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Volume 2, Number 2
Fall 1995

In This Issue:Index of other issues

(Japanese names are presented western style, family name last, except for historical figures and bibliographic entries.)

Manjiro in Cyberspace

As our cover indicates, the Manjiro Society is poised at the "on ramp" of the "Information Superhighway," the network of computers that promises to link everyone throughout the world to the Internet web of information and communications ("promises," because there is still a large gap with reality). The Manjiro Society was founded in late 1993 just as the wave of interest and excitement about the possibilities of the Internet began to rise to its crest in 1994. Accordingly, Izumi Asano, Cally Williams and Rod Armstrong began to explore this brave, new world to see if it offered new and better ways to encourage grassroots communications among Americans and Japanese. Now the effort has been joined by Jenny Lauth and Chisato Hayashi. Executive Director Taeko Floyd is loyally trying to learn about these matters, and will be moving beyond her current status as a "newbie" very soon.

What follows is a preliminary and condensed report in two areas: (1) the situation concerning electronic communications among Americans and Japanese on the Information Superhighway; and (2) the Society's tentative plans for programs on the Internet. Because of the limitations of space, we cannot define all of the technical terms here, but we offer a bibliography at the end for the benefit of anyone who wants to delve deeper into these matters. If we have stepped on the toes of any commercial providers in this field, we apologize, and offer space in the next issue of exchanges for them to explain themselves. Finally, we should note that things move very rapidly in this field, and that necessarily what is written below will be outdated by the time it is printed.

On-line Services

The on-line services were for a long time the only way the average personal computer user could link up with the world of electronic communications and information databases. The Internet was a user unfriendly world of raw UNIX commands catering mostly to academics and the U.S. government and military. For a monthly fee, service subscribers could send messages ("e-mail") to each other, participate in live discussion groups, contribute their information and opinions to bulletin boards on specialized topics, and draw on information databases provided by the sponsor, almost always at extra cost.

CompuServe, a division of the H&R Block conglomerate headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, has been the largest on-line service, with over 2 million subscribers, although it may have been overtaken in terms of the number of subscribers by America Online, whose headquarters is very close to the Society's in McLean, Virginia.

While other services may have Japan programs of which we are unaware, and America Online is actively planning closer links with Japan, it is CompuServe that has the longest running involvement. CompuServe is in a cooperative relationship with a Japanese joint venture between Nissho Iwai and Fujitsu whose service is called NiftyServe. A recent note said there are currently 1,300,000 NiftyServe subscribers. A large percentage are males between the ages of 20 and 30, and many members use the service for business rather than pleasure. Theoretically (see below), subscribers to the two services may send messages back and forth and participate in "forums" on both services.

CompuServe runs the "Japan Forum," which claims 45,500 members (presumably mostly from Japan). The Japan Forum provides e-mail facilities, forum discussion "threads" on a variety of topics (e.g. travel, art & literature, business & industry, politics, etc.) and a "library" from which the subscriber can download information and software on a variety of topics. In addition, there is a "Club Tanpopo" on weekends, where messages are exchanged in "real time."

The great bulk of the communication taking place in the Japan Forum is among westerners in English. This is because electronic communications in Japanese (or other ideograph-written languages like Korean or Chinese) requires the dreaded "double byte character system." To simplify: it takes two computer bytes of eight (usually) 1s and 0s to transmit a Chinese character or Japanese kana. There is a system for converting the Japan Forum messages to Japanese, but it is of monumental complexity, and almost no one uses it. It is possible to send files in Japanese back and forth between individual CompuServe addresses, and apparently Japanese-language file exchanges take place regularly on CompuServe/NiftyServe, but they are necessarily private. There are very few Japanese opinions offered in the public forums, and it would appear that tens of thousands of Japanese are "lurkers"--observers who do not contribute.

