Hello, everyone. I am Otsubo from the Chancellery Unit.

As I write this blog, I am in Nagasaki with our CEO, Takeo Harada, for his presentation at NLP2025.

It has been more than 10 years since I last visited Nagasaki, and I was surprised to find that the station had been renovated, with many new buildings and people.

I will strive to work as a member of the chancellery unit to come back here again.

In the meantime, I will talk about the internship programme with the students from Saint Peterburg State University of Economics (UNECON) in the summer of 2019 since we renewed our partnership agreement with them last December.

We have started to conclude the partnership agreement with UNECON in 2018.

For the partnership, our CEO, Takeo Harada, went to the university to sign an agreement of a partnership, that we provide ‘Information Literacy Education’ and accept internships in our institute.

In this digitally progressed society, many countries, including Japan, and companies are required to educate human resources who truly perform in the global society. While the flood of information is happening, the ability of information processing by human brains has a limit, and the young people in the global society who are carrying new generations are in demand to have skills to choose information, analyse it, and create future scenarios. It needs to acquire ‘Information Literacy’, which is the ability to know your circumstances whenever and wherever, and act and take leadership for the whole society. To raise the younger and expand the joint activities provided by our institute and RIJAG globally, we conducted an internship programme from UNECON in August 2019.

The programme was held for one month, and the internship students acquired ‘Information Literacy Education’ while working in our office in Marunouchi, Tokyo, with our CEO, Takeo Harada and other staff members. In addition, the programme was rich with a variety of original experiences such as visiting heads of organisations performing excellent leadership, which the internship students can perceive those companies’ knowledge and culture.

As we plan to organise this programme again after the end of the war in Ukraine, we renewed the partnership agreement with UNECON in December 2024.

We continue providing ‘Information Literacy Education’ not only domestically but also globally.

• What is ‘Information Literacy Education’?

The ability to create future scenarios through taking the meaning of information from Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). We define this ability as ‘Information Literacy’. It is a comprehensive ability related to ‘information’, including collecting information, analysing it and connecting this analysis into judgement and action based on accurate background knowledge.

Our institute has a variety of activities for many people to acquire this ‘Information Literacy’ questioned Japanese people and understand the world of ‘Financial Capitalism’.

Thank you for reading this blog. We appreciate your thoughts or opinions on it.

Tomomi Otsubo, Chancellery Unit