A company has announced it wishes to build a new factory near near the community we are in. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this new influence on the community.Do you support or oppose the factory?

It totally depends on what kind of factory it may be. If the factory is the kind that emits strong smell in the neighborhood or/and produces dangerous industrial waste, we have to say "No!" to the construction, because it might have unfavorable influence on the community, especially on the children living there.

If the factory, on the contrary, is sometinig like the one which is safe and quiet, run very modestly, there being no problems with the security of the facilities, nobody would oppose, because in general a factory usually provide the community with a bog tax revenue.

One more advantage would be that a new factory usually create new emplyment in the community, which is likely to stabilize the economic status-quo there. In the general perspective, security-guaranteed stabilized calm area would make a community of very low crime rate.

The advantages I have written about would become "disadvantages" from a directly oddpsite position. The presuposition of the security of the factory to be build supports my idea. So we have to make clear which kind of a factory we are going to have.

Which source is more important, knowledge from books, or knowldge gained from experiences, and why?

This is one of the hosehold topics and I am pretty sure we don't have to waist our precious time arguing this kind of prepositions. We live, act, and take measures against the unwanted situation in order to survive. Even though we live in a favorable circumstances, we act in our own way.

After the action, words come. We human beings are prone to record every thing around us. Through this process of abstraction (wording), we boid down the real meaning, significance and the message we would like to read in the experience to the form of "a book".

So the actual experience and the knowledge we gain through and the counterpart we get in the books are two side of the same coin. Both are important, significant indespensable, and essential. We should deal with them on "both-are-important" basis.

That is the reason I say this kind of discussion would be waste of the time.

Today, food has become easier to prepare. Has this change improved the way people live.

People used to spend a big share of time they have a day on cooking. The work of cooking almost all the time goes to women. It took them almost whole day to prepare meals for their family members. It must have been very much a harder job than we can expect today. So the present day condition in which we can have a lot of easy-to-prepare food must have made women’s life much easier. But the fact is “never”.

 

It is true women, as well as men, can have a lot of spare time thanks to those kinds of food. They have helped us and provided us with so much free time. They we have to take time to consider whether we can use it in a fruitful, challenging, look-forward way.

 

I am very sorry to say the answer I come up with is “Negative”. The reason is quite simple. It is still in the darkness how we can utilize the time we could get in a creative way. Reading books is one of good recommendable ways, but the fact is many libraries in a rural cities have had a very hard time to appeal to the city people to visit the as often as possible. This means that for citizens it is still a troublesome job to find the right way(s) to “kill time”.

 

Now is the time we have to go back and take time enough to re-consider the real meaning of “cooking meals”. It is not just to prepare something to eat on which we depend for a healthy life, but it also gives us a good chance how to live in a creative way. In a sense cooking seems to provide us an important and too-good-to-miss chance to reconsider our lives as a human being, since a human is only one species that can have an art of cooking.

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Parents are the best teachers.

To start with, being a teachre presupposes "education". We have to classify the "education" here into two categories: school and home. Each place has its own objective. School has , as its original aim, the perfectly curriculumized formal education. Home, on the other hand, does not have any systematized scheme and it should not.

School are required to give the students formal and group education including group discipline teaching how we should act inside a group. Social welfare is also targeted in school education, too.

At home, though, a child or children are dealt with by their parents as an "individual".  The term "deal with" might be a wrong expression. They must be "associated with" by the parents as independent existence.

Real education begins with individual affectionate training to each child starting with "toilet training" by the mother. Starting with those basic survival training as a human being, a child will go through many phases of preparation for an matured adult within around 15 years after the baby's birth.

Parents must be the right persons to discipline and train and teach and develop their children. This is the reason why "Parents are the best teachers".

Teachers at school cannot, no matter hard they may try, be such an multiple "actors" towards the students.

To conclude, it should be pointed out that teachers at school "teach", and parents at home "develop".
This might be the biggest difference.

Why do we have to go to college?

In those days of some generations back in the history, going to go to college was not a so-called "common sense" for almost all the people in the world.

Then why do people these days seem to take it for granted, and are ready to pay the tuition fee for their children?

There are two main reasons there, it seemes.

The first one is the fact that we are living in the world in which all of us are required to have "up-to-date" and the newest information about the surrounding. So-called "life-long education" is the very key term to survive the world.

The second reason is another fact that we are living the age of " the specialist", which provides us with many opportunities to develop our sperical "skill" and expects to contribute to the society with that special skills and techniques

These two reasons are the main conditions for us to go to college or send our children there, even though it costs much.

