the study of other plants, and any information we learn from the project has the potential of being applied to rice breeding. It is not easy to do the job at that time because there are so many simple short tandem repeats distributing in rice genome that are almost the same, and then biologically-defined repeats were insufficient for sequence assembly, that is, to put all the short sequences together. We developed our own software and overcame the obstacles in sequence assembly. The sequencing capacity reached 30 megabase (Mb) a day, that is, equivalent to 1% of human genome once. The task was fully accomplished according to the schedule. The jobs were all done by my young staff who worked around the clock. We finished the work in just 74 days as reported by Scientific American. We announced the working draft and released the sequence data in early October 2001. We landed on the cover of the journal Science ahead of other institutes. We deserve it even though we are still at the very beginning.

We have made all the rice genome sequence as well as the human genome sequence freely available that you can download to your computer from any corner of the world. Rice genome is as important as human genome that we think, as expressed by former President Jiang, owned by all, done by all and shared by all.

Genomics will help us to close the knowledge gap between genome and biology, and the genome sequence is an essential reference to the understanding of life and ourselves. When we decoded the human genome, we found that the number of human genes is much fewer than we expect. Then a question naturally rose: how can so few genes make a great man? When we work on the rice genome, we were so surprised to see there are about 50-60,000 rice genes and then the question was raised: how can so many genes make so small grains of rice? The question has not been fully answered today, but we have found something to interpret it. We have found many products from the same gene in human, however, this is not the case in the rice genome. Human gene would have less gene duplication and more so-called alternative splicing to make one gene equal to many, but rice would survive by more gene duplication so that one gene can do a single job.

In our present combat with SARS which has prevented me from joining you in this ceremony, genome sequencing has again demonstrated its power. My institute has taken the lead in China again by finishing the complete sequencing of four isolates and developed ELISA diagnostic kit accordingly. Now we are still working day and night in further research of SARS.

Through these years we have established four powerful platforms in our institute: sequencing platform with a capacity of 45Mb/day (1.5% human genome), genotyping platform with 1,000,000 typing/day, microarray platform with 12,000,000 spots /day and proteomics platform. All these platforms are facilitated or assisted by bioinformatics platform. We are still going to sequence more, such as the soybean, the chicken and etc. We have to think more, think faster and think farther.

We have won some achievements in science, and more importantly, we have won mutual trust and friendship which is essential to further international collaboration. Here I would like to close my speech by acknowledging all of those who have been with me and behind me, especially Prof. James D. Watson, Prof. Bolund Lars, Prof. Olson M and etc.

While I again express my high gratitude to Nikkei, I would also like to invite you to visit our Beijing Genomics Institute someday. I will proudly show you our talented young staff and powerful supercomputers then. I look forward to meeting you in the near future.

Speech text / June 4, 2003

Ladies and Gentlemen
It is difficult for me to know how to begin or indeed what to say on this occasion. It is customary to begin by thanking people and indeed, I want to thank first the Nihon Kezai Shimbun for having awarded me this wonderful prize. I'm grateful to all the members of the jury for considering my work and my activities important enough to recognize them in this way. I'm grateful for the award, for the graciousness with which the organizers treat the awardees, and I am grateful for a chance, once again, to visit a country and a culture I have grown to love, and where I have found many friends who have become my family. I cannot even begin to thank them individually, because then it will take up all the time I have for this brief speech, but they know who they are, and how I feel about them.

Until a few years ago, Japan was just another country to me, interesting, important but something that did not really impinge on my world, except in August every year when we took out peace marches on Hiroshima day, or when I read the occasional novel by a Japanese writer. Then, thanks to the Japan Foundation, the Asia Leadership Fellowship Programme and the International House of Japan, I was given a chance to spend two months here. Those two months changed many things for me. They allowed me a glimpse of the culture, the history and the people of Japan, and they allowed me to see the similarities, the overlaps and differences in our experiences, to see how much we could learn from each other. If this can happen to an individual, I realized at the time, how much more can be done if we are to have these kinds of exchanges on a larger scale. It was those two months that convinced me of the value of cultural exchanges.

Japan is the biggest donor of development aid to India. The two countries have recently marked a half century of diplomatic interaction, and while it is everyone's hope that this interaction continues, it is also important to ensure that cultural, human, academic interaction also forms a part of this. Administrative and political borders are sometimes difficult to cross, but at the human level, there is much we can learn from each other.

My interaction with Japan also brought me another unexpected reward: the translation of my book of oral narratives of the Partition of India, into Japanese. This time, it was a chance encounter with a Japanese woman, Emiko Fujioka, that resulted in this. Because I am a publisher, at first I was somewhat skeptical about the feasibility of such a translation. How would a book from a very different culture translate into another, I asked myself ? But Emiko-san not only pursued the translation with commitment and dedication, she also found a subsidy and a publisher. In that sense, the award which is being given to me today for this work, is as much for Emiko's dedication and work, as it is for me.

I'd like to speak a little about my book, The Other Side of Silence. It is never easy to explore a country's - or one's own - violent past, to excavate memory, to confront complicity, to listen to stories of grief and pain. Working on this book was not an easy thing for me, and all the time I was haunted by the question of how useful an exercise such as this could be. Today, I believe it is increasingly important for us to confront and come to terms with the experience of violence in our pasts, sometimes in our own families and communities, if we are to learn to address it in our present, and our future. We live in a deeply conflicted world, where war and violence have become the order of the day, where only certain kinds of people are characterized as terrorists, while others get away with blatant injustice and violence. The past has much to teach us here, both about remembering and about forgetting. For me, the greatest reward that this book has brought is the way people from all classes and backgrounds have reacted to it. And how much I have learnt from those responses and reactions.

It is never easy to pinpoint the things that make up the sum of a person's life. Yet if I were asked today about my own life, I would have no hesitation in picking the two things this award has recognized: my research and writing on conflict, out of which my book has grown, and my work as a feminist and a publisher. Long years ago, I realized that the voices of women were absent from so much public discourse. Everywhere you look, you see only men, and the rare woman who is there, stands out precisely because she is so rare. I was driven by the desire to create a forum where women's voices could be heard, and to work towards putting that most powerful tool, knowledge, and information, in the hands of women. This was the motivation for our small publishing venture, and if we have had any measure of success at all, it is because there was clearly a need for such an enterprise. But it's one thing to dream a dream, to chase a star, it's quite another to operationalise it. And that is something I would never have been able to do had it not been for the support of my colleagues, my family (particularly my parents), and my friends. I would like to acknowledge their contribution in this award.

Finally, I want to say that in a globalized world, a world of big actors, of multinationals and conglomerates, it is wonderful to find an award that recognizes and honours the small actors, the players of small parts, the providers of alternatives. It is wonderful to find an award that recognizes not only politics but also culture. Thank you Nikkei for this honour, and thank you too, importantly, for putting me in the company of two very outstanding awardees, from China and Korea. I am honoured to receive this award, and honoured to be receiving it alongside Mr. Lee Hun Jai from Korea and Dr Yang Huanming from China.

Speech text / May 20, 2002

President Takuhiko TSURUTA, CEO of Nihon Keizai Shimbun,
Chairman Gaishi HIRAIWA and Distinguished Members of the Nikkei Asia Prizes Selection Committee,
My Esteemed Japanese Colleagues and Friends,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

This is a great moment for me, my family, and the members of my institution, to receive this great award from the most prestigious news media of Asia, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. Not only the people in Japan and Asia but also many well-informed business people are reading the news from NIKKEI every day because we know that any change in the Japanese economy would affect greatly the economy of the world. As a fellow Asian, I am very proud of Japan, an Asian country that has such a real economic strength. By following the NIKKEI indexes on the Tokyo Stock Exchange market we can feel the breathing of Japanese economy, and by reading the NIKKEI, either in the print edition or in the leading most popular electric form NIKKEI WEEKLY Online, or the NIKKEI Net Interactive Online, we can learn a great deal the economic situation of Japan and of the world. Furthermore, the NIKKEI Asia Prizes since 1996 are regarded as measures of the accomplishment in a number of sectors in the developing economies of Asia. The NIKKEI Asia Prize for Regional Growth awarded to me this year is indeed a recognition for the achievements made by the people of Vietnam under the governance of the Communist Party and the Government of the Socialist Republic Vietnam. Ceaselessly we are doing our best to contribute toward peace and social security of the region. We are also contributing a significant part to the food security of some of our Asian neighbors and many other countries in the world.

Looking back to history, we Vietnamese barely had enough time for economic development: more than one thousand years under Chinese domination, more than a hundred years under the French followed by more than 30 years of American wars. When we finally got peace and unification in 1975, we face a new kind of war: the war against poverty, food insecurity, and backwardness. This is the biggest challenge we ever had, to rebuild the war-torn country under the embargo of big economic powers of the world. We made some mistakes at first, but we soon learned to give more incentives to the people. The birth of the doi moi -or renovation- policy continues to flourish ever since 1981 starting with a reform in agricultural policy. Since then, poverty is constantly being reduced and people's welfare is improved remarkably. Today our food production has reached surplus levels that place Vietnam among the top three world exporters of rice. Political stability and bright prospects for export to the US, EU and Japan have increased both domestic and foreign investors' confidence in Vietnam. GDP growth has been increasing steadily due to favorable foreign investment of USD1.2 billion and more than 21,000 domestic businesses with a combined capital of VND26.5 trillion (USD1.76 billion) in 2001. Standing by these national achievements, I and my university colleagues feel very proud of the little contributions we have made from our agricultural education-research-extension activities in the Mekong Delta since 1975. We have foreseen a likelihood of food shortage not only in a country just freshly recovered from a long war but also in many other countries around us. Thus we must give an all out effort toward securing food production of this region to restore the rice export position that Vietnam used to play before the American war. We have developed appropriate agricultural technologies such as high yielding rice varieties and the package of techniques to accompany each new variety; sustainable farming systems for various agroecosystems; profitable management of acid sulphate soils and saline affected soils of the Mekong Delta. We educated thousands of students and involved them in both research and extension works. We teachers and students went beyond our university's walls to transfer the developed technologies to local government officers, extension workers, and farmers. In 1978, the brown planthopper infestation destroyed virtually all the high yielding rice areas of the Mekong Delta. It caused widespread famine to hundreds of thousand rice farmers. We closed the university for two months and send our 2,000 students to work with farmers all over the delta to fight the dreadful insect. Armed with one-kilogram of brown planthopper resistant rice seed, each student was taught to guide the farmers to plant 1,000 sq m of rice land. Ordinarily farmers need at least 10 kg seed to plant the same area. Thanks to the new technologies, farmers were able to combat the brown planthopper, restored their production within two cropping seasons. Ever since, we continuously gave technical advice the farming communities to help increase their income and at the same time protect their environment. We also tested various farm management systems and agricultural policies to recommend to the government. One noted example is the land management policy that assures farmer's incentives to use the land while the state maintains full control of the land. We were not alone in this endeavor. Many companions have been on our side: the newspapers, the radio, and the television timely spread out the information we developed. Without them it would be impossible to reach out the technology-hunger people. In our research and training activities, many international organizations, be it a non-government organization, an international research institute (particularly the International Rice Research Institute) or a university, have come to our help in terms of funding, equipment, breeding materials, or expert guidance. My professors and colleagues at Kyushu University and some other Japanese universities have tirelessly supported my research program with needed materials. Clearly, the little part that I and my university colleagues have contributed toward the growth of my country would not have been so successful without the concerted effort of the people I mentioned above. Therefore I want to share the honour of this NIKKEI ASIA Prize with all my professional colleagues, my friends in the mass media, and my dear Vietnamese farmers. Of course this honour also belongs to my wife and children whose sympathy for my frequent absence from home has enhanced vigor to my work in the field.

President TSURUTA, Chairman HIRAIWA and Distinguished Guests present today! I am very grateful to The Selection Committee for having selected me this year's NIKKEI ASIA Prize for Regional Growth. In acceptance of this Asia honour, I wish to assure you that I shall try my best to contribute toward a more rapid growth of Vietnam in harmony with the region. The next step for Vietnam is to stand among the members of the WTO. There will be opportunities as well as challenges. For us the basic way to minimize challenges and maximize opportunities is a globalized education and training for the whole society. That is my endeavor in the years to come.

Thank you.

Speech text / May 20, 2002

On behalf of the Department of Medical Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, I would like to thank Nihon Keizai Shimbun for honoring us with the prestigious Nikkei Asia Prize for Technological Innovation.

