JCCC Celebrates New Year in Person with Live Music, Quizzes and Raffles
JCCC members, their families, guests and friends challenge a quiz competition at JCCC’s New Year’s Party.
The Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Chicago (JCCC) celebrated 2023 New Year at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel in Schaumburg on January 15, featuring popular singer-songwriter Kaori Kishitani as the special guest. The celebration was held in-person for the first time in three years due to COVID-19 pandemic, and over 750 JCCC members and guests attended the gathering.
Kana Shibusawa (Nichien Production) and Kenton P. Knop (Matsuda, Funai, Eifert & Michell) emceed, and the New Year’s party started with the national anthem of both Japan and the United States, led by Yoshio Goto, JCCC’s Advisor.
From left: Ryohei Tsuji, Takashi Watanabe, Atsushi Nakao and Akihiko Shono
2023 JCCC Chairman Akihiko Shono (Sumitomo Corporation of Americas) and Hiroshi Tajima, Consul General of Japan in Chicago, greeted the audience and carried their new year’s messages, followed by a new year’s speech made by Nonoko Momozaki, a student of the Chicago Futabakai Japanese School, Saturday School.
Chairman Shono and JCCC’s new President Atsushi Nakao (All Nippon Airways) thanked 2022 JCCC Chairman Ryohei Tsuji (Kikkoman Foods) and President Takashi Watanabe (Mizuho Bank) for their hard work to JCCC and presented a plaque.
Schaumburg Mayor Tom Dailly makes a toast welcoming the Japanese business community.
Schaumburg Mayor Tom Dailly said that the Village has more than 60 Japanese businesses and restaurants, and Schaumburg is the place for business in Illinois. He welcomed the members of the Japanese business community and made a toast for their prosperity in the New Year.
Opening Remarks by Chairman Akihiko Shono
In his opening remarks, Chairman Akihiko Shono outlined the history of the JCCC, which started in 1966 with 58 participating companies and organizations and now has more than 500 members, one of the largest Japanese Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. He thanked JCCC members, senior colleagues, and local people for their long-time commitments and warm supports to make JCCC’s significant advancement and called for further supports and cooperation from the members.
JCCC Chairman Akihiko Shono
He explained the JCCC’s three primary missions as follows: (1) making plans and implementing much needed events such as business seminars for its members and promoting business interactions between Japan and the U.S.; (2) continuing to support the local education effort for Japanese students through Chicago Futabakai Japanese Schools; and (3) contributing to the local communities as a corporate citizen through the JCCC Foundation (established in 1991), which provides grants to education-related organizations. Since its inception, it has granted more than $5.9 million to date.
Shono also mentioned about other JCCC’s activities such as participating in Chicago Japanese Picnic and Japan Festival, which will be held for the first time in four years, and said, “We’ll keep the meaning of JCCC existence in a right direction and continue to strive for advancing our presence in local communities and the U.S., while we very much appreciate warm support from local people,” he said.
New Year’s Greetings from Consul General Hiroshi Tajima
Consul General Hiroshi Tajima
Consul General Hiroshi Tajima, who is also Honorary Chairman of JCCC, congratulated to hold in-person gathering and applauded JCCC’s contributions to promote exchanges between Japanese and Japanese Americans and Japan-U.S. relations through the community events such as Japanese Speech contests, Chicago Japanese Picnic, Hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) event in the Phoenix Garden, Jackson Park, and Anderson Garden’s Japanese events in Rockford. He also appreciated hard work of the New Year’s Party Committee members who prepared a variety of programs for the party.
Consul General Tajima mentioned about the 50th anniversary of the Chicago-Osaka sister city relations, other anniversary events and the Midwest U.S.- Japan Conference, which will be held in Tokyo this year, and said that people to people exchanges in the Midwest have become active due to Japan’s decision to significantly ease its border measures last October.
As one of his New Year’s resolutions, Consul General Tajima said, “One of my goals I’ve been focused on since beginning my assignment in Chicago is strengthening the relationship among Japanese residents, Japanese Americans and Americans who are interested in Japan. This year, I’m looking forward to continuing to advance this goal and I hope this contributes to developing foundations for even stronger Japan-Midwest and Japan-U.S. relations.”