The title of this essay is "why we have to go to college". We have to admit, too, that the longer our life expectancy becoms, the more we have to learn to live an enriched life.

We have to admit, though, one more important fact about the happiness of life. We can contribute to the socieaty we are living in with our personal skills and special techniques. But at the same time we have to say Yes to the idea that skills ane techniques are not the only one factors to make us happier.

What makes us happy, what provides us with love and charity, is not athe amout of information we recieve at college. On the contrary this kind of knowlege sometimes makes us miserable and unhappy.

We are living in such an age as we are supposed to have as much lates information as possible. Living happily and making people around us happier reqired us to have another kind of information about people, not about books.

This kind of information could only be obtained through the healthy, warm and fruitful human relationships.

We must bear in mind college education is not the only way to provide us this. If we know the truth about this basic principles to make us happy, then, college education would give us strong aid to support us through lifetime.

The cheapest product is always the most economical product.

If there is anyone who agrees to this agenda, that person must be a stupid. The value of a product should be assessed according to the needs of the people who want to get it. At the same time, of course, the quality of the product should be evaluated.

If we take this perspective, we should consider the reason why it is so cheap. The answer should be very simple: few, if any, want it. There is no good thing if few people want to acquire it. Maybe it might be very fragile, not easy to handle, or we can get much better product at the same price.

Either way! The cheapest product is cheap in the real sense of the word. It is, therefore, illogical to conclude the cheapest product is the most economical, because if we get a cheap product, we have to maintain it to work in a proper way. If not, it would cost us much more money to mend it.

Running cost should not be considered light. Even though the price of the product is cheap, running cost costs us much, it would be stupid to have it.

That is the reason I cannot agree to this proposal.

But I am afraid, there are so many people who tend to consider the cheap thing and try to get such a thing first, the result of which would be miserable.

I strongly advise you all, if you want to purchase something, the cheapest thing is the least economical.

Japanology Backward

Since I began my study of English more than fifty years have passed. And I have found the difference of mentalities between the Japanese people and Western people. The Japanese are very strongly individualistic while the western people are generally very group-oriented.  I am going to show you how much they are so by proving you with some examples.

When you get up in the morning, you eat breakfast.  On the table you can find your chopsticks, your rice bowl.  If you don’t find yours there, you surely ask for them. Suppose you are eating breakfast in a western family, there is no such things as (        )’s pair of knife and fork or (       )’s plate. This is because Japanese people have so a strong individuality that they cannot get satisfied with other’s tableware.  Western people are so weak in the character that they don’t care about whose dishes they are using.

After breakfast you turn on TV and watch The TV news. The announcer might say, “I am going to present you…”  Yes, for example, the personal pronoun for the first person singular is just “I”. Nothing more.  On the contrary in Japanese we say, WATASHI, WATAKUSHI, BOKU, ORE, WASHI, ATAI, SESSHA…almost endless.  Again the Japanese people are very strongly individualistic that they are not satisfied with just one persona pronoun, “I”.

On TV, you may see sports news. Just think about it. Japanese traditional sports are almost always non-team. Judo, Kendo, Sumo, Karate, Aikido and so on. On the contrary in western countries almost all popular sports are team sports, such as soccer, rugby, cricket, basketball, baseball, American football, volleyball and others. Again there we have to admit the Japanese like to be individualistic.

On your war to the office, you might see an old shrine, where an old man worships the god enshrined there holding his hands prayerwise. Yes, the Japanese people have a very strong personality so they can celebrate the god face-to-face by himself.  What about the western people? They go to church and pray and sing a choir in group. I am very sorry to say that their personality and character is not strong enough to stand fact-to-face with the god there.

Some other examples: Japanese specialty in sensitivity, WABI and SABI. You can see very easily they are perfectly the thing in each individual mind. It is next to impossible to experience WABI in a sightseeing tour group.

What about Japan’s national heroes? Without any exception all of them are just one person, not a group: MIYAMOTO MUSASHI, ISHIKAWA GOEMON, SUGATA SANSHIRO, GEKKOU KAMEN, ASTRO BOY…again this is almost endless.

On the contrary in the western countries the famous heroes are: Sherlock Holms and Dr. Watson, Robin Hood and his company, D’Artagnan and the three Musketeers, Snow White and Seven dwarfs, Santa Claus and his reindeers, Harry potter and Hermione. They are always act in a group, not individually.

I have given you enough evidence to show that the Japanese are very individualistic people while the western people are very group-oriented.

Ladies and gentlemen, what I have said so far is just nothing but a joke. Of course you know that. But isn’t it what we always do when we meet people from different culture or different countries?  We tend to say, the Japanese are…, the Americans are…, and the Germans are…. This kind of generalization is sometimes very useful but sometimes very harmful, because we are likely to OVER-generalize our one or two personal experiences. This might very often lead to miscommunication.

