JAPAN NEWS
The Yomiuri Shimbun



Yoshiomi Tamai, the founder and president of the Ashinaga scholarship foundation for orphaned children, has been chosen as a recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award.

The award recognizes individuals who made significant global contributions in fields like education and human rights.

“The real winners of the award are the volunteers who have supported orphaned students and those who’ve cooperated through donations. I’m just representing them as their leader,” said Tamai, 80. “But I’m pleased that the world thinks highly of our efforts. I feel really encouraged.”

Tamai became an expert on road-related issues after his mother died in a traffic accident, and called for improvements in emergency medical care and compensation for traffic accident victims. He started becoming acquainted with children who lost one or both parents in traffic accidents, which spurred him to provide support so they could pursue higher education from 1967.



He eventually widened his support to include children who lost their parents due to illness and disasters, and established the Ashinaga foundation in April 1993. The foundation has collected a total of about ¥100 billion in donations, and says it has helped facilitate higher education for more than 95,000 orphaned students in Japan.

Tamai’s foundation expanded its activities overseas from 2002, through such activities as supporting orphans in Uganda whose parents died of AIDS.

Tamai is the second Japanese person to receive the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award, following former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, who was honored in 2002. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also a past recipient.

The awards are presided over by the Eleanor Roosevelt Center, which upholds the philosophies of Eleanor Roosevelt — the wife of former U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. She drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The awards ceremony is set to be held in New York on Sunday