Message from the Judging Panel Chairman

I very much look forward to attending the judging each year, because it gives me an opportunity to encounter pictures drawn with the pure and unsophisticated sensitivity of children. The pictures in this year’s contest were all wonderful, as always, and it was so difficult to pick the winners that I wanted to give them all prizes.

Today, the world faces the problem of how we are to prevent environmental damage, and protect our precious earth. For the past nine years, this contest has sent out a message to all the children who will inherit the earth in the next generation and are concerned about this problem.

The children’s pictures also overcome the barriers of language and location, using their brushes and pencils to depict the greenery and water of our earth, and boldly drawing a beautiful earth where the natural environment, animals, and plants coexist. Their pictures show us their dreams and the power of their feelings for the earth. We must take care of the earth’s environment so that we can make the world that is in their hearts and dreams a reality.

Chairman of the Judging Committee
Painter・Professor, Tokyo Nationalk University of Fine Arts and Music
KINUTANI Koji

A Contest for Emotional Expression with an Action Component

When children grow up feeling a “sense of wonder” toward living things in their immediate environments, they develop a mutually open interchange with their
living surroundings, and so become strongly and personally supportive in their protection and nurturing of the environment.

However, Japanese children today have undeniably lost many opportunities for contact with the living natural environment. While I remain critical of this situation,
this year’s submissions suggest that children are indeed interested in changing matter themselves. Learning intellectually that “the environment is important” takes only a moment, but it does not take much longer to forget it again, either. However, when the same idea is expressed using different methods, such as drawing
pictures, and when children are allowed to have playful contact with their familiar environments, they learn the same thing very thoroughly, although it does take longer. When we come across something beautiful, our whole bodies experience the pleasure we take in it. This spiritual experience of joy helps us realize the value
of compassion for the living environment as part of our lives.

Repeated direct experience of contact with the living things in his or her environment stirs up a vortex of emotion in a child’s heart. This evanescent emotional reaction, when given expression rather than simply allowed to disperse and disappear, is essential to the process of building mutual intimacy between child and an ever-widening environment.

I hope that this event will lead children from "Exploring, Discovering, and Engaging” with their immediate environments to the emotional expression of creating art,
so that this competition will develop an action component.

Professor, Aichi Sangyo University Graduate School, Architect
ENDO Yasuhiro

I judge the environmentally themed contest every year, and every time I am just as moved. The natural environment, animals, birds, and fish in the pictures are so
full of life the I even feel nostalgic for countries that I have never been fortunate enough to visit, and the children are so full of life, with their brilliant expressions.

I always end up asking myself just what '' comfort and plenty '' really mean.

Children in countries I have never seen, who spend their lives in envionments blessed by nature, and who know how to share their limited resources. I feel that
this is different from book-learning, and it leads to respect for the irreplaceable immiediate natural environment. On the one hand, I noticed with interest that many
of this year's pictures had a global warming theme, especially pictures from Japanese children. This is an important theme, and it gives us hope for the future that
children are thinking and expressing their ideas about it. However, I was forced to wonder whether Japanese children were no longer able to think about their
environments outside the framework of books and the knowledge they have been taught.

Environmental problems are such a very broad theme, and also have a major effect on global peace and poverty. I want to pray that this project of the JQA will bring
the children of the world together.

Visiting Researcher Environmental Affairs Communication Science
Institute Inc.
KOBAYASHI Tamae