The Continued “Jury Issue” and Other Concerns

This year, there seemed to be fewer real-time webcast
and game entries than last year, possibly because people are more settled down about staying indoors. For
the judging process this time, the jury were able to examine each candidate more carefully since the entries
were already narrowed down.
During my two years of judging, a question has been
troubling me: am I qualified to judge a wide variety of
genres? The best practice when a qualified person is
unavailable would be “evaluation by a team of various
experts,” and in fact this is how the entries are judged.
However, there is another hardship: how far do I push
my own opinion in such a situation?
I remember the Grand Prize winner, Naoki Urasawa
presents Manben neo -Yoshikazu Yasuhiko-, was chosen with unanimity. I watched the broadcast and was
amazed by his unfaltering brush strokes reflecting his
accumulated life experiences, and was encouraged by
his energetic creative efforts at his age. This TV program documents and conveys the techniques and work
of various manga artists. I personally hope that this extremely important program will continue in the future.
I will skip discussion of Dislocation, a video work
about refugees and immigrants, and Project Guideline,
a product for supporting visually impaired runners,
since I already wrote the Reason for Award elsewhere.
Here I would like to note my recent desire to personally
hold discussions with many people when judging and
producing works.
If propaganda is skillfully concealed beneath artistic
problem presentation or sugar-coated entertainment,
are we able to detect such works? How and in what way
is it different from a message or a criticism?
I think we must cool our thoughts and critically reconsider and learn about freedom of expression, about
expressions that might harm others or the oppressed,
and about technology or media uses and expressions
that drive changes in our cognition and behavior.