and Internationalization
In trying to define “internationalization,” we must first dispose of one serious misconception. Many Japanese think it means the Westernization of Japanese life styles and values. They quite rightly see no need for this and feel that Japan has already shown itself to be the most open country in the world to foreign influences. In earlier times, Japanese drank deeply of Chinese culture, and in recent years Western cultural influences have poured into the land. For example, Japanese are now as familiar with Western music as with their own, and they probably have as great a mastery of it as do most of the peoples of the Occident. Foreign cultural influences, such as Chinese painting and Western literature, have greatly enriched Japan and have certainly made it culturally as international as any nation in the world.
Japan has also been fully open to foreign technology and as a result has now become a world leader in science and technology. The same is true of its political and social institutions as well as its urban, industrialized life styles. Although there is much that is distinctively Japanese in the way people live, the general patterns of modern city life in Japan are basically much like those of life in any of the advanced democracies in the world.
It should be obvious to anyone that Japan is unquestionably a very international country. No one could argue that it must make its patterns of trade more international or that it needs to make its culture or its lifestyle less Japanese and more Western. If Japan were to lose its Japanese identity, this would be a great loss not only for it but for the whole world. Japan’s cultural distinctiveness enriches the world, and no one should wish to see it disappear like some endangered species of animal. That certainly cannot be the meaning of the internationalization that people are talking about. They clearly have something quite different in mind.
When I speak of internationalization, I do not mean the changing of external life styles but the development of internal new attitudes. Our motivations must be in step with the conditions of the time. For the two to be out of kilter with each other is a recipe for disaster, as Germany and Japan discovered in the Second World War.
World conditions are constantly changing, and attitudes must change with them. If they do not, catastrophe is bound to follow. The attitude that now is most in need of change is the way we view the relationship of ourselves and our countries to other lands. Not long ago it was possible to see ourselves simply as citizens of one country, and we regarded all other nations as potential enemies or at least hostile rivals. Such attitudes are dangerously out of date in a world in which the weapons of military destruction have become so terrible that their full use would destroy civilization and international economic relations have become so complex and interdependent that no country can stand alone. We must see ourselves as citizens of a world community of nations which cooperate with one another for their common good. For Japan, which has become one of the economic giants of the world, these new attitudes have to include a willingness to play a much larger role in world affairs than it has in the past. This is the true meaning of internationalization and world citizenship.
The Development of Human Society
I can perhaps make the point clearer by giving a thumb-nail sketch of man’s evolutionary progress. In primitive times, people survived by living in groups. At first, these were largely one or more families who hunted, gathered food, and cared for each other together. Even today the family remains as a primary unit for individual survival and social organization.
Gradually, as people acquired greater skills and abilities at organization, family groupings grew into larger and more complex organizations. In some cases, tribal bands developed into very large and even powerful organizations, like the German tribes of Europe which overran the Roman Empire and the semi-nomadic Mongol tribes which conquered most of Asia and part of Europe. The early Japanese uji are probably to be classified as a variant of this tribal pattern, and in many of the more backward parts of the world tribal organizations still linger on.
Agriculture brought a new unit of organization—the farming village—in which related and unrelated families cooperated on many matters, such as the fair distribution of water and their joint defense against raiders. Some villages, especially those at key spots on trade routes, developed into little cities protected by walls and ruling over surrounding farming communities. Such walled city-states were scattered widely in ancient times in such places as North China, Northwest India, and the Mediterranean region in the West.
Man’s progress in making weapons and tools, first of bronze and then of iron, accompanied the development of agriculture and the domestication of horses, sheep, and oxen. Together these innovations permitted the growth of much larger, more powerful, and more complex social and political institutions. Great empires appeared in very ancient times in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and probably India, and later spread through the Middle East, the eastern Mediterranean, and China. The age of ancient empires culminated in the long-lasting Roman Empire in the West and the even more durable Chinese Empire in the East.
Human inventions continued, creating new possibilities and also new problems. Sometimes they undermined old institutions, such as the Roman Empire, but new institutions always rose to take their place. Always the appearance of new technologies required the development of new ideas and new social and political patterns. Human civilization constantly kept evolving. The feudal pattern of life in Europe and Japan was one of these innovations brought by technological changes and altered conditions of life. In modern times, the nation state, usually centering around a shared language, became the primary focus of political organization, sweeping away older organizations by tribal units, personal loyalties to ruling families, or shared religious beliefs.
Nationalism now dominates almost all parts of the world. This can well be called the age of nationalism. But it is not hard to see that we are approaching the end of that age. No one can deny that mankind has made stunning progress under the nation state during the past few centuries, but it is becoming clear that the continuation much longer of an unbridled system of mutually antagonistic national units would bring us to catastrophe. The First and Second World Wars were fought well before most of you were born, but actually not very long ago in historic terms. Both occurred during my lifetime, and most people would agree that a Third World War would bring an end to civilization as we know it. In fact, it might mean the extinction of the whole human race. For the first time in history we are very close to the brink of our own self-destruction.
The reasons for our perilous position are quite clear. It is the result of rapid technological changes which, just as in the past, demand new solutions for new problems. These in turn require new attitudes and new institutions. There is no stopping the forward motion of science and technology, even if we wished to do so. Science and technology will continue to make rapid progress, but they will not solve all diffi culties, as many people seem to think. They may help alleviate certain specific problems, such as the control of some diseases, the need for more food, or even the development of new and better sources of energy, such as photoelectric power from sunshine. But the really dangerous problems are only made more pressing.
Конец
