The article about U.S. President Barack Obama's speechwriter (March 21 issue) was very interesting. What's more, I was impressed by Obama for valuing words as his senior adviser David Axelrod mentioned.

It reminded me of my experience as a participant in a town meeting held by a political party. I took part in it to learn more about the different policies that were launched against my favorite party. There were several speakers and one of them seemed to have been trained in how to give a speech. Once he started speaking, I found myself enjoying listening to him. I heard his party's policies through him with his clear utterances, comfortable volume and some words chosen with the locals in mind that helped me understand what the party would like to do for us. At the end of the meeting, I changed my mind to favor his party because of his speech.

There is a phenomenon that is growing: the apathy to value words. We must be careful as this will lead us to communication gaps and misunderstandings. Obama's "valuing words" taught me how essential words are.

Your article about a possible suicide tsunami in Asia (March 7 issue) caught my attention. It seems that Asian countries are more prone to suicide than Western countries, though Belgium and Finland are also mentioned among the ones at the top.

I wonder why it is especially Asian people. Could it be because they don't have a religion like Christians, Muslims or Jews, who all acknowledge a higher power in their lives, and according to the their faith and belief might cope better with adverse situations? I noticed that in Japan people only believe in their own power and when certain natural disasters happen are often rather ready to accept them with a shoganai (loosely translated as "can't be helped") remark. However, when money —: and with it their whole existence — and the loss of a job that is their status in society are involved, they become extremely helpless, and have nowhere to turn.

It's good to have many hot line counseling centers set up, but even better to teach people from childhood that material things are not everything and that humans can survive all kind of adverse situations. Nowadays, young people especially seem to be ready to quit all too easily when things become difficult. While religion certainly can help, spiritual education might be the best solution in our present world dominated by pure materialism.

At first, the idea of work sharing sounds good. However, as the article (March 7 issue) mentioned this only disguises wage cuts.

Even when many companies in Japan apply work sharing and as a result the unemployment rate decreases, I don't think that Japanese people will become truly happy and satisfied. People will find it hard getting used to having a lot of free time. They won't know how to spend that time, resulting in them not doing anything or having stress trying to find things to do without spending much money. People can't count on unemployment benefits, national health insurance or pensions as Japan's government support isn't good enough, leaving people to save as much money as they can.

Taking all this into consideration, I think that the decrease in the unemployment rate won't necessarily mean that people will become happy.

The Japan Times Weekly: April 4, 2009
(C) All rights reserved