Using computer automatic translation software, translated Japanese old tales Momotaro, Issun Boshi, and Kaguya-hime from Japanese into English, then retranslated from English into Japanese. The artists pictorialized the images of these strange stories which are close, but not the same as the original stories and then added to the stories.

It is a privilege to receive such an honorable prize and I would like to thank the jury members. For this picture book, we translated three famous Japanese folk tales, Issunboshi, Kaguyahime, and Momotaro from Japanese into English and then back into Japanese again, utilizing fifteen different kinds of automatic computer translation software. As a result, they were transformed into totally new tales, which we then illustrated as seemed appropriate. We are also grateful for software that produced so many eccentric translations.

The Encouragement Prize this year was awarded to a work in “book” form and was selected from the “Others” category. Although it was rather an unusual result, the award-winning piece seemed the most suitable of all the entries, considering the title of this Japan Media Arts Festival. In my opinion, art should first of all be a challenge to our “sense of value,” such as that of beauty and fun. With this work, the author used common automatic translation software to reconstruct Japanese folk tales, which everyone is familiar with, into stories, almost as if they were avant-garde works science fictions. This reminded us that even a traditional form of media, such as a book, can be media art, if we have a different “point of view.” What we would like to “encourage” with this prize is further “points of view that challenge our existing sense of values.”