So let’s be courageous enough to meet people face-to-face, not through our over-simplified images, but through the contact with them as they really are.

A job that requires a lot of thinking is more difficult that a job than requires no thinking.

I have to say that, first of all, there is no job that requires no thinking. Every job as long as it is worth the name of job requires the use of mind to some extent. There is, however, a clear difference between a job that requires intellectual exploitation of our mind and a job that requires so-called physical memory.

We cannot say which is better than which, because sometimes so-called physical memory is of great use for our daily lives. Take a normal door, for an example. When we try to enter a room, handling the nob of the door, we are likely to push or pull the door, instead of sliding it. This is "physical memory".

In our everyday lives. we depend on those physical memory more than our "intellectual memory". If we take this perspective and observe our lives, it is not always the case that a job that requires a lot of thinking is more difficult than a job that requires no thinking.. for a baby to get as much physical memory as possible is something essential to survive in this world. If we take the baby's ways of living, the vital device for the baby to just physical memory, not intellectual one.

Of course a job that requires a lot of thinking has its own value. Even though we survive in this world, the next phase waiting for us to enter requires how to live a "better life".

So isn't it the safest way to say there is no job worth doing without thinking?

It is more important to study science and technology than to study the arts and humanities.

There is nothing worse than the topic today.

Science and technology concentrate on how to handle the world existing around us, while the arts and humanities teach us the "value" of the world surrounding all the people on the earth.
Science and technology belong to the times and age they are produced and developed. On the contrary the arts and humanities are beyond the human history, because of the essential value they have inside themselves.

So to think much more highly of science and technology than the value-concentrated field of the arts and humanities definitely lead us to nowhere, because it will not answer the very basic question, "why we live".

Science and technology will resolve the problems of "how we live better lives" in a very simple way: in the visible way. The visible way of interpretation of the world around us is also very understandable. The way provides us with a happy-go-lucky way of accepting the situation we are living in. But there is a possibility that might lead us to a serious misunderstanding that the human beings are almighty. It is a groundless supposition that men can do anything he likes if we can develop the proper techniques.

The more the science and technology develops, the less accurate perception toward the inner, core structure of the existence of human beings we have.  It is the relationship of inverted proportion. This not-to-the-point view of men has left us nowhere. Just think of the atomic bomb created and developed in the US during the WW II. The scientists concerning the nuclear bomb development always said and says even now that as for the use of nuclear power as the bombs they are not responsible. The President of the US and the best and brightest around him are. But is that right?

We have to study the arts and humanities and should have well-balanced view of human beings. That is the only way left for us to have a bright and fine view for the future of mankind.

It is not possible to eliminate poverty.

I am afraid this topic is very highly philosophical. Poverty takes various forms. Being poor materially is the one form quite understandable, but what seems to be more important for poverty takes is being "poor in heart".  This is because being materialistically poor could/should be recovered in some way or other in the future through the efforts of human beings while being "poor" at heart doesn't seem to be healed in men's history.

What does it, then, mean to be "poor at heart"?  It tells us we can live having nothing in our mind which we can be proud of. In this tough and hard world having proper self-esteem is one of the vital effects that might enable us to survive there. But I would say real self-esteem doesn't come from material richness. Or rather we tends to lose our proper self-esteem as we have more and more properties and money. Why?

We can answer this question quite easily. Just think about the thing you have got so far. Is there any thing that lasts forever? Have you got any thing that you can enjoy forever? Definitely not.
There is nothing new under the sun. So what we have got in this world has its own lifespan. We forget the time we enjoy it by possessing it. It is the destination our material possessions will go in the future, no matter how far away it seems.

On the contrary, if we have something precious in our heart, it will stick to our memory almost forever. If it is a precious memory, it will continue to help and support you in a hard time of your life.

We human beings know this truth very well, but we are likely to forget about it. because our mind is stained by the original sin. It has made us blind to the real value of the things.

So we can safely conclude that as long as we are suffering from the heritage of Adam and Eve, we cannot enjoy the true and real joy. This is because we also conclude it is not possible to eliminate poverty in this secular world.

It is important to keep up with the latest fashion.

"There is nothing uglier than the latest fashion. That is why we have to change it in half a year." said Dr Johnson, and I am afraid it is true.

In all over the world there are so many "fashion shows" like "Paris collection" or "Milan collection", and theses days "Tokyo collection" has come to get attention. It has made me feel puzzled why there are so many styles of clothes every time which seem to me almost the same!

