In response to the request from the Organization and Personnel Department of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, GRIPS conducted a ten-day training program for vice-minister-level officials of the Vietnamese government between October 6 and October 15, 2014. In this second year of the program, GRIPS welcomed 15 vice-minister-level officials selected by the Monitoring Office of Program 165.

During the program, participants attended lectures given by the program director Masahiro Horie, Senior Professor and Director of the Executive Development Center for Global Leadership, as well as lectures given by GRIPS faculty members including GRIPS President Professor Takashi Shiraishi, Vice-President Professor Tetsushi Sonobe, Academic Fellow Professor Shigeru Morichi, Professor Shoichi Ando, Professor Emiko Kakiuchi, and Professor Narushige Michishita. Lectures were also given by Professor Tran Van Tho of Waseda University and Mr. Hiroshi Nagano, a former GRIPS professor. The participants learned about a wide range of subjects related to leadership and management, including the strategic relationship between Japan and Vietnam, modernization and development strategies, government and public administration, governance structure, management of administrative organizations, civil service systems and the role of executives, as well as about cultural policy, crisis management and national security, disaster management, science, technology, and innovation policy, and transportation policy.

In Tokyo, participants had an opportunity to visit the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. They visited Vice-Minister Mr. Satoshi Ninoyu and Parliamentary Vice-Minister Mr. Youji Muto and heard a lecture about administrative evaluation from Administrative Evaluation Director Mr. Watarai Osamu. They also had a meeting with MP Yasukazu Hamada, former Minister of State, and other members of the House of Representatives from the Liberal Democratic Party as well as members of the International Bureau and Youth Division. They visited the Keidanren and had a dialogue with members of the Keidanren Japanese-Vietnam Economic Committee.

The delegation also took a field trip to Takayama, Shirakawa-go, Matsumoto, and Kurobe. They visited the historic preservation district in Takayama, the world heritage site in Shirakawa-go, and the Matsumoto Castel, which is designated as national treasure in Japan, where they learned about the preservation of historic and traditional heritage sites, cultural policy, as well as tourism policy for heritage sites. They also visited the Kurobe-Dam, where they learned about a big project that used a World Bank loan in the period of Japan’s high economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s.

On the final day of the training program, they had a wrap-up session presided over by Professor Horie. At the completion ceremony, each participant received a certificate of completion of the course.