On-line communication is very expensive for Japanese, and this also apparently limits grassroots participation on the Information Superhighway. It is only within the past several years that the beneficent effects of American competition have brought home/desktop computer prices down to reasonable level. As far as communications charges are concerned, the Japanese user is caught in a web of governmental rules and regulations designed to protect local providers. At least until this writing, the providers have not been maintaining the constant flow of investments that increase "bandwidth" to make transmission faster and of higher quality. The cost of using NiftyServe in Japan is apparently more than $20/hour versus $4.80/hour for the American user of CompuServe's Japan Forum (just substantially lowered due to the beneficent effects of competition from Microsoft's new service). NTT and other Japanese providers are moving to lower their charges, but they have a long way to go before personal usage can reach American levels.

Gateway Japan

Gateway Japan is a non-profit project of the National Planning Association in Washington, DC. It is forming close relationships with a number of organizations in Japan and the U.S., including the Tokyo-based Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), a technology and policy research institute within the International University of Japan.

Gateway Japan publishes resource guides and provides an electronic bulletin board service, GJ On-Line, which carries full texts of important documents in English from U.S. and Japanese sources, covering policy research and business support information.

This October, GJ On-Line will be launched on the Internet, and will be accessible by www, gopher, ftp, telnet and dial-up (e-mail and fax services will be added later). A demonstration site can be reached at http://ifrm.glocom.ac.jp/ifrm/ptn.html. In addition to the present databases of information, the new Internet services will add more sources in English and Japanese, and will feature a bilingual cross-language text search system employing cutting-edge machine translation technology to make Japanese information more usable by English speaking people.

The Internet and Japan

All of us working on the Society's Internet project are well aware that there is a great deal of hyperbole on the subject of the Information Superhighway. A very useful corrective is the recent book by Internet founding father Clifford Stoll listed in the bibliography below. The Society Board has approved the following cautious principles for our programs:

  • We are interested in sponsoring grassroots communications. Therefore, we are not in cyberspace to serve as a repository of information on anything except our own organization and its activities.
  • Our goal should be to provide a sophisticated and truly helpful forum for communications. This means at a minimum that our Systems Operator (SYSOPS) should provide knowledgeable referrals onward to sources of information about topics under discussion.
  • Translation is part of the overhead of communications among Japanese and Americans, and we should think about providing some help in this connection.
  • Finally, we should not compete with anyone else providing U.S.-Japan services on the Internet. In particular, we should stay in good touch with Gateway Japan and make sure that we are not duplicating any of their services.

Our foray into the Internet is focused on a plan to facilitate electronic communication in Japanese, so a good deal of our preliminary efforts have centered on obtaining the necessary software to allow us to both read and send Japanese documents by the Internet. A crucial part of the process was securing a Japanese working environment on our computers (we have both Macintosh and IBM standard machines). With Japanese environments on our computers, we are able to utilize Japanese with Internet-related software that supports it. We are experimenting with sending and receiving Japanese messages through e-mail, a process we have already accomplished using CompuServe. A number of newsgroups written in Japanese exist, and we are currently subscribed to several. So far, we have been writing to Japanese contacts in Japanese using a Japanese word process, JWP, that is freeware on the Internet, and saving the files in New JIS or Shift JIS format. We then send them as binary file attachments to e-mail. This process is hardly more trouble than regular e-mail, but requires that the addressee have the proper software to decode the files at the other end.

The World Wide Web contains a number of Japanese home pages and documents, and a current version of the Netscape browser which supports Japanese allows us to access these (including daily editions of the Yomiuri and Asahi newspapers). The World Wide Web is the current place to "see and be seen" on the Information superhighway, and we are in the process of creating our own home page. Web pages are created using "html," a language read by Netscape and other Web browsers which display the encoded information on the screen in a readable format. After the home page is created, we can modify it ourselves, adding or subtracting information and "hyperlinks" to update our offerings.

Our future role on the Internet may involve translation, referrals, and general help to our members and others interested in communicating in Japanese internationally. The knowledge we are acquiring will be used first to help students in local elementary school Japanese "immersion" programs communicate with Japanese elementary level students. We may also provide translation services for those without Japanese software who may be interested in communicating with those in Japan who conduct their electronic communication in Japanese. The nature of the Internet ensures that information sharing will be a large part of our activities.

