I am honored to be given this opportunity to speak to visitors from various Asian counties and I would also like to extend a heartfelt welcome to my fellow country people. When you go to the organization for international exchange called the "'East-West Center" in Honolulu, there right in the middle of the Pacific your sense of direction may become confused because "East" does not mean Asia at this organization. It in fact refers to the West Coast of the U.S., while "'West" actually means East Asia. The East-West Center was founded in the middle of 20th century, during the l950's. This, I believe, is very symbolic because it shows that finally in the 20th century, we were being liberated from the old coordinate concept of Eastern civilization versus Western civilization. A British poet, Kipling, once said in his poem that East is East and West is West and that they never meet. But the concept of the East and the West in that sense is now collapsing around the Pacific Ocean, that is, among the Pacific Rim community.
And from such a collapse, I believe, a new civilization of the 21st century will emerge. America of the east Asia of the west and surprisingly Australia and New Zealand of the south have disrupted the old politico-cultural sense of the words, east-west and north-south. Each region, although still having its own culture and tradition, has interchanged with each other very rapidly over the past 100 years.
At the same time all of those regions have experienced a great change, moving toward the same direction. In each country, new industries centering around manufacturing have developed. In this sense, there is really no difference between Singapore and Los Angeles. High-risk buildings towering the sky, cars, highways, telephones, mobile telephones and TV, all of which serve as a method of connecting people's ideas and emotions, have made our lives identical on both sides of the Pacific. At the same time, each region surrounding the Pacific Ocean has been moving jointly toward the new principles of civilization over the past 100 years, through the creation of laws, the separation of religion and politics, and protection of the individual, As a result wherever you go, whether it be to Japan, Korea or Singapore, the West Coast of America or Australia, you will find the difference is greater between present day life and the life of 100 years ago in each country, than difference between the East and the West. Citizens of present day Tokyo would be more surprised and feel a greater sense of not belonging if they went back to Edo (former Tokyo) in the old days.
The inhabitants of the Pacific Rim community have had the same experience and now they live the same lifestyle, which is called "modernity". This modernity is not an ideology produced by an individual person or a nation. There is no origin or starting point of modernity which may show what in principles are. There is no Bible for modernity, nor any book like Karl Marx's "The Capital". Modernity is not what was produced in a certain area at a certain time. It is a natural manifestation of impulse or instinct of human beings as living beings. A human being has two biological principles to survive. One instinct is the preservation of the species, as you know. It is a life cycle, sustaining human life from parent to child and continues forever. The other instinct is the preservation of an individual, which is a ring of the long chain of life. We sustain our lives by these two instincts. Of course these two are closely related. The preservation of an individual helps preserve the whole human race and vice versa. However, both move in different directions. At one time in human history, human beings put more importance on an individual than any other living being. In fact it was when people attached importance to the preservation of the individual, that modernization was born. It may sound strange but modernization started in primitive times. During that time, there was the ritual of human sacrifice in many tribes, which means that an individual was killed in order to obtain the grace of God. This may sound completely contrary to the concept of modernization, but an individual was sacrificed because great importance was attached to an individual. The fact that those individuals who were sacrificed were always very strong or beautiful young men proves this. The group sacrificed those who were different from or superior to the others in order to protect the whole race. This fact is based not only on the instinct of the preservation of the species, but also includes respect for, or