This Prize honors the research team in the department who fought long and hard to identify the etiologic agent during the 1998/1999 viral encephalitis outbreak which claimed the lives of 105 pig farmers. Fear and emotion ran high throughout the country, particularly among those directly affected, as the control measures initiated by the government against what was thought to be Japanese encephalitis (JE) did not seem to work. JE, caused by a virus through mosquito bites, is a disease endemic in Malaysia and pigs act as the amplifying host. However, JE virus does not generally cause disease in pigs, unlike this virus, and children not adults run the greatest risk of being infected.

In this mysterious viral encephalitis outbreak, it was noted that some of the infected pigs had severe respiratory symptoms which progressed to paralysis. In addition, the cases were reported mainly among adult male farmers who had close contact with the animals and not among family members, including children, who also lived in the farm. The country spent a large sum of money on insecticides used to kill mosquitoes in infected farms. A larger sum of money was also spent to purchase JE vaccine from a well- established company in Japan. Despite all these efforts and huge amount of money spent, the outbreak spread to several major pig-farming areas in Malaysia. It also spread to an abattoir in Singapore through the importation of pigs from Malaysia, resulting in eleven cases and one death.

As with most outbreaks in Malaysia, the Ministry of Health played a pivotal role in investigating this mysterious epidemic. After five months of treating it as JE, our department was called in to render assistance when the disease spread to the largest pig rearing farms in the country. It is not unusual for large farms to house several thousand animals crowded together under poor farming practice. The outbreak became so severe that the government hospital in the affected area could not cope with the number of sick and dying patients and patients were referred to the University of Malaya Medical Centre where the Department of Medical Microbiology is located. It has now been estimated that four out of ten cases died, and what is even more frightening is the fact that some patients who recovered, had clinical relapse even today although the country has been declared free of Nipah virus.

Against this terrifying scenario, you can imagine the pressure that was brought on us to identify the mysterious virus. The department worked day and night on clinical specimens, using whatever technical skills it possesses. On the fifth day, we struck pay-dirt when a virus isolated from the spinal fluid of a patient working in a farm in Sungei Nipah caused destruction of infected cell cultures. Unfortunately, despite using all the skills we have, we were unable to identify this virus although we did exclude many known viruses as the cause, including JE.

This was where the linkages of the department with international agencies established over many years came into use. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, USA, the leading organization for global outbreak investigation, helped to identify the virus as one related to an Australian virus known as Hendra. However, it was not identical to Hendra and the name Nipah virus was given to this newly emergent deadly Malaysian virus belonging to the family Paramyxoviridae. With the help of CDC and several scientists from Australia, the virus was identified within 17 days and the strategy of control changed from vaccination against JE and killing of mosquitoes with insecticides to culling of pigs in infected farms and the implementation of proper precautions for those who came into contact with these animals.

Like the Australian Hendra virus, it was speculated that Nipah virus also has a natural reservoir. The department was able to isolate an identical strain of this virus from the urine of fruit bats, incriminating them as one of the wildlife reservoirs. It has been speculated that fruit bats were forced by poor environmental conditions, especially the haze from agriculture waste fires in the region, to migrate to pig farms in search of food and pigs became infected and amplified the virus, passing it to their handlers. The impact of the discovery has far reaching implications on human health and the economy of the country. The surveillance programme in pig farms has been on-going and since there has been no evidence of Nipah infection in the last two years, the country has been declared free of this dreadful virus and we can revive the important pig industry. By using drastic control measures, including the culling of 1.1 million pigs, Malaysia has managed to prevent the spread of the virus to countries in the region. The discovery of a new virus, especially one as deadly as the Nipah virus, is a very exciting event for the global scientific community. Many excellent papers have been published by the research team as well as by overseas collaborators. We are proud that our joint paper with CDC in SCIENCE 2000; 288: 1432- 1435 was given the Charles C. Shepard Science Award for scientific excellence.

The sacrifice and hard work of the department staff have been recognized with a number of awards. All these would not have been possible without good teamwork and the collaboration of many. The department would like to place on record the inspiring and pivotal role played by Prof. Chua Kaw Bing, a former member of the department, for the discovery of the Nipah virus, and regret his absence at this award ceremony.

The Nikkei Asia Prizes are designed to recognize outstanding achievements that improve the quality of life in Asia and contribute to regional stability through important initiatives by Asians that will benefit people in the region. It is indeed a great honor that the Department of Medical Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, has been chosen to receive the Prize for Technological Innovation for the discovery of Nipah virus. On behalf of my department, I would like to thank Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. for the award of this prize, which will go a long way for us to continue our fight against new and emerging infectious diseases.

Speech text / May 20, 2002

First of all, I'd like to express my sincere apology for not attending this honorable ceremony. I don't know how to tell my regret for my absence and the chance I lost to gather with the people who presented me this great Prize and with those who I respect and love. I can't attend the ceremony because I have been given an important duty and responsibility as a jury at the Cannes Film Festival in France. I am convinced that my appointment for the jury symbolizes the reliance and respect given to all people associated with film making in Asia, and the expectation of the world toward them. Though I can't attend the ceremony, this never implies a lack of respect and love to all of the participants, especially Nikkei Shimbun and juries who decided to award this Year's Asia Prize in the field of culture to me. It is truly a great honor to receive this Prize. Also, the Prize encourages me to further endeavor to develop and maintain the existence of Asia, especially of the movie industry. For the past 29 years, that is more than half of my life, I have struggled in the movie world and came to believe that movie is not only a subject to watch, but an university and the source of knowledge which provides great meaning to our lives. Through movies, friendship can be formed with people from various national backgrounds in the world who share the same worries and problems. Since Asia has a large potential, I believe it is our duty and responsibility to develop, maintain, and guard it. With diligence, loyalty and unity among us, Asia will continue to be the future of us.

I'd like to take this opportunity to express my congratulations to Prof. Vo Tong Xuan and Prof. Dr. Lam Sai Kit, for each receiving the Prize in the field of regional growth and in the field of technology. I wish their further achievements and good health.

In conclusion, I would like to express my gratitude to all of you who have always supported me these years. My great family in Japan, my mother Ms. Etsuko Takano, my sister Ms. Yuko Ohtake and Ms. Sakiko Nishihiro, my brother Mr. Oguri Kohei, Mr. Tadayoshi Sato and Mr. Ueda, and my teacher Mr. Tadao Sato and his wife Mrs. Sato, Asagaya Family, The Japan Foundation, Iwanami Hall, NHK, Nihon Seinen Kyokai and all my friends whom I can't mention their names here one by one, but who have provided continuous help and support since 1982 when I first formed friendship with Japan.

For the last 20 years, I have been friend of Japan, and now, Japan is my spirit and my second home.

Christine Hakim.

Speech text / June 6, 2001

I am overawed by this honor bestowed on me by such a prestigious business group from Japan, the Jewel of Asia. This is an award to the 9000+ Infoscions - the employees of Infosys. I am grateful to Mr. Tsuruta and his colleagues as well as to the distinguished panel of judges led by Mr. Hiraiwa. Your encouragement is very important for us. We will continue to work honest, hard and smart to be worthy of your kindness.

Corporate growth is a result of a compelling value proposition, focus, teamwork, dedication, a little bit of smartness and a lot of hard work. To achieve growth, you need the co-operation of all the stakeholders of the company - customers, employees, investors, vendor-partners and joint-venture-partners, the government of the land and, finally, the society-at-large. Such co-operation can be enhanced by the corporation adhering to the best practices of Corporate Governance (CG). CG is about maximizing shareholder value while ensuring fairness to all the stakeholders that I talked about earlier. It is about not creating asymmetry in benefits between various sections of shareholders, especially between the owner- managers and the rest of the shareholders. It is about operating as trustees of the shareholders-at-large. It is about being fair and having a long-term orientation. Finally, it is about having a sound value system.

Why do we need to adhere to the best practices of CG?

First and foremost, we value respect more than anything else. Our vision is to be a globally respected company.

Second, we are a global company - 98% of our revenues, over 80% of our customers and about 30% of our investors are from developed nations such as yours. We are listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange and on NASDAQ, a global exchange. Thus, our customers and our investors have wide choices and will quickly abandon us if they see any violation of trust. Our employees are highly educated. They observe, collect and analyze data, and arrive at conclusions speedily. Further, we aspire to become multicultural by employing talent from other countries - particularly the developed countries. Here, again, our employees have wide choices and will aspire to work with the most respected companies in the world. Thus, it is necessary that we remain the employer-of-choice for these employees. We have vendor- partners from multiple countries. These partners want fairness from us as a requisite for long-term relationships.

The Indian government has trusted us and reduced tax rates and custom duties for the IT industry. Further, we operate in eighteen countries; most of them are economically advanced nations. In these countries, since we are a foreign corporation from a developing country, exemplary corporate behavior from us is necessary to enhance the image of India and to build the credibility of Indian corporations. Let me now talk a little bit about the framework of beliefs on which we have based our CG practices.

1. Putting public good ahead of private good will eventually lead to private good.

2. In any civilized society, progress is predicated on trust, confidence and optimism in public institutions, and these should not be violated at any cost. Thus, we must eschew any temptation to use corporate resources for personal benefits. We must ensure fairness and the highest level of disclosure and transparency in all our transactions.

3. For long-term success of a corporation, a sound value system is essential. A sound value system is the fundamental pillar of our CG practices. The value system must be articulated in a simple and straightforward manner so that the message is unambiguous and easy to practice. Our value system can be summed up as: It is better to lose a billion dollars than act in ways that will make us lose a good night's sleep. The most efficient way of ensuring the success of the value system is for the leaders to demonstrate it by example. Thus, corporate leaders will do well to heed the words of Mahatma Gandhi who said: You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Everything else can be bought but respect, trust, and confidence have to be earned the hard way. Thus, our task is cut out. We have to command respect and recognition from the most demanding of marketplaces - the G-7 countries. We have to demonstrate that an Indian company can be a global leader in CG. We will continue to work hard and smart but we need your support and your blessings in our quest to become the best practitioner of CG among all the companies on the NASDAQ. The kindness you have demonstrated today by this award is a clear indication that we have your encouragement. On behalf of 9000+ Infoscions, I thank you.

Speech text / June 6, 2001

Honorable ladies and gentlemen from both this country and overseas, everyone concerned from Nihon Keizai Shinbun, and the chairman of the examining committee, I am very happy and also feel very honored today to receive the 2001 Nikkei Asia Prize. I would like to share this honor with all of you, including my family, the professors who instructed me, and the research staff with whom I shared all my joys and sorrows in the lab.

As a father as well as a husband, I have recently realized with regret that I have not been able to spend much time with my family. To my wife and my two sons who share the honor of being here today, I would like to give my appreciation for both supporting me wholeheartedly without complaining at all so that I could concentrate on my research, and for growing up sound and well.

After graduating from university, I have devoted my whole life to education and research. I believe that the research achievements of the past fifty years were not achieved by myself alone, but were rather thanks to my professors who guided me, as well as the fruit of the efforts of the research staff who conducted the research together.

Epidemic hemorrhagic fever is an incurable disease with a high death rate, and at present approximately 200,000 cases are found worldwide every year. This disease was first found in China and Russia in the 1930's. In particular, several thousand cases occurred among Japanese and Soviet soldiers during World War II, and during the Korean War about 3, 250 U.S. soldiers suffered from this disease and more than 700 of them died. Because of that, it drew worldwide attention, and was once misunderstood as bacteriological warfare. Although scholars from all over the world continued research for several decades, the causative agent was never found until 1975. Seven years beginning this research, fortunately, I found bacteria in the lungs of a field mouse and named it the Hantaan virus after the Hantaan River flowing in the area where the mouse was collected. In 1980, I found a second bacterium for hemorrhagic fever from a rat collected in an apartment building in the city of Seoul and named it the Seoul virus.

The route to this research was a severe thorny path. Though it is embarrassing to tell you, because Korea was very poor economically and there were no decent electric facilities in the 1960s, there was a time when I had to trouble a hospital to use a generator there. Moreover, since I could not raise money for research in my country, I received support from the United States for about 30 years from 1964 to 1993. Above all, since the virus causing the epidemic hemorrhagic fever, as well as its transmission route, were unknown in the initial period of the research, two researchers who were collecting rodeuts outdoors and five researchers who were experimenting in the lab using field mice that was infected and a rats for experimental use contracted the disease and were hospitalized hovering between life and death. I still feel constant regret, and never forget being thankful to them. Fortunately, none of them had to sacrifice their lives, so we were able to continue our research, but we had to close our lab as many as two times. Then, I was determined never to let this happen again in the lab, and to protect the people engaged in the research. In 1984 we started the development of a vaccine, and in 1990 we developed a vaccine that could prevent the epidemic hemorrhagic fever, which is currently used in Korea.