The Internet can also serve us well as we prepare for the Kagoshima and future Summits. We hope to encourage Internet communication among Summit participants before and after their Summit experiences. Most Internet users have some desire to meet the faceless partners on the other side of their monitor screens, although this most often never happens if they live halfway around the world from each other. In combination with the Summits, however, both electronic and person-to-person contacts will be real possibilities. We hope to combine the benefits of fast and efficient Internet communications with those of our established exchanges, which provide a depth of personal experience that Internet communications have trouble matching. We think it will be the best of both worlds, and we are actively seeking support for carrying our efforts beyond this experimental stage.

Bibliography

  1. Hideki Hirayama, How to Use Japanese on the Internet with a PC: From Login to WWW, a file available in the library of the CompuServe Japan Forum and Mr. Hirayama's various sites: We have given pride of place to this file, first because it is up-to-date, and second, because Mr. Hirayama is a member of the Society. He was not, however, available to review the above article when it was written over the summer of 1995, and should in no way be held responsible for any of its errors.
  2. Ken Lunde, Understanding Japanese Information Processing. Sebastopol, California. O'Reilly & Assoc., Inc., 1993.
    This is the fundamental source, which Dr. Lunde updates regularly by files at the Internet site http://jasper.ora.com/lunde/ which are then uploaded to many other locations such as the library of CompuServe's Japan Forum. The drawing of the dangerously delicious Japanese blowfish on the cover is probably a delicate allusion to the fiendishly complex but useful information found inside.
  3. Ken Lunde, CJKV Information Processing. Sebastopol, California. O'Reilly & Assoc., Inc., 1999. This is Mr. Lunde's latest comprehensive book on Asian language processing.
  4. Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Superhighway. New York. Doubleday, 1995.

President's Column

Brian Pendleton

It is an honor for me to be invited to write the "President's Column" in this issue of exchanges. As President of the Japan America Society of Colorado, I am looking forward to attending the Fifth Japan-America Grassroots Summit this fall in Kagoshima, Japan. I will actually be part of a substantial delegation of representatives from the State of Colorado to the Kagoshima Summit. We will come to Kagoshima both to participate and to prepare ourselves for next year's Summit in Colorado in 1996. On behalf of the Japan America Society of Colorado, and on behalf of the State of Colorado in general, I would like to encourage everyone to come to C olorado to participate in the Sixth Summit.

The Japan America Society of Colorado was organized in 1989 as a non-profit, tax exempt corporation to provide a forum through which the peoples of the United States and Japan may learn from each other's experiences and achievements. The Society has been extremely successful, and is supported by a strong membership consisting of approximately 500 individual members with good support from significant organizations within the business community.

The planning process for the 1996 Grassroots Summit in Colorado is already well underway. The 1996 Colorado Summit will afford an excellent opportunity for our Japanese and American friends to further their understanding of one another as well as to experience the enriching and beautiful environment of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains.

Having officially obtained its statehood in 1876, Colorado is a relatively "young" state. Currently, the population of the state is approximately 3,720,000 people. The population is expanding as more and more people are attracted to Colorado by the state's good weather, western lifestyle and current robust economy.

Noted for its majestic Rocky Mountains (53 peaks in Colorado exceed 4,268 meters, or 14,000 feet, in elevation), Colorado is also blessed with abundant fertile lands which support our thriving agricultural industry. Boasting approximately 300 days of sunshine a year, Colorado offers a wide range of outdoor recreational activities throughout the year, including skiing and other sport activities during the winter at our many ski resorts in the mountains, and fishing and golfing during the summer months. Tourism has become a major industry in Colorado along with our agriculture and technologically-oriented industries.

Denver is the capital city of the state. Known as the "Mile High City" for its elevation above sea level, Denver is a growing, modern city situated in the western edge of the plains and adjacent to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Open this year, the Denver International Airport is our nation's newest and biggest airport and is designed for air traffic in the 21st century. Denver has also recently constructed the Colorado Convention Center which can accommodate major national and international conventions. Another public project recently completed is the Coors Baseball Stadium, the home of our newly acquired major league baseball team, the Colorado Rockies.

