Our story
The Foundation was established as an independent grant-making charity in the UK in 1985, thanks to a generous endowment from the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation (now The Nippon Foundation), prompted by Ryoichi Sasakawa. In 2020 we were delighted to receive a further endowment from The Nippon Foundation under the guidance of his son Yohei Sasakawa, who currently serves as our patron in Japan. Our longstanding former chair, the Earl of St Andrews, serves as our UK patron.
We enjoy warm relations with organisations with aligned missions in the UK and abroad. In many instances these are charities also established and sustained through the initiative of the Sasakawa family. These include foundations in Scandinavia, France and the United States, as well as The Nippon Foundation in Japan.
40 years of philanthropy
In our first forty years we invested over £20m in UK-Japanese exchange and collaboration, supporting well over 6,000 projects.
In 2001 we established the Butterfield Awards in memory of our former chair William Butterfield, Baron Butterfield of Stechford. In recognition of the value to medicine of sustained support, these awards are higher in value and longer in duration than our standard grants.
In 2002 we launched our annual school tour, with ten students and two teachers from Rosshall Academy in Glasgow becoming the first participants. Since then every year, with the exception of the Covid-19 pandemic years, we have arranged and fully funded a group of sixth form students to spend over a week in Japan.
In 2008 we began the Sasakawa Lectureship Programme, which ran for five years, giving a vital boost to university study of Japan in the UK. The programme was based on an award of £2.5m from The Nippon Foundation towards the creation of 13 full-time lectureships at universities across the UK. Following the programme we have continued our support for university Japanese studies through the Sasakawa Japanese Studies Postgraduate Studentship Programme, also generously funded by The Nippon Foundation. These have run annually since 2014.
In response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami we supported 44 projects including relief and fundraising efforts, to a value of nearly £100k.
From 2013 to 2017 we were responsible for the UK-Japan Global Seminar Series hosted by Chatham House. The initiative brought leaders and thinkers from both countries together to identify potential areas for collaboration on global challenges in the economic, security and social spheres. Through seminars, conferences, publications and collaborative policy dialogue, opportunities were identified that then set the context for further work in those areas.