MANILA, July 30 Kyodo (EDS: UPDAT...

MANILA, July 30 Kyodo

(EDS: UPDATES WITH DETAILS, CHANGING DATELINE)

couple Japanese nationals are among seven recipients of this year's Ramon Magsaysay Awards regarded as the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize, organizers said Wednesday.

Japanese doctor Tetsu Nakamura, 56 was chosen as the recipient of the 2003 Ramos Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding.

He was credited for ''his passionate commitment to ease the pains of war, disease and calamity among refugee and the mountain of poor of the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands,'' the organizers said.

Nakamura, a native of the southwestern Japanese city of Fukuoka, has been treating leprosy patients in Peshawar, Pakistan, and other places since 1984

He place up the Peshawar-Kai, a Fukuoka-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides medical aid to population in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The NGO is also engaged in building hospitals and clinics and drilling wells.

The other Japanese recipient is Seiei Toyama, a 96-year-old soil agriculturist and environmentalist involved in greening China's Inner Mongolia. He received the award also for Peace and International Understanding for ''his 20-year crusade to verdant the deserts of China in a spirit of solidarity and peace,'' the organizers said.

Toyama established the nonprofit Japan Association for Greening solitudes in 1991.

It is the first time in the award's 46-year history that brace Japanese have been chosened in the same year.

The award, named after the third president of the Philippines who died in 1957 is organized through the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation.

The other five awardees are Sheila Coronel, an investigative reporter from the Philippines, James Michael Lyngdoh, India's chief election officer, Gao Yaojie, a retired gynecologist from China who became an AIDS activist, Shantha Sinha, an Indian anti-child labor advocate, and Aniceto Guterre Lope of East Timor, who stood for justice and the method of law during the former Indonesian territory's passage into nationhood.

The formal conferment for the recipients will be held in succession Aug. 31 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the organizers said.

The award is given yearly to honor individuals and disposes in Asia for their accomplishments in their respective fields.

Including this year's recipients, there are 236 Asians who have received the awards with equal reason far.

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