Posted by Dave Bull at 1:28 PM, March 5, 1995
My mother was visiting Japan a while ago, coming over from England to see her two grand-children. She was here for nearly a month, and almost every day, during the time that my daughters were in school, she went out for a long walk, tramping around our district.
Of course, she can't speak any Japanese at all, but she doesn't let that stop her from seeing everything she can, and meeting as many people as possible.
For her, the contrast between Japan and England is nothing short of astonishing. In her eyes, Japan is currently in a kind of golden age, just as England was about forty years ago, when I was a very young child. The streets are safe and clean, everybody is busy working, people all seem willing to help each other, education standards are high, public transportation is magnificent, and there is a general feeling of successful accomplishment in the air. She contrasts this with the England of the present, where she says that none of these things are true.
Over the past fifty years or so, the people living on these islands have done an extraordinary thing: they have created from the rubble of a war-ravaged country, a society that offers each of its members almost complete freedom to seek his own path to happiness, in return asking only that each person also keep in mind that it is a 'two-way' street, and that there are responsibilities to accompany such freedoms.
I am hard pressed to think of anywhere in the world where the balance between responsibility and freedom is so successfully managed as today's Japan. It's a source of great sadness to me that most Japanese people do not realize what a 'heaven' it is that they have built, and in which they live. But I do ... Thank you everybody, for being willing to share it with me! ... and with my mother!
(March 1995)