“Meiji Jingu Forest Festival of Art is an official event of the Japan Cultural Expo, which will be held throughout the year of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Within the core theme of the Japan Cultural Expo – “Humanity and Nature in Japan” – the festival will strive to ask just what constitutes the Japanese aesthetic, and how to communicate that to the world.
The forests of Meiji Shrine are a fitting symbol of how the Japanese have nurtured a unique aesthetic while maintaining a deep-felt respect for the natural world, and as such we believe it is a suitable place to consider the art of Japan, woven as it is so tightly into Japanese history, creativity and spirituality.
Alongside the Meiji Jingu Forest Festival of Art, we will be holding a year-long symposium to examine the concepts behind the festival. Whilst looking back over the last one hundred years, we hope to take this chance to look forward, too, to the next one hundred years of the “forest”, and one hundred years of “art”.

Keynote Lecture(40 mins): Masanori Aoyagi (former Commissioner of the Agency for Cultural Affairs. Chairman of Board of Directors, Tama Arts University)

Panel discussion (80 mins):

Masanori Aoyagi
Takashi Mitachi (BCG Senior Manager)
Kohei Nawa (Artist, Associate Professor, Kyoto University of Art and Design)
Noriko Imaizumi (Meiji Jingu International Shinto Culture Research Institute, Senior Researcher)

Moderator: Yumi Yamaguchi (Artistic Director, Meiji Jingu Forest Festival of Art)”