Happy New Year to everyone. I hope that all of you are doing well. So far, I have dressed up in various costumes for my New Year's greetings. This time, with some help from around, I decided to go with an Asian-like style.

Last year was full of really turbulent events. I was quite shocked to see Trump's re-election as the President. In Japan, the ruling party falling to a minority in Japan's general election. And prior to that, the results of the Tokyo gubernatorial election and the Hyogo gubernatorial election were also really surprising. On top of that, martial law was declared in our neighboring country. Really unpredictable things are happening one after another.

In the midst of all this, our WAN colleagues gave an outstanding performance last year. What we put the most effort into, after all, was the action to prevent the deterioration of the long-term care insurance system. By the way, did you watch the 8-hour marathon symposium on September 16th?
(https://wan.or.jp/article/show/11492)

Needless to say, it is our role now to protect the long-term care insurance system that Keiko Higuchi has created with her colleagues. The "Women's Association for a Better Aging Society" and us, the "Women's Action Network" have cooperated with each other, and with other people we established a network called "Association for Building a Care Society" to carry out the action. By doing so, we somehow managed to push back the proposed amendment, but were literally taken aback by the cut in compensation for home-visit care from this April. We will continue to do our best and fight back.

Last year's general meeting was the time of change in the WAN Board of Directors. Out of a total 20 board members, 9 directors were replaced. The new directors are much younger. Since it is important for an NPO to pass on its philosophy, the new and old board members gathered together and held another real training camp. And I am really looking forward to working altogether as a team for the next two years. Also, WAN, as a feminist citizen media, participated in RONDAN FES 2024 hosted by POLITAS, with other alternative web media. I am very happy that WAN has been properly recognized as a member of the citizen media that are connected horizontally in this way.

WAN's activities are still going on as usual, and our various colleagues are working hard. To our surprise, our feminist digital archive has been collected into one of the world's feminist archives. Editors from Brazil visited us and offered to include our WAN library into their collection. We are really happy to be recognized worldwide in this way. And right from this Library, a spin-off project was born. At a symposium held to commemorate the recording of "New Feminist Review", we heard voices just like "Feminist magazine is interesting. Isn't it a good idea to make it in print media once again?" And thus the "Dream Femi ZINE Project" was carried out. We called for submissions and received a surprising 41 applications, which makes our team squeal with delight.

In the Women's Studies Course, the WAN Feminism Introductory Course has moved from the 2nd to the 3rd term, and the Advanced Course has moved from the 1st to the 2nd term, with students in each course connecting voluntarily to the next term. And the graduates of this course established the WAN Women's Studies Institute. Some members of the Institute have even submitted papers to the WAN Women's Studies Journal. We are really happy to see that a cycle is being created in this way. The doctoral dissertation archive has been enriched, and the semi-annual doctoral dissertation presentation sessions have been going smoothly.

There were also several interesting book review sessions. WAN is a tool. If you are interested, please raise your hand and say, "I want to do this," and you can do it too. And then there was Erika Kobayashi's "Girls Make Balloon Bombs." It was an interesting piece. If this work had not won a literary award, I would have said that the Japanese literary world would be blind! To my relief, it did win the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award. And the review session on this book was also very interesting. There was also a book review session on psychology-related books. For those who want to study, I think WAN's activities really offer very fulfilling programs.

At the members' social gathering, we held a seminar on bequests suggesting people to leave their bequests for contributing to society rather than to their families, as many of our members are of old age and many are living alone like me. I hope that all of you would keep this in mind.

Last year, we invested in the replacement of the backyard that supports this site to ensure stable operation with the cooperation of a contractor. I think it was a very fulfilling year for us as in this way we built on our accomplishments and established a foothold for the next term. I sincerely hope that we could carry this on into the next term. In the new year of 2025, please continue to support WAN with your contribution. Thank you very much.

By Chizuko UENO
Translated by Maria KADONO
日本語版：https://wan.or.jp/article/show/11653