For the past 30 years we have proceeded with joint research with 142 scholars from 42 countries in the world. What I remember most during the time is that we proved for the first time the fact that the cause of hemorrhagic fever in Russia and Europe was similar to that of the Hantaan virus, and we proved the fact that the outbreak of mysterious illness in Osaka, Japan in the 1960s, as well as those that occurred in animal experiment labs in various universities in Japan between 1970 and the beginning of 1980 were epidemic hemorrhagic fever. Then, as a result of proving along with Professor Ishida and Professor Kawamata that the animal carrying the virus was the rat used for experiments, we were able to take preventive measures. I developed a rapid diagnostic kits in collaborative with Dr. Tomiyama and Dr. Mitani.

Creative fundamental research or high-level technological development is only possible through the great idea of a chief researcher, and endless efforts and cooperation by well-trained research staff members.

Therefore, it is important for the chief to both physically and psychologically help all the staff participating in the research, and to make them feel a challenge building up their pride when the research they are working on is completed.

Lastly, I would like to hope for the future infinite prosperity of Nihon Keizai Shimbun that is greatly contributing to the development of the Asian economy and scholarship, as well as deepening goodwill. Thank you very much.

Speech text / June 6, 2001

1. The Newari language, variously known as Nepal Bhasa, Newari, Newar or simply as Newa Bhae, is a Tibeto-Burman (T-B) language, the mother tongue of the Newars who are generally recognized as the earliest settlers of the Kathmandu Valley, also known as the Nepala Mandala. Out of nearly 250 languages in this branch, Newari is one of the four which have written traditions - the others being Tibetan, Burmese and Manipuri. Its importance for historical and comparative linguistics need not be emphasized.

2. "The Newars have long occupied a culturally important place among the Himalayan peoples. Over the centuries they have developed a complex and an advanced culture which contains elements taken from both the great Sanskrit traditions of India to the South and the traditions of Tibet and China in the North.

3. The Nepala Mandala therefore is an important Himalayan cultural centre and cultural crossroads, and Newari is notable for being one of the oldest Himalayan languages with a written tradition and a very rich literature. Documents in Newari have now been traced as far back as the 12th century A.D., while full manuscripts written in the old form - known as Classical Newari - date from the end of the 14th century A.D.

4. Although Newari is the key language in many fields of research in the Himalayan region - anthropological, religious, literary and linguistic - there are still many obscure and hence controversial areas in historical phonology, verb morphology and conjugation systems, and the placement of Newari within the Bodic grouping of languages.

5. Classical Newari is obviously a crucial area for such research, and scholars have long felt the need for reliable reference works on the language as it occupies a unique position in the study of the development of T-B languages in general and the Himalayan languages in particular. A Classical Newari Dictionary will also have important applications in the study of the cultural history of Himalayan South Asia and in particular the rich culture of the Kathmandu Valley. It has thus been the expectation of all the researchers involved in this project that the present Dictionary of Classical Newari will be an essential tool for the study and research in history, culture, art, languages and literatures of the Himalayan region.

The Nepal Bhasa Dictionary Committee Project

1. The Nepal Bhasa Dictionary Committee (NBDC) Project was initiated by late Prem Bahadur Kansakar, and the Committee itself was actually established over 20 years ago on 26 January 1980 with the two noble objectives to compile monolingual and bilingual Dictionaries of Contemporary Newari and Classical Newari to fulfil the need for reliable reference works in the language. As one of the Committee members, Mr. Iswarananda Shresthacarya, had already a sizeable corpus of contemporary Newari words, the Committee drew up a proposal to sponsor its editing and publication. The German Research Council approved it, and funded its publication.

2. NBDC conceived and formulated the project in three phases : the first phase launched in 1983 was to compile a lexicon of Classical Newari from 11 bilingual Sanskrit - Newari Amarakosas (1381 - 1900 A.D.). This phase was funded by the Toyota Foundation. The Amarakosa materials were also later re-compiled in 1987 - 94 as a concordance for ease of reference in various semantic domains. It was funded by the National Endowment of Humanities, USA. This phase of the project was compiled by Kashinath Tamot and edited by Ian Alsop, Saraswati Tuladhar, Omi Sharma and Gurusekhar Sharma. This lexicon and concordance are now both available on-line over the Internet.

3. The present Dictionary, launched formally by the wife of late Prem Bahadur Kansakar on September 11, 2000 is the result of the second phase of the project, namely the long-awaited Dictionary of Classical Newari compiled and edited by two separate teams and coordinated by the Project Leader and Chief Editor Professor Dr. Kamal Prakash Malla. This phase of the project was completed by the generous financial support of the Toyota Foundation of Japan from 1982 to 1992.

4. The work on the present Dictionary began in January 1986 and by the end of November 1992 the compilors and editors had prepared a working draft with a total corpus of 30,942 records of attested Newari words drawn from 99 different source manuscripts including literary genres such as drama, narrative texts, poetry and songs; didactic and legal documents (known as tamsuk-s), historical chronicles such as the Vamsavali-s, and diaries of social history called the Thyasaphu-s.

5. It was envisaged that the target audience or the potential users of the Dictionary will be : (a) non-native experts, research scholars or the students of the Newari language who may need to consult an authoritative bilingual dictionary prepared by Newar scholars of repute for diachronic and etymological information on the language. (b) native speakers of Newari who may wish to refer to or cite an authoritative Newari lexicon to be acquainted with the historical development of the language.

6. The only previous attempt to fill this need, namely the Danish scholar Hans Jorgensen's A Dictionary of the Classical Newari (1936), although a valuable step in this direction, is essentially a preliminary effort limited in scope and hampered by a lack of sufficiently varied source materials. The most serious shortcoming of Jorgensen's Dictionary is that it is based entirely on relatively late - 17th century A.D. or later - manuscripts of narrative prose.

7. The present Dictionary is more comprehensive in coverage, and will serve to provide researchers in several fields of Nepal and South Asian Studies - historical, cultural, literary and linguistic - with a valuable research tool. The Committee has at present one of the largest databases and corpus of lexical material in any Tibeto-Burman languages.

8. The third phase of the Project was planned to be a Dictionary of the technical and ritual language and other miscellaneous texts. But this part of the project has not yet been conceived or implemented for two reasons : one, there are a vast number of technical and ritual texts including those on Astrology and Astronomy, Ayurvedic medicine, Metal Craft and Architecture on the one hand, and a wealth of materials on tantricism and various ritual practices of the Newars, on the other. Secondly, there is today a distinct lack of expertise / skilled manpower to analyse and interpret such materials.

9. However, the present Nikkei Asia Prize awarded to the NBDC by Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc has provided us a fresh source of inspiration and encouragement to carry out the third phase of the project. The Project Leader, Professor Malla, has already sought the advice and assistance of available experts and specialists in order to conceive methods of selection of relevant materials and plans of operation. Given the financial resources now at our disposal, our priority presently is to assemble a team of dedicated experts who can implement the third phase of the project to a successful conclusion.

10. In conclusion, I would like, on behalf of the Nepal Bhasa Dictionary Committee, to express my sincere gratitude to the President of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc for nominating the publication of the Dictionary of Classical Newari (2000) for the 6th Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture, and to the Chairman and members of the Nikkei Asia Prizes Selection Committee for recognizing our efforts to sustain indigenous cultures and to promote cultural activities in Nepal and the neighbouring areas of the Himalayan region. We are greatly honoured by this award which will most certainly encourage us to set higher targets in the future. Thank you.

Speech text / June 7, 2000

Chairman of the Nikkei Asia Prizes Selection Committee
President and CEO of Nihon Keizai Shimbun Inc. (Nikkei)
Winners of the Nikkei Asia Prize
Ambassador of Thailand to Japan
Guests

Today I am deeply honored to receive this worthy prize. I am deeply moved and gladdened that the results of the work into which I have poured mind, body and soul for more than 20 years are known and valued by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., a prominent organization that works to transmit information and knowledge and carry out economic cooperation.

Though this prize was granted to me as an individual, I want to take this opportunity to say that many persons in governmental and private organizations worked with me in this endeavor to build cooperative relationships among countries over more than 20 years. I receive this prize today on behalf of all those who worked with me for these many years.

In these the world is confronting both the positive and negative aspects of globalization. I believe that mutual understanding and cooperation among all countries in the aspects of economics, government, society and technology is the only way the people and communities of the world can hope to escape inequalities and conflicts. The path of cooperation aims at improving and developing the lives of people at all socio-economic levels in all countries, and to eradicate poverty in the future.

Actually, we have already been working for some time to build cooperative relationships among countries in the Asian Pacific region. I wish to solidify peace and harmony within the Asian Pacific region through mutual cooperation. Such cooperative relationships aiming at development must continue to progress and the development must become permanent. The relationships must also work to make the lives of the people in the region equally prosperous.

Honored guests, some time ago I carried out activities to become Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), because I understood the importance of the multilateral trade structure. The World Trade Organization plays the central role in that structure. That is to say, it is engaged in making global trade free and fair and of increasing inter-regional trade not only in the Asian Pacific region but in other regions as well.

When I assume the role of Director-General of the WTO, I will do everything in my power to increase the importance of trade between various regions of the world. I will work to enable all countries to participate in global trade on an equal playing field. I am touched by the fact that the Japanese government and the Japanese people understand this point quite well. When I was carrying out activities in order to assume the post of Director-General of the WTO, I constantly felt the support of the Japanese government and the Japanese people. Thanks to them, it was determined that in two year's time I would assume the post of Director-General, an important post for promoting free, fair, and equal trade in various regions of the world.

I consider it indispensable for all countries--advanced, developing, or underdeveloped--to understand their own and other countries' problems in order to eradicate inequalities and conflicts and to build harmonious cooperative relationships. This is my philosophy. Japan's development has exemplified this philosophy, and all my work to date has incorporated Japan's development as a model.

What I want to stress is that Japan has taken the central and guiding role from the beginning in furthering friendly relationships and economic cooperation among all countries. This is true at all levels-- regional, local, and governmental. From now on as well, I hope that Japan will cooperate with us in developing Asia.

Asia has experienced a financial crisis for the past two or three years but, conversely, Asia also may be in a position to play the role of pulling the world economy toward a stable, balanced state.

Receiving the Nikkei Asia Prize for Regional Growth has reinforced my courage and determination. I resolve to use all my strength, knowledge and abilities to achieve cooperative relationships within the Asian Pacific region and to expand economic and trade cooperation outside the region as well.

Lastly, I express my deepest thanks to Mr. Gaishi Hiraiwa, Chairman of the Nikkei Asia Prizes Selection Committee and Mr. Takuhiko Tsuruta, President and CEO of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc.. I extend hearty congratulations to the two persons who won prizes today. Thank you very much.

Speech text / June 7, 2000

Science is an international affair. Asia has taken its place as a significant contributor starting with discoveries made by Asian scientists in the West and with increasing numbers of discoveries now emanating from the East.

The first draft of the human genome sequence will be ready latest by this year, a sign of how fast the field of biology is moving today. The new millenium begins with the epoch of the human genome sequence, an event with historical parallels to the construction of the Periodic Table of Elements during the beginning of the last century. Both events represent systematic and taxonomic science with one arising from chemistry and the other from biology. It was not until the discovery of the nature of the elements that their activities became interesting. The discovery of uranium 235 which will undergo fission at critical mass gave rise to the age of physics impacting on the nature of the physical world. The discovery of growing perfect crystals of silicon gave birth to the electronic industry and the age of instant communications. The holy grail of modern biology lies in the uncovering of the functions and the regulation of the 50,000 to 150,000 genes encoded in the human genome. The unlocking of this knowledge will uncover the secrets of cell signalling, early and late embryonic development, differentiation, aging, regeneration and death. This will facilitate the treatment of malignant diseases, autoimmune, neurological and metabolic disorders as well as the rejuvenation of our environment. New biology will incorporate established disciplines belonging to the physical sciences for its computation and applications. Before long, work will begin to solve the problems of debilitating longevity that medical advances in the last century has raised. In the age of the new biology, one can expect longevity to include the critical element of functionality. Hopefully, the new age will bring with it effective solutions to rescue the environment as mankind reaches the crossroads for its survival.

