200 Emails
(Original in Japanese)

Momone Ozawa
(Age 9, Japan <Living in USA>)
Japanese Supplementary School in Middle Tennessee

I have a Korean friend. At first, she didn't like me very much because she knew that Japan had been at war with Korea a long time ago. But I played with her everyday so she came to realize that not all Japanese people were bad. That made me really happy. But this year, she will go back to Korea. We have become really good friends so I will miss her a lot.

I think that if I get to know someone well, I will understand that person better, and that person will understand me better too. Just as my Korean friend learned that I was not a bad person, I think we can learn to understand people in different countries. So if we used the internet to exchange email with people in other countries, I think we could learn and understand lots of different things.

What would happen if I sent email to people in countries throughout the world? How could I do that? How many people are there in the world? I began by thinking about how many countries there were in the world. At first I thought there were about 150 countries. Then I wondered how I could check and find out. I thought I could find out on my computer so I looked at the internet. According to my computer, there are about 200 countries. I was surprised there were so many countries.

Then I wondered what would happen if I sent email to someone in each of those 200 countries. It would be interesting to see what kind of replies I would get. If I did this I would learn a lot about those 200 countries, and the people in those countries would learn a lot about Japan.

What would happen if not just me, but people throughout the world did this? Maybe we would all become friends. Maybe the day will come when people around the world will exchange email with people in different countries. It would be really wonderful if everyone could make 200 friends. People around the world would learn, accept and understand things about other countries. Then, instead of looking at a country as just a country, we can relate to a personal friend there, and perhaps come to like the people of that country too, just like my Korean friend did.

My Korean friend and I might not have become friends because of the war in the past. That is why I think wars are bad. I don't have the power to stop war all by myself. But why don't we all start by sending email to someone in a country we know nothing about. As the number of email increases, perhaps everyone in the world will get to know one another. Even if our efforts are small in the beginning, they will grow and grow, and maybe they will be able to prevent wars. I hope that day will come. I want to use the internet like this to build a peaceful world.