Colorado has had a long-standing tradition of warm relations with the people of Japan. Over 12,000 Japanese-Americans reside in Colorado and are actively engaged in all areas of our economic activity. Colorado's then-Governor, Ralph Carr, officially extended the hospitality of the State of Colorado to the Japanese-American population on the west coast of the United States at the time of the outbreak of hostilities between the United States and Japan during the Second World War. Many of our Japanese-American residents relocated to Colorado at that time. Currently, many Japanese companies have established branch offices in Colorado or have invested in a variety of businesses here. Recent surveys indicate that approximately 70 companies in Colorado are owned by or have significant investments from Japanese companies.

The members of the Japan America Society of Colorado are looking forward to assisting the Manjiro Society in the planning and presentation of the Sixth Japan-America Grassroots Summit in Colorado in 1996. Please join us!

"Past and Future"

The Executive Director's Program Review

Taeko Floyd

As the summer draws to a close, we look back on a busy spring and forward to Kagoshima and the 5th Summit in the fall.

We have had changes at the Society office. Cally Williams, who had been our only other full-time staff member since April of 1994, married graduate theology student Satoshi Kawachi in July and moved to Michigan. We will miss her fluent Japanese and exuberant personality. Jenny Lauth is taking Cally's place. Jenny is originally from St. Louis, Missouri, and, in addition to her Bachelor's from Northeast Missouri State, she has a Master's in East Asian Studies from Indiana University. Like Cally, she was a JET program English teacher in Japan, working in Chiba Prefecture. She has moved into the whirlwind of preparations for Kagoshima with great competence, and I feel we are very fortunate to have her aboard.

In the past, we have had some beneficial contacts with the International Internship Program, a Japanese non-profit that sends Japanese abroad for a year as teachers and interns in positions where they can contribute to cultural exchange between Japan and the world. The Honorary Chair is Mrs. Haru Reischauer, widow of the former ambassador to Japan. Now, with IIP's kind introduction, we welcomed in late August Ms. Chisato Hayashi, of Fukui Prefecture, for a 9-12 month internship in the Society. Ms. Hayashi graduated from Meiji University in Tokyo in Agricultural and Organic Chemistry, worked for several years in Tokyo, and now wants to gain experience abroad. We are delighted to have her help at this critical time.

In April, Rod Armstrong and I visited Denver to discuss plans for the 1996 Colorado Summit. We were joined by Executive Director Tohru Takahashi and Program Director Miyoko Aoki of the Center for International Exchange in Tokyo. We met with the Board of the Japan America Society of Colorado, which will be cosponsoring the 1996 Summit with us. We discussed the program, locales, and financing of the Summit, and set the date for the end of September (which everybody agreed was the best time of the year in Colorado).

Colorado is a beautiful state, and currently is also marking America's highest rates in terms of population and economic growth. Colorado should attract many Japanese to the Summit. Our visit assured me that they will have plenty to see and experience once they are there. During our time in Colorado, we drove to Colorado Springs, which will be a principal site for the Summit. In the two-hour drive, we experienced rain, hail, snow, and a bit of bright sunshine. I was told that this is common in high altitudes! In addition to Denver, we visited Longmont, where the Emperor and Empress recently enjoyed a "homestay," and Boulder, home of the University of Colorado. Our friends in Colorado are very supportive, and eager to proceed with preparations for the 6th Summit.

In May, we cosponsored with local organizations a lecture tour on Manjiro by Professor Tetsuo Kawasumi of Keio University. In Boston, he spoke at a dinner hosted by Consul General Nobuyasu Abe. The Japan Information and Cultural Center hosted his next appearance in Washington, DC, were he talked about "John Mung and Young America." He related some humorous misunderstandings about food and manners from the visit of the first Japanese official delegation to Washington in 1864. Professor Kawasumi then traveled to Colorado Springs and Denver, and onward to San Francisco. His talks in Colorado were cosponsored by the Japan America Society of Colorado, and in San Francisco by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce. He finished up in Hawaii, where he spoke at a meeting of the Joseph Heco Society (named for another early Japanese visitor to the U.S.). In Hawaii, Dwight Damon, as descendent of Manjiro's host in Hawaii, Reverend Samuel Damon, talked about some of his family's traditions concerning Manjiro. We are grateful to Professor Kawasumi for helping to increase awareness among Americans of the Manjiro story.