Speech text / June 7, 2000

President of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., everyone from the Nikkei Asia Award Committee and all guests in attendance today, please allow me to begin today by offering my sincere gratitude to all the members on the Nikkei Asia Award Committee for selecting me as recipient of the prize in the culture category of the Nikkei Asia Award, which is granted great prestige in the Asian region. I am filled with joy at being able to return to my beloved country of Thailand with this ultimate of honors.

I would like to mention that the works I have created to this time, which were just mentioned, are all born from a place of pure passion for the arts. Upon receiving this Nikkei Asia Award, great desire and energy arose from within me, including the hope to continue untiring efforts in my work throughout my entire life, and at the same time, that my work itself might fulfill the purpose of the Nikkei Asia Award. The great joy I feel on the occasion of attending today's awards ceremony springs from the great pride I feel in the three points I will mention next:

1. That Thailand and Japan have continued to maintain a long-term relationship based on mutual friendship, that the relationship between the Thai and Japanese peoples has long been one like that between siblings, and that the relationship will be forever lasting. I feel very happy about such a situation.

2. That the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. has the will and desire to sponsor and carefully foster people in the Asian region who have been awarded prizes in the categories of technological development, economic progress and culture, for the sake of human and societal development in the Asian region. Such activities serve as a model for having the following generations engage in proper and righteous behavior, and they also serve to raise the standard of living of the people in this region. Moreover, Japan is generous in supporting its friends in Asia for development that is on par with that of other civilized countries in other parts of the world, in the areas of lifestyle, economy, society and culture.

3. I have come to Tokyo to attend this Nikkei Asia Awards ceremony, and have been deeply impressed upon witnessing the high level of prosperity that Japan enjoys. Moreover, the spiritual prosperity of the people and the material prosperity of the nation are in balance with each other, which is the result of the Japanese people's incredible diligence and efforts made in various aspects of their lives, such as industry, science and technology, as well as culture and the arts, and shows the unrivaled identity that is Japan's.

I myself work in the area of arts and culture, and this includes the work of teaching at a university. I teach undergraduate, Master's and Ph.D. programs at Chulalongkon University in Thailand. My work, which I have long carried out, involves architecture as traditional culture, serving as part of Thailand's identity. I would next like to talk about the motivation for my becoming engaged in this work.

1. Just as Japan's venerated emperor is a symbol venerated by the Japanese people, Thailand is a nation with a revered king acting as the sovereign ruler unifying the hearts of the Thai people. When creating works of architecture or other arts and crafts, in particular in the case of Thai traditional arts, a feeling of dedication to our king is firmly fixed inside of me.

2. Thailand's national religion is Buddhism. I also am Buddhist, and many people in our country are adherents of Buddhism. As an architect I have created many architectural structures in both Thailand and other countries as a tribute to the Buddha, in the faith of Buddhism. Those architectural works of art have been created according to the forms of traditional culture as conveyed to me by Buddhism.

3. Most of the work in Thailand have been agricultural, and from the past until the present day, the lifestyles of the people of Thailand represented traditional culture itself and created the identity of architecture. This is reflected as the tranquil beauty in all the arts, such as architecture, creative arts, fine arts, and dance and music, and the like. This forms an identity overflowing with sensitivity in the various aspects of the arts, and I myself expend all my energies into preserving these traditions, hoping to create ever more wonderful works.

In many ways, Thailand is still a developing country, and we receive aid from Japan in a number of fields, such as economics, industry, science and technology, and education, among others. Thailand is said to be a nation with a long history of culture and arts. If Thailand can further develop, improve the living standards of its people and become more prosperous, preservation of the arts and culture will continue, making possible the conveying of the Thai identity, and this will then further the aims of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc.

I close by offering my prayers for the happiness and prosperity of the Japanese people.

Speech text / June 2, 1999

I, Shi Wen Long, feel deeply honored to receive the "Nikkei Asia Prize" this year.

I was born as a Japanese national in southern Taiwan, which was a Japanese colony at the time. I was 18 when the Pacific chapter of World War II ended, and consequently became a Taiwanese.

I graduated from the machinery department of a technical high school, and worked for family-operated workshops, etc., before establishing Chi Mei Corp. at the age of 31.

The company initially handled plastic molding and processing, but has since moved into the manufacturing of plastic materials. The lineup covers petrochemical downstream products including acrylic resin for lighting equipment, outer-shell for home appliances, housing for electronic products, PS used in automobile interiors, ABS resin, tires and synthetic rubber for gumboot soles.

In the main product of ABS resin, the company has increased the annual output to around a million tons from a humble beginning of approx. 2,000 tons, becoming the world's largest manufacturer in a matter of 23 years. (In Japan, ten major ABS manufacturers including Technopolymer Co., Ube Industries and Toray, have the combined annual output of approx. 800,000 tons. Three major ABS manufacturers in the United States, namely GE, Monsanto and Dow, produce a total of approx. one million tons per annum.) Chi Mei's corporate capital has also grown from the initial NT$2 million (around 8 million yen) to the current NT$12.7 billion (around 50 billion yen).

The successful growth can be attributed to technological innovation, which has drastically reduced manufacturing costs and halved sales prices, thus dramatically expanding demand. The market has been further expanded by a high level of economic growth on the Chinese mainland. A series of capital investments in manufacturing equipment and market expansion has nurtured Chi Mei into the world's largest ABS manufacturer.

As for its corporate structure, the company quickly evolved from a family business, and separated funding and management, entrusting the business management to professionals, independent of shareholders and founding families.

Another factor of success is the system of loaning interest-free money to employees for the purchase of company shares. It has helped build a common sense of vested interest between employees and shareholders, and heighten employee morale and loyalty. Today, employees hold approx. 20% of the company shares, providing financial security to their life after retirement.

Chi Mei also started redistributing its profits to society at an early stage. In 1977, it established Chi Mei Cultural Foundation to donate approx. 10% of the company profits to social projects in categories of medical services, education and culture. More specifically, the donations have gone into establishing large hospitals, setting up scholarship programs, and developing / managing museums.

Such corporate activities follow a common behavioral pattern observed among many fast-growing businesses. Yet, it should be stressed that Chi Mei has done so as a means of pursuing happiness, or has achieved profit growth as a process of pursuing the happiness of all employees, rather than as the final goal.

Company growth and high profits must not undermine the happiness of individual families. For this reason, Chi Mei introduced a 40-hour working week system in July 1988, and adopted a policy of not encouraging overtime both at offices and at production lines. Consequently, the company has won the honor of the best Taiwanese company in terms of short working hours and high wages. I myself exercise the practice of a two-day working week, with the five remaining days spent for fishing or enjoying music.

However, it is questionable how much longer such a favorable corporate management can be sustained. Our products, once the most competitive internationally, have now come under severe competition from developing countries.

Nothing lasts forever. If the company were to be struck with a significant change and suffer a downfall, my philosophy at least would soften the emotional toll. When I think about it, our company produces and sells as much as 1.2 million tons of synthetic resin and synthetic rubber. Our strong growth has left behind a large number of businesses that lost their competitive edge and went downhill into financial ruin. I am also constantly aware that mass consumption of petrochemical materials contributes to the deterioration of the environment.

In relation to the theme of "How the Asian Economy should be Developed", once a nation reaches a certain standard in clothing, food, housing and providing medical services to its population, the priority should be directed to environmental protection, quality of life and cultures, rather than further development of the economy. Karl Marx said, "For a person dying of starvation, the first piece of bread means life. The second piece of bread means pleasure. The third piece of bread means poison." Japan and other industrialized countries around the world must extend help to the countries without the first piece of bread so that they can crawl out of poverty. Countries with the second piece of bread must work toward environmental protection to the same extent as their efforts for economic development. Countries with the third piece of bread must concentrate on supporting low-income nations in a style of "teaching how to catch fish rather than giving fish (Mencius)", rather than focusing on their own economies.

One of the factors hindering the economic development of Asian countries, is the inclination toward nationalism, manifesting in the form of government regulations extending excessive protection to domestic industries. Especially the countries that left colonization or became independent after World War II, tend to put priority on nationalism in all issues, and use it as miracle cure in too many situations. In order to achieve international economic development, a world with no nation states before the 18th century would have been most favorable. This could signify the true meaning of a "borderless" economy.

Following the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble around 10 years ago, Asian countries were struck with an economic crisis, starting in Thailand in July 1997. Although with some fluctuations in the degree of gravity, all countries suffered economically. Yet, from a different perspective, the crisis could be interpreted as the correction of a distorted economic development. It is true we suffered. However, we can accept it with positive feelings if the suffering is seen as an important turning point.

Fortunately or unfortunately, 50 years of Japanese colonization helped Taiwan build a solid foundation for modernization, second only to Japan in the Asian region. This is attributable to Taiwan's prosperity today. I wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to Japan for its past contributions.

Frankly speaking, I feel the development of our company has left behind a deterioration in the environment. I therefore wish to donate all the prize money of 3 million yen to organizations working for environmental protection in Asia, the selection of which shall be entrusted to Nikkei Newspaper.

Thank you very much.

Speech text / June 2, 1999

The honorable Nihon Keizai Shimbun President, Mr. Takuhiko Tsuruta, honorable guests and respectable ladies and gentlemen.

It is the utmost honor and joy for me to be invited to Tokyo as the winner of the 1999 Nikkei Asia Prize, and participate in the Prize's award ceremony organized by Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

Firstly, let me express my heartfelt gratitude to Nihon Keizai Shimbun and "Nikkei Asia Prize" selection committee for awarding me with this honor. I also wish to extend my gratitude to my fellow scientists in the same specialization based in Japan, Dr. Katsuyuki Minami of the National Institute for Agro- Environmental Sciences in particular, for his strong support for me in the selection of this honor. It is my deep belief that my winning of the Nikkei Asia Prize is attributed not to my personal efforts but to the contributions of the Chinese government, Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), executive members of Institute of Soil Science of CAS, and members of the research team engaging in my research project. I could not have enjoyed this international honor had it not been for support and co-operation from senior members and colleagues of such organizations, and many years of education and training I have received from the Chinese government and CAS. Therefore, this honor is not for my personal endeavor. Rather, it represents recognition of the project I have worked on many years, of the cooperation and joint development between Japan and China in the science project, and of the development of science in China and the rest of Asia. Indeed, it symbolizes the friendship and development among the people and scientists of China, Japan and Asia.

I have long committed myself to the research of soil science in China. For over 40 years, I have examined, classified, evaluated and studied the development of China's soil resources, and strived to develop and utilize the resources for continuous development of agriculture through local soil maintenance, soil improvement and enhancement of soil properties. I have also joined Japanese and other Asian soil scientists in research on land degradation and the environment, which has made a significant contribution to the issue of global changes in soil properties. The issue of the environment and development in the 21st century is a theme attracting significant attention from scientists and national governments around the world. Although there are may different projections made, the general belief is that the world will witness the following changes in the next decade: By 2025, the world population will grow by 60% from the current 5.3 billion to 8.5 billion, with 1 billion of them exposed to famine. Of 3.6 billion hectares, which accounts for one-fourth of the total land area of this planet, one-sixth is projected to suffer desertification. Land degradation of a global scale is indeed very serious. Statistics show that as much as 2 billion hectares of land suffered degradation over the past 100 years, with additional 5 million to 6 million hectares of land degrading, and 20 million hectares of irrigated land salinizing each year. At this rate, in the next two decades, one-third of cultivatable land would be lost around the world. Unless some measures are taken, food supplies would drop by 19% on average in 117 developing countries including those in Asia. In South East Asia, food supplies would only feed 85% of the projected population. Global climate changes are dealing a devastating blow to the present form of agriculture, and inevitably affecting the development of the world economy in the 21st century. The United Nations took the initiative in organizing the Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, and identified the "effective use of natural resources, including land, water, energy, forest and life forms", as one of the most important global issues into the coming century (UNCED, 1992). This is because human activities are imposing drastic changes on our land resources, with the influence expected to magnify as the world population increases over the next 50 years. It means major difficulties lie ahead in the efforts to prevent land degradation and improve the environment. Allow me to take this opportunity to express my sincere wish, that is to make fresh contributions to promoting research into global soil and environmental issues through strengthening close coordination between soil scientists in China, Japan and other Asian countries. It has been 18 years since I first came to Japan in 1981. During the 18 years, I have made 10 visits to Japan, once every two years on average, to take part in various international conferences mainly on soil-related issues. This includes conferences of the International Society of Soil Science (ISSS), the international convention on problem soil, the international conference on the improvement of volcanic soil, salinized soil, alkali soil and acid soil, and the joint exchange meeting for Japanese and Chinese soil science projects. I have acquainted myself with almost all members of my generation from the Japanese Society of Soil Science over the years, and have even struck up friendships with younger people in the last few years. The academic and friendly exchange over an extended period of time, has led to a close academic relationship among ourselves. What is more important is the fact that us scientists from Japan and China have deepened the friendship and partnership. In recent years, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Science, has dispatched over 20 young scientists on training and fact-finding missions to Japan. Fellow Japanese scientists have also made occasional visits to our Institute to take part in joint research and academic exchange. Japan's prominent soil scientists, namely Dr. Katsuyuki Minami, Hokkaido University professor emeritus Akira Tanaka, The University of Tokyo professor Satoshi Matsumoto, Akita Prefectural University professor Mitsuo Chino, Dr. Mitsuo Hasegawa, etc., have all made significant contributions to China's efforts to foster scientists and promote academic exchanges. All of these factors have led to establishing the foundation for developing soil science projects in both Japan and China. Let me take this opportunity to express my sincerest gratitude to Japan's soil scientists for their efforts toward developing Sino-Japan science projects and friendship. It is my deepest wish that this science / technology exchange and friendship will continue to develop unchanged between the two countries.

