And so there is a great sense of self confidence, both in Turkey and in Japan, as far as what to do with their own culture. And you feel that, whereas in many of the colonized parts of the world, even, as important as it is, China, there is a chip on their shoulder; they have to somehow defend something against the rest of the world. Whereas in Japan and Turkey, we really don't have to to defend anything; we have already defended it.
Now the question s is: How are we going to proceed to the third millennium? And the way to proceed, I think, is through the injunctions of Tokugawa Ieyasu. We need to be strong and patient and careful, and we need to become ourselves. How do we become ourselves? Well, it's like human beings; we become ourselves by intelligent reading and intelligent thinking about other people and how much we want to accept and how much we don't want to accept, how much we want to keep away. And that way, we enrich our personality; we enrich our identity. And it seems to me that Japan has been in that way in a cultural sense enriching itself immensely. And therefore, all Asian countries are looking at Japan as an example for themselves. Japan is absolutely critical to India, to Sri Lanka, to Southeast Asia, certainly to Turkey. And I was fascinated that Aoki said that he was learning something from Turkey. Most Turks would feel the other way around, that they want to learn something from Japan as to how this extraordinary miracle of pheonix-like rising after the Second World War took place. So those are my comments. I think this is an absolutely fascinating and exciting conversation on very important matters for the future for all of us.
I'm...Yes. The idea of creating culture and also providing the space to have culture in Tokyo is a very good suggestion. There have been many good suggestions during this discussion. A lot of these are going to happen anyway. As long as Japan and Tokyo remain as vibrant as they are, this is all going to happen, because the world is going to look at Tokyo; people will come in any case. They want to see more of what's going on here. It is true that Tokyo could do more to showcase its extraordinary beauties. For instance, the New Tokyo Forum is an extraordinary architectural monument. Do you remember that when Guggenheim put in that building, that curious building, which I've only seen pictures of it in Bilbao. All of a sudden, the number of visitors to Bilbao was a nondescript place on the north coast of Spain, godforsaken coast. with a very bad climate. And all of a sudden, from zero tourists it went up to some unbelievable number, only because this was well presented; Guggenheim put in that extraordinary building. So Tokyo has many new lovely buildings, public buildings, and I think they would be very valuable.
I just want to add one simple word about all that was said about language. I would like to indicate to you that notwithstanding the famous reticence of Japanese to speak other languages, in fact we have among us, in the person of Professor Okamoto, who came to Turkey to visit me in the months of August without knowing Turkish, by December, in four or five months I took her to a party among Turks and she was chattering away in Turkish, and people would not believe that she had just come from Japan. So it is obviously an attitude that can be encouraged and will make a big difference all around.
(川本さんの、いかにハリウッドがひどいかについては、私も全く同感です。暴力を審美的にとらえているのは私には耐えられません。また、エキサイティングな映画は今アジアから来ていると思います。
