Takahiro Shinyo, vice president at Kwansei Gakuin University in Hyogo Prefecture, experienced an act of unexpected kindness in Germany when he was serving as Japan's ambassador to the country in 2011. It was a food charity event, organized by his fellow ambassadors of Southeast Asian countries to Germany, to raise funds for those that suffered in the Great East Japan Earthquake in March that year.

Moved by the generosity of their actions, Shinyo asked one of the ambassadors who organized the event and why they did it. The ambassador said: "We know Japan helped us a lot in developing the economy of our country. Now Japan is undergoing great suffering and we can't just sit and do nothing about it." After Japan was hit by the massive earthquake on March 11, 2011, many developing nations all over the world sent the country donations as tokens of their appreciation for what Japan had done in the past to help them develop their economies and infrastructure.

The former ambassador now serves as the vice president of the university, and is one of the key members working on its "Global Academic Port" initiative program. The aim of the program is to offer internationally minded aspirants a gateway to work at U.N.-related institutions, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, as well as other international non-governmental organizations.