Science will continue to make uninterrupted creation and progress into the new century, and people of China, Japan and other parts of Asia will also foster their science projects and friendship.

In concluding my speech, I wish to express my renewed gratitude to Nihon Keizai Shimbun for the honor they have granted me. I hope an even greater prosperity will be brought to Sino-Japan science projects, friendship between the two countries, and the business of Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

Thank you very much.

Speech text / June 2, 1999

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am very honoured to be awarded the 1999 Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture. This is a great incentive for me as well as for my colleagues in Vietnam.

As it was informed in the letter of Mr.Tsuruta Takuhino, President of Nihon Keizai Shimbun's Board of Management, the Culture Prizes Selection Sub-Committee had remarked that my films convey to the world at large not only the soul and sensitivity of the Vietnamese but also of people from our continent... When I make films my only desire is to be able to express my thoughts and emotion in face of life to convey the concerns and aspiration of Vietnamese; if this can be shared by overseas audience, especially Asians, then I feel indeed truly fortunate and happy.

Cinema is an art that can make human beings understand each other. All of us, regardless of country belong to, share cultural similarities and common aspirations for lives blessed with well-being, liberty, equity and happiness. A life which treasures values such as harmony between man and nature, tolerance and human compassion. In the course of the development of our respective cultures, each of our nations has contributed its distinctive identity rooted in its own historical circumstances into the making of an Asian culture that has both common traits and diverse distinctive features. We may proudly say that Asian culture is a precious heritage which we are preserving, nurturing and enriching, for this is very found that gives us the strength to exist and develop.

By granting a yearly Nikkei Asia Prize for culture along with one for technological innovation and regional growth Nihon Keizai Shimbun is sending a strong message, namely: Culture is an integral part of an Asian society's development. Such conception deserves respect and provides strong encouragement to all who work and create in the field of culture in Asia.

For my part, as I am bestowed this great honour, I pledge to continue doing my utmost for the development of Vietnamese cinema and thereby to the common growth of Asian cinema, giving expression to the Vietnamese soul and in so doing, also to the Asian soul.

I would like to convey my most earnest thanks to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun,Inc. Press Group and the President of its Board of Management, Mr.Tsuruto Takuhino, to the Jury of the Nikkei Asia Prizes and its Chairman, Mr. Gaishi Hiraiwa, for their choice and decision to grant me this noble distinction.

I wish to take this opportunity to express my profound gratitude to Japanese film critic Tadao Sato & Mrs. Hiraki Sato, for all that they have done to bring our cinema to the Japanese and the world public, and for everything they have done to assert our Asian cinema.

I thank and wish good health to all present at this solemn ceremony.

Speech text / June 3, 1998

Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.

First of all, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., and particularly to its president, Mr. Takuhiko Tsuruta, for bestowing this honor upon me. I would also like to offer my warm congratulations to the paper as it commemorates the 120th anniversary of its founding. The Nikkei Prize that I have received today honors not just me personally but all of the 30,000 employees of Changhong Electric Co., Ltd. and China's business community. For me personally, it is a tremendous honor, and an inspiration.

In the ten-odd years that China has been promoting reform and open markets as the world's largest developing nation, it has achieved considerable progress and given birth to many excellent companies in an environment of market competition. Changhong was the first government-run company in the defense industry to begin the process of "military-to-civilian conversion." It set an example for others by liberating itself from the constraints of a planned economy mentality. It recognized very early on the situation that China was in, and, with the market as its guide, began developing electronic products for civilian use that responded to consumer needs--taking into account the income levels of China's consumers and the differences in purchasing power between urban and rural areas. By endeavoring to improve product quality and to supplement service, the company has devoted itself to the task of improving the people's standard of living. From its inland location in the Sichuan Basin, the company expanded into a nationwide operation, and has even moved into the international arena. As of the end of 1997, the company had a domestic market share of over 35 percent for its major products, and we project that the figure will increase to over 45 percent this year. Today, "Changhong" has become the top brand in China's consumer electronics market. I would like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to all my friends in various fields who have supported Changhong to date. I feel extremely happy, too, that over the past few years Changhong has been able to contribute a bit to the prosperity of the Asian economy.

The management of government enterprises is a difficult issue worldwide, and, particularly for China, an important concern related to the economy and civilian life. Therefore, as one of these government enterprises, Changhong not only developed a business enterprise, but has done something more important: it has carried out a valuable inquiry into the reform of China's government enterprises. Changhong's development has shown that the management of government enterprises can succeed. For that to happen, these enterprises must welcome the opportunity to compete in the marketplace, and must demonstrate sufficient superiority in human resources, technology, operational scale, etc. While promoting reform and restructuring, they must strengthen their managerial controls, and adjust and reorganize various factors, such as products, assets, organizational structures, technologies, personnel, and so on.

In the course of this development, we have maintained good and mutually cooperative relationships with Toshiba, Matsushita, Mitsubishi and other Japanese companies operating in the same area. The sophisticated entrepreneurial spirit of these Japanese companies and their thorough and scientific methods of management impressed us deeply. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere appreciation to these companies for the support and earnest cooperation that they provided in behalf of our company's development.

As the global economy grows increasingly integrated, the issue of how multinational companies should manage their operations and carry out their technological innovations amid this new environment of market competition domestically and internationally, and of how they should deal with international competition, has become an important one for Asian countries. The eyes of the world are on China, and China, which is now opening itself to the outside world, is welcoming investments. The politics and popular sentiment of China are stable, and the economy is continuing its stable development. The investment environment has greatly improved. Moreover, the country has an abundant supply of manpower and natural resources, and sits on a vast market of 1.2 billion people. Numerous investment opportunities exist in a wide range of areas. This is a never-to-be-repeated opportunity for development, and we sincerely hope that the world's business corporations, particularly companies from Asia, do not let this opportunity pass.

Although Changhong has grown remarkably in the past, our achievements are minuscule in comparison to the world's top companies, and we must continue to endeavor to forge new paths to the future. Changhong's next goal will be to become one of the world's top 500 corporations. Toward that end, I truly expect Changhong to continue its efforts in marketing, technology, and management, and, as outstanding personnel join the company in various areas of the world, to expand its businesses on a global basis. Currently, Changhong has entered into strategic alliances with such well-known companies as Toshiba and Philips, and is promoting high-level cooperation in a comprehensive range of areas with these companies. Changhong's aim is to continue to be a company with a tremendous amount of vitality, and to aim to become the "Toshiba or the Matsushita of China."

We are facing a major historical watershed as the old century gets set to turn into the new. The world economy is becoming increasingly integrated, and technological development is proceeding at a dizzying pace. Amid such change, politics is also becoming increasingly multipolar, and the voices of people from Asia and around the world expressing a desire for peace and stability, and calling for mutual cooperation, are now the mainstream. The beginning of a new Asian era is virtually upon us. The "East Asian Miracle" of the second half of the 20th century left a major impression on the world. The Asia of the 21st century will undoubtedly continue to contribute significantly on the world economic stage as a new region of advanced economic development. At the international conference on "The Future of Asia" that convenes tomorrow, we will have an opportunity to listen to more constructive opinions and perspectives on this question. Along with the employees of Changhong, I look forward to contributing all that I can toward the creation of a new page in Asia's history in the 21st century.

Thank you very much.

Speech text / June 3, 1998

The organizers of this ceremony; Mr. Takuhiko Tsuruta, president of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc.; honored guests; ladies and gentlemen: Good morning. I pray that this finds you living each day without incident.

As the representative of the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, I have been given the honor of receiving the 1997 Nikkei Asia Prize for technological innovation. As I do so, I cannot help but feel profoundly moved and delighted at the opportunity you have given us.

Considering the many other fine research institutes in Asia, this prize represents for us an undeserved honor. The RRIM was established in 1925 and is now in its 73rd year of existence. For the RRIM to be recognized by the Japanese media for its work to date is extremely significant, and an honor. I wish to express my profound gratitude to those who have awarded us this prize.

I have heard that this is the first year in which the prize has been awarded to an organization rather than to an individual, and that the prize was originally established to be given to individuals. In that sense, the fact that it was awarded to an organization is extremely significant. I believe that the prize also signifies recognition of the work that led, in 1991, to the institute's receiving the Prime Minister's Award for Excellence in Quality.

The RRIM began as a small research institute, originally with the objective of conducting research and development into upstream activities in the rubber industry. Thereafter, the institute expanded its areas of endeavor to include rubber processing and downstream activities. Today, the RRIM is one of the world's largest research institutes involved in research and development on natural rubber, one of the world's major products.

With research and development into natural rubber as its major mission, our institute has played an important role not only in rubber cultivation carried out on a plantation-size scale but also in the smallholders' sector and in the area of rubber product manufacturing. Via a dynamic and effective mechanism of technology transfer, the results of the institute's R & D activity have made an enormous contribution to these three sectors. As our country has continued to industrialize, conditions surrounding Malaysia's rubber industry have begun to change. For example, acreage in rubber production has declined, production costs have risen, labor shortages have grown more severe, and rubber prices have fallen. These and other problems are compelling Malaysia to come up with solutions. Because 85 percent of those involved in rubber production are farmers on small landholdings, the RRIM is being forced to deal with the difficult issue of enhancing the social and economic status of smallholder producers by working to improve the productivity of rubber cultivation and to enhance the incomes of rubber growers through technological innovation.

The rubber industry as a whole contributed approximately 10 billion ringgit to total GNP in fiscal 1997. Because the rubber industry is considered a composite of a number of different industries, this 10 billion ringgit figure comprises revenues from rubber exports, revenues from the manufacture of rubber products based on rubber and latex, and revenues from the production of accessories made of rubber, and so on. As a result of the development of rubber product manufacturing, domestic consumption of rubber products has also grown. In order for the rubber industry to achieve significantly greater development, I believe that research and development must focus on downstream activities, added-value production, rubber farming systems, and strategic research. R & D must also emphasize work on quality control, standardization of rubber products, and projects relating to the environment and pollution control.

Today, Malaysia is the world's third leading rubber-producing nation, after Thailand and Indonesia. Certain conditions make it impossible for Malaysia to compete with these two countries. Specifically these are that land for planting rubber is limited, and that production costs are continuing to rise. However, through the development of new products for the rubber industry and the development of new technologies, Malaysia hopes to become the Mecca for research on rubber in the Asia region.

The concept of developing a rubber-theme urban center on the 500-hectare experimental farm operated by the RRIM has already received approval as a plan that will encourage the development of the rubber industry in Malaysia. This rubber-theme urban center will gather in one location R & D activities, (small and medium-sized) rubber product manufacturing plants, other projects related to rubber manufacturing, and an industrial estate. When this project becomes a reality, we are hoping to be able to attract investments from Japanese entrepreneurs. Moreover, in order to raise the level of expertise among researchers at the institute, we are hoping to receive support from Japan for the training of researchers.