We had our first official Board Meeting on May 12. Rod Armstrong, Izumi Asano, Tom Clark, Bob Fritts, Barbara Nesbitt and I were in attendance, and George Knox and Lewis Robinson joined us by conference call. We had a helpful review of programs and policies, and formally elected the following as officers of the Society for a term of one year: President, Rod Armstrong; Vice President, Lewis Robinson; Secretary, Tom Clark; Treasurer, Izumi Asano; and myself as Executive Director.

Response to our announcement and publicity about the Kagoshima Summit has been tremendous. We have already received over 200 applications from people in thirteen states. The diversity of groups and individuals participating reflects the growth and expansion of our grassroots programming. For example, there will be forty U.S. postal employees and their spouses, many of whom have participated in past Summits. Several of the other professional exchanges will be new this year, including farmers, National Park rangers, and NASA employees.

Another pilot program at this year's Summit will be elementary and middle school children. This first contingent will come from the Fairfax County "immersion" programs where students are taught science, health, and arithmetic in Japanese. There will also be students from the Japanese language programs at the United Nations School in New York. We will welcome delegations from Miami, Florida, sister city of Kagoshima City, and from LaGrange, Georgia, sister city of Aso City in neighboring Oita Prefecture. There will also be five representatives from Wheel Chair Athletes International, who will come to the Summit from an international race in Oita the week preceding the Summit.

Considering my fellow countrymen's penchant for organization and planning, I am sure we can all look forward to an interesting and worthwhile 5th Summit. See you there!

Manjiro Watch

Professor Tetsuo Kawasumi of Keio University came to the U.S. in early summer on a speaking tour about Manjiro. He spoke in Washington, DC, Denver, San Francisco and Honolulu. He tried to tailor hist remarks to Manjiro's special connection with each area, although for Washington and Denver, the connection was necessarily indirect, for Manjiro never visited either city. Professor Kawasumi has edited the massive compilation of English and Japanese documents in the volume Nakahama Manjiro Shusei (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1996), a copy of which he has generously donated to the Manjiro Society library. He is a thoughtful and knowledgeable student of Manjiro and his era.

It was apparent that many in American audiences who are introduced to the Manjiro story for the first time are puzzled by the speed and vigor with which Manjiro rose in American life. For example, after three terms of schooling, on his second whaling voyage, Manjiro, at 19, was chosen first mate by his shipmates in an emergency election. Even over the mist of the intervening 150 years, Americans are able to estimate what it meant for a teenage foreigner to rise by shipboard election to the next-in-command rank on a Massachusetts whaler. If these were the capabilities of a "grassroots" Japanese peasant, even an "above average" peasant, Americans want to know how he came about them.

Asked in Washington, Professor Kawasumi offered "self confidence" as Manjiro's dominant resource. Unfortunately, the phrase "self confidence" reminds contemporary Americans of the jargon "self esteem," and the dreary fact that many Americans who worry obsessively about self esteem today already have an unduly high quotient of it.

In my opinion, Manjiro was so impressive to Americans because his character and ethics were so clearly of a very high standard. Character and ethics are the product of education, often religious in nature, and the natural question therefore becomes: How did a 14 year old fisherboy come to possess such an education? Put more generally with regard to the entire generation of "Meiji" leaders who modernized Japan--often starting as teenagers--this is a question that has puzzled many American and other Western scholars. There is a good deal of recent literature on education in the Tokugawa period, emphasizing the extraordinary work of the village temple schools.