New Year’s Speech by Nonoko Momozaki
Nonoko Momozaki
Nonoko Momozaki, a senior of the Chicago Futabakai Saturday School, introduced Professor Tadanobu Tsunoda’s research which found how Japanese and Westerners perceive the sound of insects differently.
Generally Westerners process the sound in the right brain and perceive it as noises while most Japanese process it in the left brain and feel it like beautiful sounds or voice of insects.
Momozaki was born in Illinois and raised by her Japanese parents. She has lived in Japanese lifestyle at home and American style of life outside home. While she has been spending her life between two cultures, she was looking for what her Japaneseness looked like.
One day, she and her friends went to a Japanese festival and came across a ceramics booth. While her friends were watching beautifully decorated plates, Momozaki was most attracted by a somber brown bowl. She thought her preference of the bowl to decorated ceramics would be her Japaneseness, and Japanese’s love of plainness and simplicity has been already in her mind as a Japanese identity.
In another occasion in Japan, Momozaki volunteered to help foreign children who were not fluent in Japanese language. They were struggling doing homework from their school.
All other volunteers were elderly people who always paid respect for the children and treated them as the same human beings. Momozaki was deeply impressed by elderly volunteers’ attitudes toward other people. She said that their way to treat the children taught her the Japanese way of mindful, face-to-face relationship beyond the differences between ages, social statuses, cultures, countries and more.
Momozaki said she is going to graduate from Saturday School and enter a college in the U.S. and will have less opportunity to speak Japanese, but she will not lose her Japaneseness, which she encountered through her life, and wants to be an adult who loves to enjoy listening to beautiful sounds of insects.
Live Performance by Kaori Kishitani
After a luncheon, a live performance show by Kaori Kishitani started. She was a vocal and guitarist in a girls’ band, PRINCESS PRINCESS, which produced many hit songs since its inception in the 1980s. She became a singer-songwriter after the band was broke up in 1996 and resumed the band in 2012 for one year only to support victims of the 2011 Great Earthquake and Tsunami in the Tohoku area. She has continued her music activities as a solo singer and held many live concerts across Japan.
Kishitani started her live with a hit song “Sekaide Ichiban Atsui Natsu (The Hottest Summer In The World).”
After she sang two pieces, she talked about her relationship with the Chicago area. Her daughter entered a high school in suburb four years ago, and Kishitani repeatedly visited Chicago to take care of her daughter who is going to graduate the school in May this year.
When her daughter was the sixth grade in an elementary school in Japan, Kishitani traveled to London with her after 10 years of parenting at home. The mother and daughter saw musical “Mamma Mia!” and then Kishitani was moved by it and cried. She realized that she still had a sensibility like her young days although she had thought being mother meant becoming totally different person.
At the same time, she remembered that her mother wanted her to have a happy life as she wished her daughter to enjoy full of a happy life. This realization moved her to return to music activities and wrote a piece “DREAM”.
During the pandemic, all her live performances were cancelled. She was bored by the pandemic and wanted to make a cheerful piece like she used to sing in the PRINCESS PRINCESS era, so she wrote “STAY BLUE” with Kyoko Tomita, a member of the band and now her close friend.
Last piece was “GET CRAZY!”, and then she sang “PAPA” as an encore saying that she understood the meaning of the piece as she got older and raised her two children.
Over a dozen of quiz-competition winners challenge bean-moving competition to win the first prize.
After the live performance, the audience excited to join a quiz competition and the annual raffle with generous prizes donated by the participating corporations including round trip ticket to Japan.
At the closing, Takashi Watanabe, Chairman of the New Year’s Party Committee, said, “I’m so impressed by Kishitani san’s performance. I believe it was the best live for the people in their fifties including myself,” and the audience gave him a big applause.
Watanabe thanked the volunteers and sponsors and encouraged the audience to participate in many events to support those event organizers.
Watanabe led sanbon-jime, threefold repetition of the hand-clapping pattern to celebrate a conclusion of JCCC New Year’s Party.
Takashi Watanage, Chairman of the New Year’s Party Committee, thanks all valunteers and sponsors for their hard work and supports.