Nemen M. Kpahn
JAPAN-Many years ago, when I was a boy growing up in the mid-1980s, there was a Japanese Overseas Cooperative Volunteer (JOCV), Japan’s edition of a Peace Corps volunteer working in Tappeta in Lower Nimba County. He taught math and physics at the local public high school (government). I and my friends were fascinated by this man.
We spent most of our after-school hours at his house cooking and hanging out at his house. He sponsored our boys’ Football team and bought us jerseys and balls to play games.
That man, his name was Osamu Nakajima, started a lifelong love for Japan in our young hearts. We began to learn Japanese and Japanese writings or characters. I was only 14 years old when I got in touch with the Prime Minister of Japan’s office, and his office faithfully posted copies of a glossy magazine called Pacific Friend to me every month. I vividly recalled the local Postman asking me how a young boy, like men growing up in the backwater of a town, would be in touch with the Prime Minister of Japan’s office.
For the next 35 years, my love for Japan remained strong. I wanted so much to visit Dai Nippon (the other name for Japan} How could a land so far out in the east of the world become a world leader in technology and earn the distinction that no other country wanted? Japan thus became the only country in the world with the dubious reputation of being the only part of humanity that had had the terrifying and horrendous atomic bomb being dropped on it in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
We all have grown up with Japanese technology, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Hino, Mazda, and other cars. There was Sony, Sharp, Toshiba and on and on in the world of technology. From Brisbane, our Dreamliner aircraft flew over the vast Pacific, cruising at more than 900 km (550 miles) an hour towards Japan, finally landing in Osaka—Japan’s second-largest city. The buildings, roads and infrastructure had me holding my breath in awe. And believe me, I have visited some of the greatest cities in the world: New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Doha, Dubai, and Bangalore, among others.
The trains in Japan are spectacularly clean, and they run on time. And two things surprised me during my trip. Japanese people are generally shy and incredibly kind people. They always bow to greet and to say thank you. When I had to use the toilet in my hotel room, I could not believe a toilet could have such technology, and some could flush by themselves after you attend your private business. Soon, I was standing on the fiftieth floor of a restaurant, looking across the vast expanse of steel and concrete that made up Osaka. From Osaka, I got on the Shinkansen (Bullet Train). This train moves at an unbelievable speed of more than 310 km (200 miles) an hour, moving so fast from city to city high above the ground with seats that look like modern aircraft. With immaculate toilets and ladies dressed in blue-black uniforms serving food and drinks for a fee, I am in awe as the world zoomed by through my train window. Our destination, Hiroshima, was bombed on August 6, 1945, and the pain and sufferings endured and brought to life through a visit to the museum, vivid and dramatic, made many around me cry or sob openly. I became so overwhelmed that I became silent for two hours. I could not talk to another human being for two hours. That trip changed my life and made me determined to work for peace so that the awful power of nuclear weapons will never be unleashed on humanity again. From Hiroshima, I went to Kyoto and then to the industrial city of Nagoya and the story of Japan’s car-making shocked and surprised me.
Japan was closed to the outside world for more than 300 years until Mathew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy forced Japan to open to the world. By the early 1900s, Saatchi Toyoda, the great Japanese Industrialist, wanted to make cars in Japan. But Japan did not have the technology (technical know-how to make) cars. He bought an American Chevrolet car and asked his technicians to pull every part of the car apart inch by inch. Next, his technicians replicated each part of the car in wood. Then, they put the wooded parts of the car together until they fitted. The rest, they say, is history. From the wooden parts, Mr. Toyoda’s team cast the pieces in iron, and Japan was on its way to making cars, and that is how Toyota, the world’s largest car company, was born. Sometime in the 1950s, Japan and Liberia were the two fastest-growing economies in the world. In their famous book Liberia: Growth without Development, (Clower et al.,1966), a team of American academics catalogued how Liberia’s economy grew without infrastructure. And Japan left us behind.
By the time I got to Tokyo, my breath was taken away. Tokyo is the largest city in the world. The Tokyo metro (underground train system) is the busiest in the world. Some stations are so deep underground that they are like 30-story buildings. At the Nihonbashi train station, a friend of mine on the trip began to cry, overwhelmed by the sheer number of trains and how we had to navigate which train to use to get to our destination. But Japanese people are very kind. In those jam-packed train stations with millions passing through, whenever a Japanese person noticed me as a foreigner was having difficulties, they always came over to help. Even with the language barrier of me speaking English and they speaking Japanese, through signs and gestures, we understood each other. When I stood at the Tokyo Tower, the highest tower in the world, 600 meters above ground, my world was reeling in cycles. How could a people so physically slight build such things? The sea of skyscrapers roads crossing over and overlaying one another. The trains, the bridges. How could such small people build such things?
And yet, while Japan modernized, they retained their traditions. A robot came to serve me at a busy Tokyo restaurant, and I hollered. Then I knew Japanese people have the same brains as us. If we could focus as a people and use our resources to build our own country without going around on our knees begging other people, if we could stop waiting for investors and invest in our own country, we could become a jewel of West Africa. Japan and its people impressed me more deeply than any country in the world. I am glad my childhood fantasy did not disappoint when I visited Nippon, the land of the rising run.
Nemen M. Kpahn is a Liberian scholar and travel writer who resides in Australia.
Clower W.C., Dalton, G., Harwitz, M., Walters A.A. (1966). Growth without Development: An Economic Survey of Liberia. Northwestern University Press,
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