Twelve Vietnamese students are attending the Japan-ASEAN Student Conference that opened in Sendai of Japan’s northeastern prefecture of Miyagi on Nov. 14.

The four-day conference is part of the Japanese and Eastern Asian youth exchange activities held under the Japan-East Asia Network of Exchange for Students and Youths (JENESYS) programme sponsored by the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

During the conference, around 150 students from Japan and member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will discuss ASEAN integration and its partnership with Japan , as well as the target of building an East Asian community in the future.

The students will also tour a number of economic and socio-cultural establishments in Tokyo and Sendai .
According to the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Tokyo hopes that through these kinds of cooperative activities, a network will be created between the youths who will play an important role in future exchanges between Japan and ASEAN. Japan also hopes that the Japanese students will further deepen their interest and understanding towards ASEAN.

JENESYS was announced by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Second East Asia Summit (EAS), which was held in the Philippines in January 2007.

The 35-billion-yen youth exchange programme invites about 6,000 young people, who are mainly from the EAS member countries (ASEAN, China, the Republic of Korea (RoK), India, Australia, and New Zealand), to Japan every year for the five years following 2007.

Earlier, a delegation of young reporters from Vietnam and four other Mekong sub-region countries visited Japan under the JENESYS programme from Oct. 28-Nov. 8.

The delegation visited Japan ’s media agencies, including the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), Fukushima Broadcasting Station and Asahi and Nikkei newspapers, as well as a number of Japan ’s localities./.