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On April 22th, 2012, the writing contest New "A Brief Message from the Heart", the 9th such event, was held in the Maruoka gym in Sakai City, Fukui Prefecture.
For this year's contest, the theme was "Tomorrow", and total of 35,127 entries were received from contestants located throughout Japan as well as numerous countries worldwide. Of these entries, 205 contestants received prizes with 93 winners attending the ceremony. The award breakdown is as follows: Five contestants were selected for the Grand Prize, 10 won the Award for Excellence and 20 earned the Sumitomo Award.
This year, there were a lot of submissions about the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami with one grand prize winner covering the topic while telling their story about their missing daughter due to the tsunami.
At the reception, each of submissions were read and introduced by students from Maruoka Junior high school. Also, singer–songwriter Hitoshi Komuro who was on the awards selection committee took the Grand Prize submissions and converted them into songs which he sang while playing his guitar at the ceremony as he has done for previous contests in the past and is always popular.
As a special addition to this year's ceremony, author Chinatsu Nakayama who is also in the committee, wrote a poem from which was inspired by one of the Grand prize submissions.
Also before the ceremony, in the next hall, there was a Japanese calligraphy show hosted by the Ehime prefectural Mishima high school Japanese calligraphy club, which was model for the 2010 movie "Shodo Girls". The calligraphy skill was also well received by a big ovation from the audience.
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Scene of award ceremony
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