Where Are You Looking From? | Tomoki Kamo, Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management
The Faculty of Policy Management and the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies regularly hold information sessions at Keio Osaka City Campus. This year we held one in Fukuoka as well. We wanted to speak directly to more people outside the Tokyo area about what the two faculties have to offer. The session drew more high school students, parents, and teachers than we had expected. The Fukuoka Mita-kai, Keio’s alumni association in Fukuoka, gave us warm and generous support in making it happen. I would like to thank them once again.
In Fukuoka, I found myself thinking again about something.
The world looks different depending on where you look at it from. As a scholar of area studies and international politics, I see this confirmed in my work every day. I first felt it keenly when I worked in Hong Kong.
I have worked in Hong Kong twice. Both times, my day began with the local newspapers. What was happening in China that Hong Kong society cared about? Was there anything new in the reports? Why was this story running now? Why did the focus of related stories shift over time the way it did? With questions like these in mind, I read closely each day what the papers were saying about China.
Reading this way, you cannot do without comparison. You compare the Hong Kong papers with those of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and with the Taipei papers. You compare the Chinese-language papers with the English-language ones, and of course with the Japanese papers too. One more comparison I found especially interesting was with the Singapore papers.
The China you see in the Singapore papers is not the China you see in the Hong Kong papers. Just as the Beijing papers and the Hong Kong papers show different Southeast Asias, the Southeast Asia in the Singapore papers is not the one in the Hong Kong papers. The most striking difference was how much coverage was given to what lies west of Singapore—India and the Middle East. Given where Singapore sits on the map, that is only natural. My time working in Hong Kong taught me firsthand that China, and the world, look different from every region.
If we think of the international community as a place where countries, regions, and international organizations each hold up their own conception of order and contend with one another, then what moves international politics is how they see one another—and where they misread one another. The world map takes a different shape depending on where you stand.
If Japan is to engage with the world and keep its peace and prosperity, it needs an international sensibility: the ability to imagine what kind of world map the other side is holding. If the world really does look this different from different places, then I hope students will develop this ability while they are at university, and come to see for themselves where they are looking at the world from.
Fukuoka, where we went this summer, occupies a very interesting position on the world map that a China specialist carries in their head. Measured in a straight line, Tokyo and Shanghai are both about 880 kilometers from Fukuoka. Osaka and Seoul are each about 500 kilometers away; Taipei is 1,280, and Beijing 1,400. Seen from Tokyo, Fukuoka is a far-off city in the west. Seen from Fukuoka, though, Tokyo and Shanghai are the same distance away. Students who grew up in Fukuoka, or elsewhere in Kyushu, may well have a different world map in their heads from students who grew up in Tokyo.
Students with different maps come together in the same classroom and show each other their maps. That is what a university is for. It is why we went to Fukuoka, and why we hope to welcome students from every part of Japan.