Anyone for Tea?
(Original in Japanese)

Takuto Sato
(Age 18, Japan <Living in USA>)
Battle Creek Japanese School, Michigan

With civil war rife among races and religions worldwide, it almost seems that world peace has retreated to a completely different world far away. However, isn't peace simpler than that? Isn't peace the feeling you get when your body relaxes and you enjoy peace of mind, in fact, very much like the feeling you get when enjoying an afternoon cup of tea? If that is the case, perhaps we could realize world peace by providing everyone with tea tables so that people around the world could enjoy teatime together, irrespective of race or religion. Ongoing development of the internet and other communication technologies today has significantly reduced the distance separating people of the world, and it is this that makes establishment of a Global Tea Table (GTT) possible.

The internet is a heaven-sent tool for realizing a tea table at which we could enjoy casual conversation with anyone in the world. People with different cultures and backgrounds from around the world could get together online and enjoy communicating. But the constant threat of fraud and other crimes associated with existing online chat rooms makes it difficult to describe them as havens where one could enjoy a cup of tea. At the GTT, all participants would be required to provide identification, and a committee to handle malicious users would be established in each country to prevent this kind of trouble from occurring. Teatime can only be enjoyable when everyone observes manners, so people who do not behave would have to be penalized by prohibiting their access or taking other suitable action. Strengthening security in this way would enable GTT to offer participants an unprecedented secure haven.

People accessing the GTT site would be invited to a randomly selected "table" where they would join people chatting and enjoy casual conversation. Selecting conversation partners randomly would offer users opportunities to engage on an equal footing in unbiased conversations with people from various different cultures, whilst avoiding troubles frequently associated with conventional chat rooms that seek close relationships. GTT would be a place for casual conversations consistent with teatime, and would not encourage users to delve too deeply into one another's privacy.

The world that emerges when prejudices are removed is unbelievably vast. I used to play on a soccer team with a Korean boy. In the process of playing soccer together and chatting about our favorite players I forgot all the biases I had had until then. If I did not have the chance to join the same team at the same time as him, I would probably still have biases against Korean people. Most probably, I would have never imagined that connecting with Korean people was possible. By establishing GTT as a place to promote mutual understanding, we can realize a world of understanding without prejudice.

The biggest problem in realizing a GTT is the language barrier. However, if we can overcome this barrier, we can truly realize unprecedented communication. Today, people get information about the world by looking at the news in their native language. But this information has been edited by the media organization and may differ somewhat from information gained directly. At times, these differences plant discrimination and bias in people's hearts, and hinder mutual understand between people of different races. For example, a series of media reports on visits to Yasukuni Shrine was the major cause of the biases against Koreans I mentioned earlier. Luckily for me, because I lived in America and was able to talk to him in English, I was able to rid myself of these stereotypes at an early stage. Removing language barriers in this way is an indispensable condition for realizing mutual understanding of races and religious beliefs. Fortunately, language barriers are getting smaller each day as development of automatic translation technology makes significant progress. Accordingly, we are probably getting closer to realizing a GTT that will promote deep mutual understanding among people of the world.

Eventually the GTT would develop from a text conversation table format to one that could accommodate voice communication and then video chat. This would require considerable development of translation technology, but just as people long ago were unable to imagine towns brightly lit by electric light bulbs, realization of such technology is distinctly possible. If people of the world could sit around after dinner with a teacup in one hand and chat about the day's events with people of different cultures and languages living on the other side of the globe, and if this custom caught on around the world, surely world peace would follow naturally.