My own views are founded on that wonderful classic of thirty eight years ago, Tokugawa Religion. This book was the Harvard Ph.D. thesis of Robert Bellah, who went on to become a preeminent scholar of American values at the University of California. Interestingly, he was assisted in his translations by Tatsuo Arima, then a doctoral candidate at Harvard, who went on to become a Japanese diplomat and consul general at San Francisco, and is now ambassador to Germany. The edition I have is the second printing: New York, The Free Press, 1969.

Tokugawa Religion tells the story of the spread in Tokugawa society of Shingaku ("Learning for the Heart"), founded by Ishida Baigan (1685-1744). Although originally oriented more to the merchant class, by Manjiro's childhood, Shingaku had been absorbed into the national consciousness even in such a distant fishing village as Nakahama where Manjiro was born.

There is no space to give any detailed analysis of Shingaku here. Rather, to give our readers a brief summary of what were undoubtedly the main principles of Manjiro's code of ethics, I give below the summary appearing on page 174 of my copy of Tokugawa Religion. It is a translation of the work of the Japanese scholar Miyamoto Mataji.

I. Family Harmony Do not forget the words "filial piety." Practice strict economy, and practice hygiene, and be careful about both food and wine and be not excessive. Selfish and unreasonable words and deeds are forbidden. Work hard for the family business and do not complain about insufficiencies. Have patience and quickly rectify mistakes. Have a sympathetic heart. Do not forget the achievements of the ancestors and be kind to relatives and old people. Have faith in the gods and Buddhas.

II. Responsibility toward Society You must be honest (shoojiki). Have respect for superiors and sympathy for inferiors. Strictly obey the laws of the nation. Be gentle and avoid quarrels and brawls. Do not break promises. Act so that you do not forget your debts of gratitude to others. Do not throw up the mistakes of others.

III. Ideas about Business In all the world there is nothing that is called one's own. The family is handed down by ancestors and passed on to descendants. Money does not belong to just one individual. If money belongs to society as a whole it is not to be spent by one person for his own sake. If small it must be spent for the whole family, if large for the public benefit. Trade should not have for an object only the acquiring of money. Always think of the prosperity of the family.

We can see the effect of this kind of thinking on Manjiro's treatment of his earnings from the Gold Rush. At great cost to his health, Manjiro saved $600 from his work in the California mines, a sum that would have to be multiplied many times to equate to the dollar's present-day value. In his mind, Manjiro probably judged it to be "large money" (as in the preceding paragraph)--to be spent for the public benefit. Accordingly, he used it to buy passages and a whaleboat to get himself and his friends from the original shipwreck back to Japan.

--Rod Armstrong

An American Reflects on a Homestay Experience

by Chris Zabawa

Dr. Chris Zabawa is a geologist and environmental scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This was written in his private capacity.

With the arrival of autumn in the United States, I have started to make plans for attending the Fifth Japan-America Grassroots Summit in Kagoshima. This has given me the opportunity to reflect on the many fond memories I have of traveling to Tokyo, Nagoya and Kyoto in 1993 for the Third Summit. The 1993 Summit served as my introduction to the Manjiro Society and to the efforts of the Tokyo Manjiro/Whitfield Commemorative Center for International Exchange to promote communication and understanding between the peoples of Japan and the U.S. The 1993 Summit also marked my first trip to Japan, and it was particularly special because of my homestay with a Japanese family. Besides being a lot of fun, I realize now that the homestay experience is especially important in helping to accomplish the goal of real exchanges of ideas and points-of-view among peoples of different cultures.

At the Saturday evening reception marking the close of the 1993 Nagoya session, I was introduced to my homestay host, Mr. Takemasa Obata. His first task was to help me say goodbye to the Japanese participants in the panel discussion on environmental issues that had just concluded. Then we went out into the warm evening rain shower to Mr. Obata's home in Gifu City. There I met Mr. Obata's wife and daughter, and was shown to my room, the bedroom of the Obatas' son, then away at college. After an evening snack, and an exchange of souvenir gifts, I fell asleep on tatami mats wondering what the next day would bring.

