THE JAPAN-NORWAY SOCIETY Org. No. 989 512 850
The Japan-Norway Society in 2016 The Japan-Norway Society is a membership based volunteer organization established in November 1977. The strength of our society depends on the members. Following the presentation at the AGM in January 2016 the main focus for the board in 2016 was to increase the number of events, reach out to new members and make the society more relevant to the current-day Japan-Norway environment. Communication February 2016, we launched the Japan-Norway Society group on Facebook. Facebook is by far the most used social media in Norway and it has proven to be useful to share information about events and also for members to interact. We are pleased to see that the group quickly became popular and by the end of 2016 the group had about 650 members. During the 1st half of 2016, we upgraded our web pages. (www.j-ns.no) to make them easier to use and also easier to maintain and update. The main focus was on the activity calendar where we post all our events and also other relevant events organized by others. We have also updated the page containing useful links in an attempt to share information of relevance for the Japan-Norway community. The web pages had a total of about 5 800 visits by about 3900 unique visitors in 2016. Events We arranged a total 22 events in 2016: -
4 February: Annual General Meeting and New Year Reception
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18 February: Guided Tour at Munch Museum
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21 February: Annual Ski Day.
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17 March: Benkyokai about the Idemitsu Norway Story.
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20 April: Suiyokai
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28 May: Norwegian Culture Inspired Japanese Tea Ceremony
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30 May: J-NS Cooking class
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7 June: Benkyokai about the Fuglen Tokyo Story.
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22 June: J-NS Cooking class
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23 June: Guided Tour at Munch Museum
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20 August: Pappa and kids-kai in Frognerparken
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24 August: Suiyokai
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31 August: Guided Tour at Japanomania Exhibition
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4 September: Annual Mushroom Hunting
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5 September: J-NS Cooking class
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27 September: Benkyokai about Northern Light
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22 October: Norwegian Culture Inspired Japanese Tea Ceremony
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26 October: J-NS Cooking class
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22 November: Guided Tour at Munch Museum
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23 November: Benkyokai about Japanese Odyssey – 2500 km bicycle tour of Japan
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6 December: Launch of book “Copeland - ølbryggeren ved verdens ende”
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8 December: Bonenkai
In 2016 we made most of our events open for participation also by non-members. The exception have been free events organized for paying J-NS members only. Basically, the idea was to have each event break-even and a fee was charged to cover the respective costs. There has been a difference in participation fee for members and non-members. In total about 600 participants joinend the above events. In addition, we promoted a number of Japan-Norway related events organized by others.
J-NS Grants We re-launched the J-NS Grants scheme and made the guideline and application procedure clearerr. In November, Mr. Eskil Roll and Mr. Nicolai Croze received the 2016 grant of 10 000 NOK for their project “Itakura – The Japanese Storage House”. Logo Competition In commemoration of the J-NS' 40th anniversary this year a public logo competition was called for and there were 21 unique design entries by the submission deadline of 31 October 2016. The board shortlisted three designs and requested members to vote. The most popular design will be announced as a winning design at the AGM. Members We see a steady growth in memberships and by year-end we had 96 memberships. (39 individual members, 49 family members and 8 corporate members.) In 2015, we had 77 memberships. Finance Our income in 2016 has been 34,000 from membership and 69,049 from the various events. The funds have been used to cover costs of the various events, grants, gifts and administration. The balance in 2016 is 31603. Some outstanding payments explained in the foot notes will reduce that amount. Please see financial report 2016 for details. Board of Directors At the AGM in 2016, the following 10 members were elected board directors Svend Haakon Kristensen (President) Mette K. Johnsen Cecilie Nilsen Kaori Ishii
Yasuko Oki Synne Olsen Bjørnar Slettvüg Kenichi Kasahara Teruyuki Takahashi Roy Hirano During the year, Synne Olsen, Teruyuki Takahashi and Roy Hirano moved away from Oslo and left their board positions. The board met 7 times during 2016.
Oslo, 11 January, 2017 Svend Haakon Kristensen President