It goes without saying that Malaysia's rubber industry has benefitted from the achievements of the RRIM. But the institute's impact is also being felt by rubber-producing countries elsewhere, in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. As this clearly demonstrates, our institute has contributed to the development of a structure that has promoted the development of the rubber industry, not only in our region, but around the world. Consequently, these achievements have also contributed to a division of wealth and to the development of scientific technology. Our rubber high-yielding clones are being cultivated in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, India, Sri Lanka, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil. The provision of rubber clones to these regions has been carried out through the sale of seeds, the provision of technology, and the offering of programs related to genetic engineering. In addition, the institute has provided these countries with information relating to rubber tapping technology, rubber processing technology, manufacturing technologies for rubber products, and product testing methods. The RRIM has also prepared a plan for accepting and training overseas researchers in matters relating to rubber production. Finally, the institute also publishes material related to the rubber industry, and organizes international conferences and seminars on topics relating to the rubber industry.

With the aim of commercializing the results of its research and development, the RRIM has taken steps to spread the technologies that it has developed by providing a consulting service. This consulting service is also available in response to inquiries received from overseas clients.

The structure of international cooperation between Malaysia and other countries has been sustained through the exchange of expert knowledge between Malaysia and such institutions as the International Rubber Research and Development Board and the Association of Natural Rubber Producing Countries.

Without the serious involvement of the government, it would be difficult to achieve progress and development in scientific technology. In this regard, we are proud of the fact that we are in an extremely privileged environment. By this I mean that Prime Minister Mahatir clearly understands the need for government involvement, and is playing a central role in articulating a plan for the areas of research and development requiring special emphasis in relation to the Vision for the Year 2020. As one example, the prime minister has specifically advocated plans for the establishment of a "Center for the Development of Rubber Industry Technology," for the advancement of biotechnological research, and for the construction of an "Exhibition Center for the World's Rubber Products." Moreover, these concepts are already moving in the direction of contributing to a further strengthening of production of added-value products and of the foundations of our research.

In closing, on behalf of the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to those at the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. for inviting my wife and me to this distinguished ceremony. I would also like to express my appreciation to the other honorees for the kind consideration they have shown us. I hope that this opportunity to meet can be used to build stronger structures of cooperation between our countries. I know that the awarding of the Nikkei Asia Prize to our institute will encourage further efforts on our part to work toward the global development of the rubber industry.

Thank you for your attention.

Speech text / June 3, 1998

I am very happy and honored to be able to say a few words to you today as the recipient of the third Asia Prize.

To begin, let me express my appreciation to those on the evaluation committee who selected me to be honored in the cultural category of the third Asia Prize. I am still amazed that a person such as I could have been given such a prestigious award. Looking back, I take pride in the fact that the path that I have taken in my work has coincided in many respects with objectives and aims of the Nikkei Asia Prize. In this regard, I would like to share a part of this joy and honor with those in the world of Asian theater and performing arts who have held similar aspirations.

When I began my work in the theater in the early 1960s, I was totally absorbed in Western drama. I was particularly captivated by avant-garde art and the so-called New Theater. Without knowing what was genuinely new in drama, I nonetheless had complete faith in the tenet that art, by definition, always had to be new. For a young stage artist in Korea, a remote corner of the Far East, Western drama represented the ultimate in new drama, and for that reason I was enthusiastically involved in bringing the Western theater into my country.

In the 1970s, however, I began to sense doubts about the way I had been looking at the theater. If my country's traditional theater was the theater of the past, might not Western theater also be the theater of the past? Wasn't the new theater of the West today really seeking new energy from the theater of the East? Couldn't even newer forms of energy be discovered precisely in the stage works of countries that were our neighbors--in the drama of Japan and China, in Noh or kabuki or classical Chinese opera, or in the puppet shows and shadow plays of other Asian countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia? And might not the customs involving women mediums in my own country, or the songs sung by our common people, also contain seeds of new forms of drama in the future? With these and other questions in mind, I began to reflect on the identity of my own country's drama, on the identity of Asian drama, and on what Asian drama shared in common.

Whatever the political relations among nations, there is clearly a need to deepen exchange with neighboring countries in the area of culture. That having been said, however, we must never subscribe to an exclusionary regionalist doctrine. While pursuing our separate identities, we must endeavor to become more international in our outlooks and, at the same time, to value the origins--the hometowns--of our spiritual lives.

While I have striven to protect the identity of the drama of my own country and the drama of Asia, and have advocated actions toward that end, I have never intended to deny that all cultures contain elements of intermarriage. Up till now, while arguing the need to restore the identity of our own drama, I have also advocated the pursuit of "a third kind of drama." This "third kind of drama" may be thought of as an interracial cultural product that has sprung up out of the encounter between Western and Eastern drama. However, this is not a simple uniting of forms of Western and Eastern drama, nor a simple mixing of blood such as arises from the union of man and woman, but a process that gives rise to hope for a third kind of creative "something" to emerge from the clash of two forms of spirit.

Last year, while participating in a workshop in Riga, Latvia together with young stage artists from various countries, I ardently explained and argued my views about Eastern forms of spirit. In response, one young person asked "Why must your approach always be Eastern?" To which I responded, "Okay, so why must your approach always be Western? If the approach should not always be Eastern, neither should it always be Western." While cultures must be liberated through bridges that transcend national borders, races and ethnic groups, such bridges must not be one-way; they must permit a flow in both directions. I explained that if the flow up till now has been virtually one way from the West to the East, then it had to become a flow in both directions from now on. In all ages, there are cultures that are dominant and popular from time to time. But if the world's cultures were to be homogenized by that dominant culture, that would be tremendous loss. By accepting and respecting cultural diversity, we make it possible for a rich, interracial cultures to flower around the world. By allowing this to happen, each of these places can become a world center, in a cultural sense at least.

Today, Korea, along with a number of other Asian countries, faces a crisis of national survival. The unfamiliar word, "IMF," has wrought economic crisis. But I can't helping feeling that this crisis is less an economic one than one fostered by the destruction and loss of culture. Turmoil has arisen because the country borrowed far too much money than befitted its status and because, in many respects, it acted like a nouveau riche nation. Also, because it was satisfied with quantitative expansion, it lost its originality and its ability to foster an adequate cultural consciousness. The result was that it brought the crisis upon itself. By so easily forgetting about its difficult earlier days, the country was driven by pride into a morass.

To extricate the country from this crisis, many economic measures have been implemented. But I believe that cultural measures are even more urgently needed. By paying too much attention to extracting itself from the economic crisis, the country is said to be losing its ability to look at cultural matters. But it is precisely at such times that people should be reading books, watching plays, and listening to music. For from these sources comes an ability to endure difficulties, and to empathize with the pain being experienced by neighbors who are suffering.

Today Japan undoubtedly has one of the world's most flourishing performing arts sectors. It is almost as if Japan has become a final destination point for culture, so much has poured into the country and thrived. But if Japan allows culture to stop here and to grow content with the status quo, it will not be long before such culture withers and dies. Instead of being satisfied with flourishing as a final destination, Japan should become a new embarkation point, a new generator of cultural innovation. I believe that, in the 21st century, Asia must become a center for the generation of new, creative culture.

n closing, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. for establishing the Asia Prize, which has created an awareness that economic development and cultural development go hand in hand, and which has awakened us to the importance of Asian culture. My sincere appreciation to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., too, for allowing me to stand in this place of honor. Thank you very much.

Speech text / May 14, 1997

Mr. Takuhiko Tsuruta Mr. Ryoki Sugita

Distinguished members of The Nikkei Asia Prizes Selection committee

Excellencies

Ladies and Gentlemen

1. I deem it a great honor to have been chosen by Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. for the award of Nikkei Asia Prize for Regional Growth. Nikkei enjoys great prestige in the world of journalism. The members of the Selection Committee for the Nikkei Asia Prize are persons with outstanding credentials. As such I consider myself extremely fortunate for having been chosen for this award. I accept it with a deep sense of gratitude and humility. I take it as a recognition and appreciation of the strenuous efforts being made in India since 1991 to accelerate the pace of social and economic development through a wide ranging programme of economic reforms.

2. This year India is celebrating the golden jubilee of her Independence. We have an impressive record of grappling with the formidable social and economic problems facing a poor country in the process of modernisation and development. Throughout this period, we have remained faithful to the ideals of a democratic polity based on the rule of law and respect for fundamental human rights. India's economic structure has been greatly diversified. We have now a vast reservoir of scientific, technological and managerial skills. At the same time, we recognise that we have a large unfinished agenda if we are to get rid of the ancient scourge of poverty, ignorance and disease.

3. India was in the midst of a deep economic crisis in June 1991 when a new Government of which I was the Finance Minister came into power. We dealt with this crisis with firmness and determination. We were able to restore reasonable macro economic stability in a sort period of about nine months and with the least possible social and economic costs in terms of loss of output and employment. We also used the crisis as an opportunity to launch a multi faced programme of economic reforms designed to improve the productivity of resource use and to impart a new element of dynamism to the economy. The major objectives of these reforms were to remove the overhang of bureaucratic controls which stifled competition, individual initiative, efficiency and innovation and to open up the Indian economy for progressive integration with the global economy. Thus far reaching changes were made in the regulatory framework governing investment, domestic and as well as foreign, banking and financial markets, foreign trade and payments. The tax system was streamlined so as to promote savings and risk taking and more efficient allocation of resources.

4. By any reckoning, the initial results have been highly encouraging. The Indian economy has been growing at an average annual rate of 7 per cent in the last three years. The industrial sector has grown at an annual rate of 10.4 per cent. The inflation rate has averaged 7.6 per cent. The balance of payments has shown a dramatic improvement and foreign exchange reserves now exceeding $22.6 billion dollars cover nearly seven months' imports. The deficit on the balance of payments on current account estimated at 1.4 per cent of GDP in the last fiscal year is well within the limits of prudence. The stock of external debt has increased only modestly in the last six years and as a proportion of GDP it has declined from 41 per cent in 1990-91 to about 29 per cent in 1995-96. The debt service ratio has declined from 36 per cent to less than 26 per cent. Meanwhile, the rates of domestic saving and investment in 1995-96 have set a new record. India now is able to attract annually 5-6 billion US dollars by way of foreign direct and portfolio investment.

5. The reform process is far form complete. The fiscal deficit is still too high for sustained growth. The infrastructure needs large amounts of investment as well as improved management. Public enterprises need credible reforms to improve their efficiency and resource generating capacity. Public finances have to be restructured to enable more resources being devoted to social services such as education and health, environment protection measures and social safety nets to protect the poorest sections of society during the stage of transition to a more dynamic economy. Overall, the domestic savings and investment rates have to go up to at least 30 per cent of GDP. These call for widening and deepening of fiscal and financial sector reforms. Nevertheless, a basis now exists to achieve and annual growth rate of 7-8 per cent, taking into account India's vast human and material resources.

6. We recognize that in our efforts to modernize our economy we can learn a great deal from the experience of Japan as well as other countries of East and South East Asia. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Government and the people of Japan for their active support for India's economic development. Japan is today the largest donor of official development assistance to India. We greatly appreciate the generosity of the Japanese people. However, we now seek a broader relationship with Japan and other countries of Asia in which flows of trade and private investment will figure more prominently. India now welcomes foreign private investments, particularly in the areas of infrastructure. We are determined to create a hospitable climate for such investments. Moreover, the progressive liberalisation of India's economy will provide new opportunities for two way expansion of trade between India and other countries of Asia.

7. It is my sincere hope that entrepreneurs of Japan and other countries of East and South East Asia will take an increasing interest in exploring the potentialities of investment in and trade with India. On our part, we are very keen to forge new dynamic linkages with the economies of Asia-Pacific. We are firm in our resolve to become an integral part and parcel of the vigorous growth processes now sweeping Asia. We believe that in an increasingly inter-dependent world that we live in, the future lies in expanding the scope of international cooperation, including strong regional cooperation. Asia is now blessed with a vast pool of savings, technical knowledge, large and expanding markets and high quality human resources. Purposeful regional cooperation can harness these assets to the mutual advantage of Asia and the outside world. The Twenty-first century has the potentiality of being the Asian Century. India is determined to play its role in realizing this dream.

8. I thank you all for giving me an opportunity to address this distinguished gathering.

Speech text / May 14, 1997

First of all, I would like to thank Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. for presenting me with this prize. It is indeed a great honor.