Sunday was a clear, sunny day, and I explored the private gardens around the Obata home before breakfast with the family. Mr. Obata then took me on a tour, which included a stroll through the farmers market at a nearby temple, and a stop at the Gifu Museum of Art. Among the Museum's collections is a unique exhibit of masterpieces of European art which have been reproduced electronically through high definition digital technology. I learned that this exhibit was developed during Mr. Obata's tenure as the museum's director.

We spent the afternoon driving through the countryside surrounding Gifu City and along the beautiful shores of the Nagara River. Mr. Obata patiently answered my many questions about the farms and villages we passed. My curiosity led to many questions about the patterns of land use and ownership; the process by which local governments plan for the expansion of towns and villages into the surrounding farmland; and Japanese attitudes towards the protection of air and water quality and the protection of habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife.

At the end of the day, and with only a short time left before sunset, Mr. Obata asked if I had any other special things I wanted to see. At my request, he took me on a tour of the local supermarket-an interesting contrast to the grocery store run by my own father and grandfather in the U.S. Midwest. Finally (and with some consternation), he honored my request to step into one of the many similar, gaily-lit shops we had passed repeatedly on our travels--and to my astonishment, I received a crash introduction to the sights and sounds of a pachinko parlor!

On Monday, I bid farewell to the Obata family. The Nagoya station was jammed with early morning commuters. Through my homestay experience, I found myself thinking of the Japanese commuters not as unconnected, distant beings, but as individuals similar to me, with careers, special interests, and personal responsibilities in their daily lives.

After my return to my home in Annapolis, Maryland, there occurred a remarkable coincidence that extended the meaning of my homestay in Gifu. Mr. Obata had told me that he was born in China, and the name of the city, Shenyang. My hobby is after-hours study of Chinese, and I host a number of Chinese exchangees with my government agency. During the time I attended the Third Summit, my homestay guest in Annapolis was Mr. Liu Xiang-hu. Liu Xiang-hu turned out to be from Shenyang, and he wanted to correspond directly with Mr. Obata. It was a great pleasure to me that, to use Mr. Liu's phrase, these "two fellow-townsmen" could join in friendly communication over these long intervening years of history.

It is my wish that other American participants in the Fifth Summit will have similarly meaningful homestay experiences, and that new levels of understanding will continue to sprout at the grassroots level between Japan and the U.S.

Editor's Note

Manjiro was only fourteen when he was shipwrecked. We at the Society always have this in mind, so we are concerned about programming for the youngsters. Thirty children have been selected from the Fairfax County, Virginia "immersion" program (see my "Note" in Issue 2 of exchanges) to go to Kagoshima. They are all "computer literate," as the phrase goes, and we thought it would be educational if they communicated with their counterparts in Kagoshima to acquire background for their Summit adventure. The Virginia kids thought it would be "super cool." As the "Manjiro in Cyberspace" article in this issue reports, we have worked out all the techniques of communicating in English and Japanese, and thought it could be done quite easily--even across 12,000 miles.

We read the Japanese papers here, and for the past year or more, "multimedia" has been the buzzword. If you took the articles at face value, all Japan was busily moving into cyberspace, for the Japanese seem to define almost everything connected with personal computers beyond word processing as "multimedia." Still, there has been a strong undercurrent in the articles of the opinion that multimedia might be just a fad.

So far, we have not been able to get anyone on the other end of our line. We find that apparently the only Internet site in Kagoshima is that of the prefectural university, where it is used for serious scientific exchanges. We have not been able to locate a school in Kagoshima with Internet access. But we have located computers in schools in other parts of Japan, and while they seem to be sitting unused for most of the time, at least one school is willing to seek a special budget to buy modems and otherwise dive into cyberspace with us.

Meanwhile, the American kids and their teachers are working out their proposals to the Kagoshima kids for topics to communicate about. The Americans want to plant seeds at the same time and compare growth, and compare the effects of typhoons and hurricanes. They may locate some computers while they are in Kagoshima and show off their talents to their new friends. Perhaps cyberspace will meet the grassroots after all.

-- Hatsue Armstrong

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