My remark would be a great offense to the designers who give so much time and energy, manpower, teampower to the creation of new type of fashion each time. The variety and difference of these styles may fascinate females but not always males it seems.

So the point is whether we ware those clothes tailored on the style shown on the stage of those fashion shows.

They are somewhat masterpieces of the designers so even we see them kind of awkward and out of the normal sense, if they could get the audience's attention and as the result have become a topic(s) of everyday talk of the people, that's all that they want. They need nothing more.

To stick to the latest fashion itself does not make any sense. The audience's big attention is all they need.

That's what the latest fashions are all about. 

So you don't think too much about the lates fashions.

But there is one thing to remember. Even though it seems to ridiculous to keep on following the latest fashion, the fashion itself is supported by those enthusiastic followers both in Japan and in Europe.

So it would be advisable to see them if you alike or not.

Tokyo Olympics 1

We are lucky enough to have Tokyo Olympics 2 in 2020. How many people here remember we had another Tokyo Olympics almost 50 years ago? Yes, it was 1964 when The TO 1 was held. I was an elementary school boy at that time. And I saw a very shocking scene there.

Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow toastmasters!

It was the final match of the Judo tournament. Open weight division, which was the most important for the Japanese Judo athletes, because all the other 5 divisions were already won by Japanese Judo athletes. There, Japanese Judo champion, Mr Kaminaga, who had become a legend in the world of Judo was completely defeated by Mr Anton Geeshing from Holland. It was not a close match. It was Mr Geeshing's one-sided winning..

Until that time, in the world of Judo, Japan is "God", almighty, in a sense. In the World wide Judo champion ship tournament which had been held every year, the champions, the first prize winners are almost always Japanese Judo athletes. There was no exception at all. And the Tokyo Olympics 1 was the very first exception.

After that final match, Mr Anton Geeshing became a "Hero" national as well as international. When Geeshing came back to his home country, a big welcome back party was held in honor ho him. The prime ministers and some noble persons were present at the party. He created another legend in Europe's Judo World.

Later Mr Geeshing established a new company for new Judo uniforms which was a big success. After that he founded some companies and became the president. One company he founded was the one that produce professional wrestlers which proved to be a great success. Yes, he had a big talent as an entrepreneur.

Mr. Kaminaga remained one office worker for Japan's company for the rest of his life.  After a big success, Mr Geeshing passed away in 2010. Mr. Kaminaga also died some years before Mr Geeshing. That was the end of one story.

There is another drama, which had been kept secret, behind the first story. It was about Mr. Kaminaga's life. Mr. Kaminaga worked for a company in Japan and he was also had a special work in Kodokan. He worked for Kodokan as a chief of international section of Kodokan, because he could speak some English.

Before the Tokyo Olympics 1, all the international Judo tournaments was dealt with by International Judo Association. But the Tokyo Olympics was completely different and bigger event. From all over the world more than three thousand Judo people came to visit Tokyo. The section of international affairs of Kodokan had to handle every chores like Visa, plane tickets, hotels, accommodations, and of course, suitable food!.

How many people were there in the international section of Kodokan then. You never believe if I tell you the truth. Just 5!! and two of which were part time workers. This means that Mr Kaminaga should take all the responsibilities for that matter, and he did!

Six months before the Olympics, Mr Kaminaga didn't go back home, staying almost all day long at Kodokan, doing those chores. What made the situation worse was that those works prevented him from having a spare time to go to judo dojo and do his own practice.

I am very sorry to say that there was another accident just one month before the Olympics. He was involved in a traffic accident and had a very severe ligament injury in his left leg. Ligament is a stream of muscle around here and if you have injured here severely, you cannot walk. So was Mr Kaminaga.

In the final match, that was the truth. The result? That's what all of you already know.

Mr Geeshing was the winner of Judo tournament, and he was also a successful entrepreneur. He died as such. His death made a big headline on major newspapers. On the contrary Mr. Kaminaga's  death was reported in a very small article on newspapers.

Yes, Mr Geeshing was a winner. But does that mean Mr Kaminaga was a loser?

I don't think so.

Mr Kaminaga devoted his whole life to the development of Judo. He never think of himself or his reputation before and after the Olympics. Whenever Mr Kaminaga was asked about the final match with Mr Geeshing, all the words he said was "He was strong".

Mr Kaminaga didn't speak about his own result of the match, and he never let the people around him say anything about it, including his situation and physical injury he had before the match.

Was Mr Kaminaga a Loser?

No. He was the winner of his Life.
As a Japanese, I am proud of having him as a great Judo master, and one of the Last Samurai's.