In recent years, an escalation in the formation of economic blocs has been seen around the world. For us to advance the formation of such a bloc, I think that, as in the cases of

Europe, the United States, and EU, there should be no major difference in economic standards among the member countries. To eliminate such differences, it is important that industrialized countries take the initiative in improving the technological standards in the neighboring countries and, in concerted effort with these countries, elevate the overall economic standards. In this respect, it is essential to establish an appropriate framework for technological cooperation between the regions under the concept of co- prosperity. This leads to an extremely important problem coming to light: that is, how countries without technology can be supported so that they can develop the technological capabilities suited to their needs.

Since 1981, I have traveled throughout Southeast Asia giving speeches and lectures on development policies and planning for science and technology. At the end of these speeches and lectures, one question that I always received was "How can we successfully develop science and technology in our country as you have done in Korea?" I always answered, "First of all, your head of state must have a solid belief that science and technology are the most important issues in developing your country." I added, "Next, you need strong leadership that can support this belief, then you need to develop abilities and organize said abilities and, finally, you need a resolute power to bring the country together to push ahead with the plan." As I visited the many developing countries, I learned firsthand that they strongly desire help in their development from industrialized nations and such NIEs as Korea.

I think that we should take this opportunity to seriously think about the method and type of ties we should have with Southeast Asian and other Asian countries. In particular, I suggest that we rethink what factors must first be considered when engaging in economic trade or investing in a joint venture with such Asian countries.

In order for us to strengthen economic cooperation with developing Asian nations, I think we should consider more than exporting merchandise or importing raw materials. I think we must think long-term and consider exporting technology or plants. This long-term view not only lends directly to our aim of increased trade, but is a means of helping the other country develop economically. For us to increase trade while maintaining a friendly relationship, we must give in return for what we receive. The most appropriate gift, then, is cooperation in the development of policies and plans for the country's industrialization and support of scientific and technological development so the country can gradually reverse the trend of regression. In essence, it is best to use our past experiences to sincerely support the other country, and export any technologies that may be needed as a result.

Unlike in the past, various limits can clearly be seen in expanding business to Asia by exporting products. Another point that needs to be taken into account is that each developing nation naturally has its own unique history, culture, social traditions, and customs. Their politics and economic conditions also differ greatly. Therefore, when providing these countries with support or cooperation, it is necessary to first fully understand the country's social structure, conditions, life styles and mentality, so that work can proceed from the country's viewpoint. To this end, we must be prepared to become part of the country's society and seek the best method while performing the work the country requires. If we advance our work based on abstract judgments resulting from casual observations made on the outside, we would be running a risk of repeating major trials and errors and even adversely effecting the country.

Based on these points, it is necessary for us to fully understand the characteristics and situations of the other country and, based on a relationship of trust and understanding and a long-term view, strive to build a mutually beneficial bloc. To this end, I think it is best to build a foundation of cooperation in science and technology before providing cooperation with merchandise or business.

Whenever I think about the development of science and technology in developing nations, I remember a phrase in a paper entitled, "Underdeveloped Science in Underdeveloped Countries" by Dr. Stevan Dedijer, a Swedish scientist. The phrase read, "It is extremely difficult to achieve the objectives in the development of science and technology in a developing country unless the head of state executes leadership and the government actively supports this."

Because of this, I would like to reiterate the importance of developing science and technology by referring to heads of states of developing nations that I have directly met who have the determination and power to put into practice plans concerning scientific and technological development. At the same time, I would like to emphasize that the correct mentality and actions of the scientists and engineers are essential to the development of the country's science and technology. Naturally, most of the heads of state that I have met had tremendous interest in the development of science and technology. Since I cannot talk about all of them, I would like to refer to the case of the former President of Sri Lanka.

I visited Sri Lanka twice in 1985. UNIDO held a workshop on Sri Lanka's policies concerning science and technology in March 1985. I received an invitation and went to Colombo. Upon my arrival, on the day before the conference, I was asked by the Sri Lankan government to speak on scientific and technological development strategies for developing nations. I accepted the request, since I felt that having come all this way it would be polite to listen to what they wanted. Then, on the evening of March 11, I spoke before Sri Lankan public servants. On the morning of the following day, the twelfth, an opening ceremony was held for the workshop. Sri Lankan President J. R. Jayewardene attended to deliver the opening speech. A simple party was held after the closing ceremony. It was at this party that the Science Advisor to the President approached me and told me that the President wanted to see me and asked if I would come along. I approached the President and greeted him. He then said, "I heard from many people that your speech was excellent, so I would like to know what you spoke about. " I answered that I spoke in detail, primarily referring to cases from Korea, on how to prepare development policies for science and technology in a developing nation and how to put these policies into action. Upon hearing this, President Jayewardene regretted not hearing the speech so he could learn about the subject in more detail. Dr. Cyril Ponnamperuma, the Science Advisor to the President, commented that I had written three books on scientific and technological development strategies for developing nations and that all three books had been translated into English. Hearing this, President Jayewardene asked if he could have one of those books. I replied that I would give him one that I had brought as a gift for the Science Advisor.

However, I felt that a book would be wasted due to his age of 80 years and lack of knowledge concerning science and technology. Before I left the party, the president asked me if I could extend my stay. I asked if the President had anything in particular that he would like to ask. He replied that he wanted to ask questions after he finished reading the book. He added that if I could not extend my visit, he would like for me to make another visit in the near future. I could only answer that I would do that.

To keep my promise, I decided to return to Sri Lanka from June 23 to 29, 1985. I arranged to pay a visit to the President on the day after my arrival in Colombo. The President had told me that he would ask me questions after he finished reading the book that I gave him. The questions turned out to be well organized and to the point. He appeared to be extremely satisfied as I answered his questions. Then, he told me that he has a few requests, and presented an organized series of problems. In summary, the first question was, "You state in the book that technological development is essential for the industrialization of a country and that a medium for technological development is also necessary. What can Sri Lanka do?" The second question was, "We must first have the personnel. How can we develop the personnel for science and technology? Would you prepare a method for this?" The third question was, "My personal observation is that developing nations do not have the environment for science and technology to take firm root. Tell me what Korea has done to prepare the environment." He also asked for an explanation on not the general personnel development plan or educational plan, but the course of establishing science institutes and technology universities in Korea and the special measures that were necessary for this process. Finally, he asked me to write the draft for the basic law on the promotion of scientific and technological development.

The President's questions covered most of the measures that are pertinent to the problem. However, the draft for the basic law alone could not be drawn up in a single day. Fortunately, though, I had the experience of developing and enacting a plan based on a law in Korea so I was familiar with all aspects of the law. Therefore, it was not an extremely difficult task for me. However, since the President's requests covered a wide range of fields, I felt that it would be a slightly heavy burden. Nevertheless, I had to start the work. I experienced considerable difficulty in finishing in a few days, without rest, what may otherwise take more than a few years to complete.

As I have described, I made many suggestions to Sri Lanka in the fields of science and technology and presented many methods to implement the suggestions. I learned, however, that the plan was not working as I had expected. Then, upon seeking for the cause of the problem, I found out that although the President was enthusiastically promoting the plan, conflicts between domestic and international factions under the President were ruining the effort. I was extremely saddened to hear this. It was a rare case where the top level was agreeable but the lower level had numerous problems. Very few heads of state are as wonderful as President Jayewardene. Therefore, if the head of state understands and aggressively supports a plan, even a difficult problem can be solved. Thus, it is important to place the development on track.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to and recognize the efforts of Chairman Hiraiwa and the other judges of the Nikkei Asia Prizes, and Executive Managing Director Mr. Sugita and others of Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

Thank you.

Speech text / May 14, 1997

I am most grateful to receive a distinguished award that Nihon Keizai Shimbun is bestowing on me and my fellow recipients from India and Korea.

I am accepting this prize as a recognition of my research activities and music compositions, an honor I am most happy to share with my wife who is here with me. I also accept this award in the name of the University of the Philippines where I have worked for decades and where results of my researches are deposited in the U.P. Ethnomusicology Archives. . I am glad that the Ambassador of the Philippines to Japan, His Excellency, Mr. Alfonso Yuchengco, is able to join us today.

I am deeply thankful to famous musicians and musicologists who have helped introduce my music or made known my researches in Japan.
These are:
Professor Shigeo Kishibe, a long-time friend.
Mr. Yuji Takahasi, who translated into Japanese several of my works.
Ms. Aki Takahashi, who commissioned and performed my musics, together with his brother, Yuji.
Professor Kuniharu Akiyama who sadly passed away last year, helped in introducing my music Strata to the "Sendai Asian Music festival '92.
Mr. Toru Takemitsu, who together with Mr.Watakabe Akira,advisor to the President of Suntory Hall helped to commission and present my music Distemperament in the Suntory International Music Festival.
Professor Yutaka Fujishima together with Professor Shin Nakagawa presented in Kyoto and other cities in Japan and Germany several musics of mine.
Profesor Tomoaki Fujii is my co-board member at the Asia Pacific Society for Ethnomusicology Professor Yoshihiko Tokumaru acknowledged my work in the Koizumi Ethnomusicology award.
Professor Osamu Yamaguti interviewed me in television on my music and researches.
Professor Gen'ichi Tsuge is a colleague in conferences Dr. Alan Feinstein and Ms. Reiko Ogawa of the Japan Foundation favor projects on the musics of Southeast Asia The Toyota Foundation had supported a research work of mine.

Ethnomusicological researches in Asia disclose concrete elements showing tangible links in the structure of court music in East-Southeast Asia and court of classical music in Europe, indentifiable in counts of four, a regular of expected beat and bipolar oppositions between fifth and other interuals.

Counts of four and the beat regulate "rhythm" and "melody". A bipolarity between fifths is crystallized in European harmony with similar oppositions and other usages of fifths in gamelan, pi-phaad, gagaku, a- aku and Tang melodies. Intervals are in turn based on lengths of vibrating bodies and proportions, the very subject of music in ancient Greece with a corresponding knowledge in West Asian antiquity, still to be understood and clarified in its relation to music.

In relating this thinking of the past to the present a question arises on how a very old concept of mathematical proportions can still be represented in music of the 21st century.

I regret that because of a lack of time and space, it is not possible to include other names that in some way made known my music and music research in Japan. I reiterate my thanks to the Nikkei Keizai Shimbun for this prestigious award.

Speech text / May 15, 1996

Nihon Keizai Shimbun under the leadership of Mr. Takuhiko Tsuruta has established the Nikkei Asia Prizes to promote understanding among countries of the Asia Pacific Region. It is a great honour for me to be awarded the Nikkei Asia Prize for Regional Growth and I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep appreciation to Nihon Keizai Shimbun for this honour.

My profound thanks also goes to all members of the Selection Committee under the chairmanship of Mr. Gaishi Hiraiwa. To be chosen by the distinguished Selection Committee from among so many eminent persons in Asia who left their marks in promoting regional growth is truly an exceptional distinction for me.

Allow me to look upon this distinguished honour conferred upon me as an expression of appreciation and confidence in my country, its people and its government for their endeavours to promote regional growth and regional cooperation. My role has been limited to contributing in a small way to advancing mutual understanding and mutual confidence.

On this auspicious occasion perhaps I could share with you some of my thoughts on regional growth and regional cooperation. In developing a vision of the future it seems appropriate to ask ourselves what can be learned from the past. Looking back at Indonesia's history of the last 30 years, the first lesson is that a fundamental economic transformation of a country and its economic relations with other countries can indeed be accomplished. In order to bring about a fundamental economic transformation, a few requirements are to be met. These are, first of all, a national resolve, a determined leadership, clear directions , and full commitments to put your own economic house in order and to live in peace with your neighbours. The next requirement is a sympathetic understanding by other nations and a readiness on their part to develop an effective and mutually advantageous economic cooperation.

Here the relations and economic cooperation between Japan and Indonesia comes to mind. During the middle of the 1960s Indonesia faced a myriad of problems, including widespread food scarcity, hyperinflation, stagnant industries, substantial unemployment, rapidly deteriorating infrastructure, and a balance of payments crisis. At that time many international analysts and observers held out little hope for Indonesia's future. The turning point came in 1966 when the new government of Indonesia adopted an economic stabilization and rehabilitation programme, a balanced budget, and a competitive exchange rate. At that time the country was confronted with a severe foreign debt crisis. Debt payment due, including arrears, exceeded exports earnings. In September 1966, at the initiative of the Government of Japan, the first meeting between the new government of Indonesia and its creditors took place in Tokyo. That first meeting, convened at the initiative of the Government of Japan, provided Indonesia the opportunity to announce and explain its new economic and financial policies. Three months later, in December 1966, the Tokyo meeting was followed-up by the Paris Club meeting which agreed to reschedule Indonesia's foreign debts. After two months, in February 1967, the first meeting of the Inter- Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI) took place in Amsterdam at the initiative of the Government of the Netherlands. Both the Paris Club meeting on Indonesia's foreign debt and the IGGI meeting would not have taken place without that crucial Tokyo meeting in September 1966.

