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Japan Hires Detective Conan to Introduce World Summit

Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has released a free pamphlet starring the Detective Conan manga character on Monday to mark the G-8 Summit meeting of the top world leaders this summer. On July 7, the leaders of Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Commission will hold their annual meeting in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Nine characters from Gōshō Aoyama's mystery manga introduce the history of the G8 Summits and showcase the Hokkaido backdrop in the 24 pages of Detective Conan: A Guide to Summit. The entire pamphlet is available by selecting the PDF file links at the bottom of the linked page. Viz Media publishes the original manga as Case Closed, and Funimation released part of the animated version.

The same ministry hired the pint-sized detective to explain its mission to children in another pamphlet and a related manga campaign. In fact, the same staff artists for Aoyama — Masaru Ota and Kazuhiro Kubota — drew both pamphlets. To prepare for this summit, the Ghibli Museum joined other national landmarks in running its first anti-terrorism exercises last year. On a related note, the ministry appointed Fujiko Fujio's manga robot cat Doraemon as the first "anime cultural ambassador" last month. The ministry hosted part of a summit of a different sort, the International Cosplay Summit, at its Tokyo headquarters last year.

Thank you to Kumi Kaoru for the news tip.

Source: Mainichi Shimbun