Life is much easier than it was 500 years ago.

Thanks to the scientific and technological advancement today, the life now seems to be much easier to live than the old days. But I am afraid that is not true at all.

What is essential element to make our life easier? Sometimes it might be something very concrete such as the transportation system, or communication system, or basic infrastructure to support the society from the base. In this sense life is really becoming much easier.

Today public transportation system is almost almighty that it could take us to almost any place we would like to go. The Internet service has enabled us to have an immediate contact with the people living in the opposite side of the earth.

The news from different countries instantly arrives to our study and office. We are supposed to respond to them as soon as possible. That situation seems to have broken the physical distance which separated the people on the earth in the former days.

The superficial availability and convenience seem to have made the life quite easier. But a man live not for food, but for the "meaning" of life as well. Even if the superficial convenience seems to be enough, it does not give us the basic meaning we need to live our life.

Then what will give us the basic meaning of our life?

There seem to be so many answers to this questions. But the thing common in those answers is the real existence that gives us the ultimate answer to our life is something "beyond" the life. Something like religion, thought, new way of thinking would make it worth while to live a life.

Five hundred years ago, in the last phase of medieval period, and at the dawn of Renaissance time, the life was quite under control of church in the western countries. The dominance of the Church of course had many disadvantages but at the same time the Church gave us the ultimate and very vivid meaning toward life.

Like Dr Frankl's  experience in the concentration camp of Nazi, at the Auschwitz, we cannot live life without meaning and the meaning makes even the most fruitless life worth living. In this perspective the life now cannot always be said easier that it was 500 years ago.

Scientific and technological advance is always good.

The term "always" is very controversial. In this world nothing continues forever and there is no thing whose value is "always" true to "everything". So ninety-nine percent of the  matured persons would consider this topic as "false", just because the word "always"  is used there. But is it too superficial, isn't it?

Yes, it is true that all inclusive term is rarely properly used in the human world. it is, though, "an over-riding principle" and "There is no rule but has an exception". So here attention should be paid to the "exception".

Now some consideration should be given to the usage of the word "good". According to a dictionary at hand, the term "good" is defined as something or some situation that do us something advantageous. So something is being "good" when and only when the thing gives us what is wanted. So the next step is quite clear. What do you think about what we would like to have, in other words, what we would like to have from the bottom of our heart?

In the study of psychoanalysis, they use a technical term "the pleasure principle" which means that we human beings act according to subconscious instruction to go to something pleasurable. Let us think this way: if we made up our mind to learn from everything around us, from all the experiences including good and evil,  from the past experience as well as our expectations in the future, then can we conclude that everything is good?

If we apply this principle to "scientific and technological advance", then can we say safely that scientific and technological advance is "always" good?

As we all know scientific and technological advance could be sometimes very dangerous and gives us a great damage like FUKU-1 nuclear power plant accident. If we can learn a lesson from the accident and try our best not to repeat the case, isn't it at least an acceptable experience?

Only when we think this deeply, the topic today "Scientific and technological advance is always gool"?

It is acceptable for parents to use physical force to discipline their children.

These days we can see many pieces of news report on the newspapers concerning the child abuse by their own parents. Sometimes the contents of the news seems to be too much for almost all of us to see them directly. A child was beaten so hard he had a bone fracture on the skull which caused a very severe aftereffect. Another child was thrown into very hot water only because she took a defiant and a bit disobedient to the parents. As a result the child got burned so severely and even though was brought to the hospital soon she lost her life.

Reading those verious articles on the papers we usually feels it should be prohibited even for the paretens to use physical force under any circumstances towards their child(ren). There is every reason to think it to be banned by the law.Yes, the attitude is very correct and proper.

But is that to be a panacia to ban physical force from the side of parents?  Looking around the society, is it also the reality that there are so many examples of juvenile delinquency here and now? Some of them is more wily and dirty than we can expect of the minors. Some years ago some high schoo-driven-away students were reported to rape and killed a high school girl after more than one month's incarceration in one of the boys' house.

The key term here we have to bear in mind comes up: "Education" should be remembered at any moment of teaching discipline to the children or students at home as well as at schools.

Children are like "angles" when they were so young and parents sometimes forget their role as a socialization-teachers. When the children were infants, it OK to give them complete freedom and later on, as there are supposed to be "socialized", their freedom and liberty naturally would be limited. It is the parents and teachers who are responsible for their proper socialization.

So this speech would be concluded by pointing out the clear cut range for the allowance of physical force towards the children. It should be acceptable for the parents to use physical forct to the children as long as it is strictly limited within the range of "education" for the proper socialization of the children.