Many occasions of effective economic cooperation between the two countries followed. In 1970 a plan for a final settlement of Indonesia's debt crisis was worked out in the Paris Club. Initially, the plan did not receive the support of the Government of Japan since it was contrary to the provisions in the existing laws of Japan. Had the Government of Japan at that time continuously opposed such a settlement in the Paris Club, no agreement with any creditor could have been reached. But instead, the Government of Japan and in particular the late Mr. Takeo Fukuda, who was then Minister of Finance, made a determined effort to overcome such legal impediments by successfully introducing an amendment to the existing laws. In today ' s language of development cooperation, it was an act reflecting the true spirit of cooperation between partners in development.

The second lesson of Indonesia's recent economic history is related to the existence of so many uncertainties and unpredictable events. On the world scene, events such as what happened to the Berlin Wall and to the Sovyet Union are cases in point. We may be tempted to say that in today's world the only certainty is that there are numerous uncertainties. One example of uncertainty in the past was the two external shocks experienced by the Indonesian economy during 1986. The sharp appreciation of the Japanese yen against the US dollar and at the same time the very rapid decline of international oil prices were a double blow to the Indonesian economy. But here again, the Government of Japan reacted positively and immediately. Such a deep understanding of the predicaments of a developing country is indeed quite rare in the present world.

What we also learn is clearly that through national resolve and determination a country can achieve a high a degree of resilience in facing the challenge of uncertainties. In a world full of uncertain and unpredictable events we must be able to firmly establish national resilience and to work together towards achieving regional resilience as well as global resilience.

Here comes the role and the responsibility of the mass media. In facing this uncertain world it depends very much on the ability and the efforts of the mass media to promote mutual understanding between nation. It is very hearting to note that the present initiative of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun to establish the Nikkei Asia Prizes is a reflection of that spirit.

Speech text / May 15, 1996

Esteemed Chairman, President Tsuruta, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am very honored to have been invited to Japan to receive the Nikkei Asia Prizes from the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., the highest authority in economic news. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for being elected the first recipient of the Nikkei Asia Prizes. At the same time I want to thank the committee of judges from the bottom of my heart for their kind praise of both Chinese hybrid rice and my achievements in that field.

Research in hybrid rice began in China in 1964. The first successes were achieved in 1973 after nine years of experimentation. Hybrid rice started being cultivated broadly in 1976. Many years of experiments show an obvious increase in yields as a result of using hybrid rice. Hybrid rice produces a 20% greater than regular varieties of rice under the same conditions. Hybrid rice is now cultivated in 15,334,100 ha, 50% of the total rice paddy area, and 57% of the total cereal crop yield is derived from hybrid rice. In 1995 hybrid rice yielded 6.7 tons per hectare while regular varieties produced 5.2 tons per hectare. Hybrid rice has been used throughout China for 20 years and the accumulated area surpasses 187 million hectares with the total increased yield over 280 billion kilograms. This demonstrated that hybrid rice has made a great contribution to China through improving grain yields.

Although hybrid rice research and application have already accomplished outstanding achievements, there is no limit to science. In the area of plant breeding, hybrid rice is still in the initial stages of development with a great potential with a bright future. The species of hybrid rice used in current production belongs to the "advantage-taking" category. To further improve the yield of rice paddy we are working on developing a sub-species of hybrid rice which is of stronger advantage. Its potential yield is 20% higher than today's hybrid rice. Initial results have already been achieved with this project and it will be applied in production in the near future, which will push the rice paddy yield of China up to a new level.

Science has no boundaries. I believe the hybrid rice project belongs not only to China but to the whole world. This project can contribute to the well-being of the Chinese people, and the well-being of all the people in the world. One of my greatest wishes is that hybrid rice can be used throughout the world, as I believe it can play an important role in solving the starvation problems that the human race is facing. Recently, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has gradually been carrying out a plan of spreading hybrid rice to developing countries. As part of this plan, Chinese experts including myself have been providing technical support, and we have already achieved very good results in Vietnam and India. Hybrid rice has produced a remarkable increase in production compared to local improved seeds. It is being spread intensely and has bright future. I firmly believe that as hybrid rice is gradually used in more and more countries, it will make a great contribution to the happiness of mankind and peace in the world.

Being granted the first "Nikkei Asia Prizes" is a great encouragement to me. As a scientist I shall continue to exert myself and give my best to the undertaking of developing hybrid rice on a global scale. At the same time, I sincerely hope that hybrid rice can get more support from various circles, especially from our friends in Japan, so that its benefit to the people of the world can become available more quickly and grow even further.

Thank you!

Speech text / May 15, 1996

Mr. Takuhiko Tsuruta, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Japan is still as beautiful as ever, and this is an ap-propriate place for receiving a prize which has significance not only in Japan but also all over the world.

I am very pleased to attend the very first prizes-awards ceremony. I feel especially honored to have been chosen as the recipient of the Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture for l996.

I cannot find words to express my feelings. My heart is so full that I cannot ever forget this moment throughout my life.

I take this opportunity to thank all of you and all Japanese people from the bottom of my heart.

I have worked for projects undertaken jointly with Japan on many occasions, and have visited Japan several times to attend conferences and do other things. Every time I come to Japan, I have new experiences so I bring them back as my memories to my home country. I tell my colleagues what I experienced and what lessons I learned here in Japan. I also tell my mother and family members how I enjoyed things here.

My mother likes to hear her children tell their stories. This is because she is illiterate. She learns by listening, observing and experiencing. She has a lot of experience, since she has as many as 15 children. My father entered the priesthood when he was very young, but returned to secular life at the age of 25. In those days a man had a chance to study if he became a priest. He leaned about Buddhism by reading scriptures written in Pali and studied Laotian literature written in ancient characters, and became an expert in these fields. He wrote textbooks on the language of Pali for use in monasteries, as well as other important textbooks, including the grammar of the Laotian language, a dictionary of the Laotian language, the history of Lao sand the art of divination. He also read ancient Laotian literature written on palm leaves and rewrote it in present-day Laotian characters. His work has become the cornerstone of modern Laotian literature. He loved composing poems. Every time he wrote a poem, he read it to my mother. When she made some comments on it, he revised his work in accordance with her advice. Such was the environment in which I was raised.

I was born in 1940, when the world was gripped by the nightmare of World War II. Laos was not immune from it. My father was an activist who attempted to establish the identity of Laos. His activities led to his being arrested by the French authorities then ruling our country. His arrest put our family into a very difficult situation. My father always had to stay away from us. As one of his children, I was subjected to various restrictions. In early 1941, my father sought refuge in Thailand, leaving me and my mother behind. At that time she had only two children, my brother and me. She worked very hard to feed her children, and at the same time tried to find ways to go and see my father in Thailand. However, the three of us -- my mother, my six-year-old brother and myself, eight months old at that time -- were captured, put on trial, and were deprived of freedom for one month and 18 days.

After we were released, my mother did not give up her attempt to flee. She finally succeeded in doing so. Inl942, all members of our family met in Bangkok, Thailand. Our life in a foreign country lasted until 1948, after which my father took all of his family back to their homeland.

It was during his stay in Bangkok that my father had an opportunity to study many works of Laotian literrature and print them. They were Sinxay, Sane Lup Pasoune and Thao Houng Thao Cheuang. I consider myself very fortunate, in the sense that I grew up among mountains of my father's books. Among them were palm-1eaf volumes written in ancient Laotian characters, books printed in Thai characters, and my father's handwritten copies. He read me many stories written in verse. Sometimes he read a story in such away that I may be able to recite it. As I learned to recite a story, my mother and grandmother (my mother's mother) wanted to hear it. Fortunately, I had the chance to learn to recite a 17th-century poem which was the original version of Sang Sinxay, when I was only eight years old. I had only a vague idea about what the words meant. My mother and grandmother, who listened to me, taught me the meaning of each line of the verse.

When I returned to Laos in 1948, I, like other children, entered school as a matter of course. What I did not expect was that children in Laos were supposed to learn French, whereas in Thailand we learned and wrote the Thai language (1 learned Lao at home from my father.) In those days Laotian children had only two hours a week to study Lao as part of their primary education, one hour on writing and taking dictation, and one hour on reading and reciting. 1 liked very much to read Sang Sinxay, Thao Houng, Thao Cheuang and various other literary works, and I was disappointed to find that I had to sit through tedious hours writing French. One day, during a history class our teacher said to us, "Our country was once LaGaule." Upon hearing those words, my distrust, which was growing until that day, melted away. I told my father about that. From that day on I began to learn the history of Laos from him with absorbed interest.

I had the chance to learn French and English. That gave me an opportunity to come into close contact with French literature and world literature. Even so. I had strong attachment to Laotian literature from my earlier days. When I was working as a teacher -- I was teaching French in my official capacity -- I had growing desire to spread the Laotian language and literature among my students, who were also my friends. My father said to me, "Language is the symbol of a state, while literature is the heart of language." Laos has written language (characters) and descriptive literature. Such literature is recorded in piles of palm leaves. I strongly wished that new generations of the Lao people would have a deeper understanding of literature of their own country.

My life is inseparable from literature. I could not help reading literary works and writing some myself. While teaching, I wrote short stories, long stories and poems, and began translating foreign literary works.

Among ancient Laotian literary works, palm-leaf manuscripts contained many things which had remained unknown for a long time. We had to undertake the project of restoring and preserving palm leaves in order to protect our ancestors' wisdom against the passage of time and hand it down safely to later generations.

The project of cataloging and recording palm-leaf manuscripts was undertaken from 1989 to 1994 with the support of the Toyota Foundation. The project started in three provinces of Laos. Then its scope was extended to cover six provinces -- Vientiane (municipality).Vientiane (province), Luangphabang, Khammouane, Savannakhet and Champasak -- which were chosen as the treasure trove of palm leaves along the Mekong.

The first thing to do under the project is to go to the country side and remote places having temples which, we may say, form the core of mass culture. Palm leaves are found in scripture houses and main buildings of such temples. They are placed in beautifully sculptured wooden boxes. To most people, it may have seemed strange that a woman should travel through the length of the country to talk to priests about palm-1eaf manuscripts. Our project team made special efforts to encourage priests and local residents to cooperate with us in preserving cultural heritage. We taught them how to clean palm leaves and preserve them, hoping that they would continue efforts to preserve their cultural legacy after we left. We visited more than three hundred temples in all. Whichever village we visited, we found people there very cooperative. Little by little, the people came to realize that preserving palm leaves was something they had to do on their own.

It is true that in certain periods of our history, palm leaves were left unattended, but this is because there was no one who knew how to read messages written on them, nor sufficient funds to preserve them in good condition. We live in an age when products of new culture such as foreign books illustrated with pretty pictures and video and cassette tapes affect the daily life of the people and the way goods are produced. Some people prefer foreign language material simply because they are engulfed in waves of commercialism. Such people unknowingly accept the kind of culture which is totally incompatible with their daily living. The Laotian government recently adopted the policy of cultural revival, which is in keeping with social and economic development. Thus, the project of preserving palm leaves assumed special significance. It became one of our tasks to transmit the knowledge written on palm leaves. This is a very demanding, time-consuming work. Fortunately, we received support from the United Nations and many countries and foundations. In Japan, the Toyota Foundation supported our efforts.

In the 21st century, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to achieve further economic and scientific development. However, we should not forget basic ethics in the process. What should we do to live a decent life, remains spiritually healthy and take care not to destroy each other, animals or the natural environment while economic and scientific developments continue? Laos's palm-1eaf culture tells a lot about our own past. Knowing our own past should help us adapt to the 2lst-century world which is just around the corner.

One of the most notorious social problems in our region at a time when we are approaching the end of the 20th century is that children and daughters are sold for money. This is something we should be deeply ashamed of as we move into the next century. In Eastern-bloc countries, families are breaking up. Such social ills are increasing not only in our communities but all over the world.

There are many more social ills, including violence, suppression, belittlement of women, and drugs. How can we eliminate these problems? It may be that the wisdom and moral sense of ancient people, particularly Asians, may be a help in solving them. Even if such problems are not eradicated completely from the globe, they may be reduced at least. I think so. I believe so.

Thank you very much.