Qingdao Publishing Group was invited to attend the award ceremony of the "Junichi Watanabe Literature Award" in Tokyo

Recently, the 4th "Junichi Watanabe Literature Prize" award ceremony was held at the Tokyo Kaikan in Japan. More than 500 people attended the award ceremony, including Kodansha, Shueisha, Elementary School, Shinchosha, Watanabe family, and well-known figures in Japanese literary and art circles. As the only overseas invitee, Qingdao Publishing Group attended the award ceremony under the leadership of Mr. Wang Weida, Secretary of the Party Committee and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Group. The day before the ceremony, the Qingdao Publishing Group paid a special visit to Shueisha, the organizer of the Literary Award, and exchanged in-depth views with President Maruke Horiuchi and the Watanabe family on the operation of the Watanabe project and future cooperation between the two sides, and on the introduction of the publication of the winning works of the Watanabe Junichi Literary Award.

Junichi Watanabe is a famous contemporary Japanese writer who won the Naoki Prize in 1970 for his novel "Light and Shadow", and in 1980 won the "Eiji Yoshikawa Literature Prize" for "Distant Sunset", and his representative works include "Paradise Lost", "Blunt Force", "Hydra Diary", "Soul Breaking Lake", "Avatar", "Shadowless Lamp" and so on. Junichi Watanabe once wrote an article entitled "Perpetrators Will Not Become Victims," criticizing the Japanese prime minister for paying homage to the Yasukuni Shrine, criticizing the atrocities committed by Japan during the War of Resistance Against Japan, and severely criticizing the Japanese Government's refusal to reflect on the war of aggression, thus showing the conscience and sense of social responsibility that a great literary scholar should have for history.

The Junichi Watanabe Literary Prize was established in 2016 by Shueisha, one of Japan's three major publishing houses, to commemorate Junichi Watanabe, who created masterpieces of Japanese literature representing the Showa and Heisei periods, and to encourage and recognize the creation of novels that transcend the boundaries of pure literature and popular literature and deeply express the psychology of characters. The prize is held annually for 2 million yen, and the judges are all heavyweight writers and critics of the Japanese literary scene, including Jiro Asada, Mariko Koike, Nobuko Takaki, and Kei Miyamoto. Previous award-winning authors and works include "Vision" by Kawakami Uniko, "The Final Chapter of the Concert" by Keiichiro Hirano, and "The Man I Killed and the Man Who Killed Me" by Akira Higashiyama. The winning work of this year's "Watanabe Junichi Literature Prize" is Matsui Imasako's "Furong Gancheng".

In 2016, Qingdao Publishing Group wholly acquired the Junichi Watanabe Literature Museum designed by the famous architect Tadao Ando in Hokkaido, known as the "Cement Poet of the World", which was the first case of overseas mergers and acquisitions of cultural enterprises in Shandong Province, and was rated as a key national cultural export project in 2017-2018, and was praised and commended by the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Culture of the State Council, and the former State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. In December 2018, the "Qingdao Hokkaido Cultural Exchange Center" was unveiled at the Junichi Watanabe Literature Museum, which attracted widespread attention and reports from the media at home and abroad. At the same time, the "Charming Qingdao Photo Exhibition" that showcases the image of Qingdao city was also successfully held at the Literature Museum. As a window for cultural exchanges between Qingdao and Hokkaido, the "Qingdao Hokkaido Cultural Exchange Center" is actively building an important platform for Sino-Japanese cultural exchanges.

During the period, Qingdao Publishing Group and its party also visited the elementary school hall of a well-known Japanese publishing house and Tokyo Books, and the two sides discussed and exchanged views on Sino-Japanese publishing and multi-level cultural cooperation.