I had a chance to attend a lecture by Sakurai Yoshiko (櫻井よしこ), a famous journalist in Japan well-known for her views on politics. She talked about the rise of China and the need for Japan to be able to deal with this issue. She also talked about the problems with the current Japanese administration in the way they are dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake.
Her lecture was informative and passionate, and as an ex-newscaster (and her experience with mass media), she was good at delivering speeches. You can really feel the charisma and the persuasive power. But her lecture would have been better if her views were not so biased. A few points that I thought she could have improved on so that her lecture was not so biased.
She mentioned that China does not invent new technology. Instead, China gets her technology from elsewhere (hinting that some of it was stolen). But history has shown that China invented gunpowder (which changed the way war was conducted), silk (still in use today, and still a very much sought after commodity), Chinese characters (which Japan is using for her writing as well), the compass and the list goes on. China may not have invented much new technology in recent years, but I thought her statement was too sweeping.
She also mentioned that Japan has never lost a fight to China. But if you look at it this in another way, it was because they have only fought twice, and it was Japan who initiated the fights (when Japan fought the Qing dynasty in 1894 and the Sino-Japanse war in 1930s). It was the Mongols (not the Chinese) that tried to invade Japan in the 13th century. China has never been aggressive towards Japan in her 5000 years of history, even though for most of the 5000 years, China was superior in power to Japan. Yet the moment Japan gained the upper hand in power, Japan displayed aggressive intentions.
She goes on to say that the Japanese race and culture is impressive. Of course I agree with this. But I think we should also take a look at history. Japanese culture is impressive, but how much of it was borrowed? The Japanese culture borrowed heavily from Chinese culture, with Chinese characters for writing, chopsticks for eating, even kimono was styled after Chinese clothing. Without Chinese culture, rate of civilisation would have been much slower, and when Westerners arrived in the 16th century, she would have been colonised like the Americas and South-east Asia.
It is one thing to be persuasive, it is another thing to be narrow-minded. It is not just enough to see things from the viewpoints of different people. It is more important to see things from different viewpoints. Seeing the same thing from the eyes of 10 people who are all looking at the same thing with the same viewpoint does not mean one is objective. It only means one has found friends who share a common viewpoint. To see things in a better light, we need to find 10 friends who see things from angles different from each other. If everyone's hand is on the snout of the elephant, an elephant would be no different from a snake. Only by finding people who are touching the elephant at different places can we piece together what an elephant really looks like.
