Defining an Open Country T.M. Doshisha International High School

Have you ever thought of what Japan would be like today if the Potsdam Declaration had never taken place? What would our lives be like today if Japan had never surrendered? I think our lives would be a whole lot different than the ones we are going through now. It is easy to imagine what this country would be like today if the series of events in 1945 had never happened, and the war concluded with the victory of Japan. Some people may think that the United States or Russia could be under occupation of Japan today and everybody in the world would speak Japanese in their daily lives. Some may say that the world would have become a better place to live, while others might say that humans would have already started their emigration to Mars. My personal opinion is that Japan would have continued its national isolation policy, and the door leading into the country and going out to the outside world would be closed and locked. Our daily lifestyle would be much like the one of the samurai warriors during the Edo Period, and men would have their chonmage topknots on their heads. Doshisha International High School would have never been founded and even worse, I would probably not have even seen the computer that I am using now to type this essay. Of course, we would have never gone abroad and lived in foreign countries like we have in our real lives. What a sorry world it would have been... Luckily or unluckily, Japan surrendered in 1945 and the situation of Japan and the rest of the world, is very different from my willful imagination. Japan has become a very open country. The Japanese citizens are virtually free to travel around the world and we also see many foreign tourists everyday in the city. Furthermore, all of us in this seminar English class have actually lived in a country different than Japan. However, can it really be said that Japan is truly an open and free country to the world? What factors are important when determining if a country is open or not? I have been pondering this question ever since I returned from my eight-year stay in the United States. After moving back to Japan six years ago, I have noticed that the ordinary Japanese citizen places foreigners in a category different than that of themselves. The majority of Japanese people think of a foreigner as "someone different," and this is what gets caught in my mind when considering whether Japan is truly an open and free country to the world. I have been fortunate enough to be able to live abroad, which in many ways allowed me to compare two of the world's most well known countries. During my eight-year stay in the United States, I have lived near many different neighbors. I remember that all of them treated my family and me as neighbors no different than the others, not the way ordinary Japanese would look at a foreigner. We were the only Japanese that lived in the small town, so there would have been no surprise if the Americans had treated this rare family as "someone different," since after all, we are different in a superficial way. The foreign family would have indeed been treated so, if the situation was reversed and the American family had moved to Japan. Should a country that would categorize foreigners as "someone different" be recognized as an open country? Conversely, there could be exceptions. If my family had moved to a different city or town, the neighbors may have had a prejudice against Japanese. But generally speaking, Americans are extremely open-minded to people of foreign countries. Many Japanese people dislike the fact that the United States is the factual "top" of the world. Many question why the official language of the world is English, and some even grumble about the American president always posing in the middle of pictures taken during international conferences. Such statements are nothing more than idle complaints. The reaction towards foreigners is what makes the difference between a country open to the world and a country not. The Japanese must first understand this basic point before complaining about the American president always being in the middle. Traveling the world has become very popular among the Japanese. It is common to see international airports packed with Japanese people leaving for destinations such as the United States or Australia. More than 17 million Japanese departed for foreign destinations in 2000 with purposes of tourism. However, the number of tourists that entered Japan from foreign countries did not even reach one-fourth of that number. These numbers alone clearly show that Japan is not an attractive destination to the majority of the world. Then why is Japan not a popular destination to foreigners despite the countless sites, from historical ruins to modern high-tech institutions that could possibly be of interest? The answer is simple. People do not even consider Japan an option when choosing a destination to visit. A country that does not appear as an international tourist destination option to foreigners should not be recognized as a country that is open to the world. The debate on whether to consider a certain country as one that is open to the world or not depends on how one defines an "open country," but the general treatment of foreigners is clearly the biggest aspect. If one hundred Japanese people were asked if they feel their country is, in fact, open to the world, one hundred would answer "yes" with confidence. However, have they truly thought about the issue I have stated in this essay? The answer is "no". I hope that someday all Japanese citizens will realize that there are many ways to define an "open country," and a country is not open to the rest of the world just because the door going in and out is unlocked. Child Research Net would like to thank the Doshisha International Junior/Senior High School and Takeshi Masuda, student and author, for permitting reproduction of this article on the CRN web site.

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