The 6th China-Japan-South Korea Ministerial Conference on Culture was held in Yokohama, Japan on Nov 30. [Photo/people.cn]

The 6th China-Japan-South Korea Ministerial Conference on Culture was held in Yokohama, Japan on Nov 30. Yang Zhijin, China’s vice minister of culture, Hakubun Shimomura, minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology in Japan, and Kim Jong-deok, senior official of culture, sports and tourism in South Korea, attended the meeting. They made keynote speeches in which they noted that the three sides should step up their cultural exchanges and push trilateral cooperation forward in a more practical direction.

It is worth mentioning that Hakubun Shimomura emphasized the importance of applying the 808 Hanzi (Chinese characters) that the three countries share in common into cultural exchanges. And the three sides exchanged their ideas on this.

The proposal of Hanzi-based cultural exchanges was first raised by the Northeast Asia Trilateral Forum, a celebrity forum made up of academic experts and former politicians from the three countries. It is hosted by China’s Xinhua News Agency, Japan’s Nikkei Inc. and South Korea’s JoongAng Daily. The chart of the 808 commonly used Chinese characters was released this April, with the aim of removing cultural barriers and promoting cultural communication among the three countries.

Hanzi is the common historical and cultural heritage of China, Japan and South Korea and an important link in promoting cultural communication among the three countries. Most of the 808 characters share the same meanings and patterns in the three languages, with a few exceptions, such as the character “走” which means “walk” in Chinese but “run” in Japanese. As Hanzi is ideographic, people from the three countries can communicate through the 808 common characters without knowing the languages.

Also, the 2015 “Culture City of East Asia” was declared at the meeting, with China’s Qingdao, Japan’s Niigata and South Korea’s Cheongju awarded with the title.