Shengliver’s Note: This is a revised entry. Shengliver tells about the friendship between Ms Kei and him.

 

While watching news over lunch one day last week, I was perturbed by the devastation that the earthquake and tsunami wrought in the Japanese nation. Therefore, I have been following the developments in Japan in the past few days.

 

One person popped into my mind’s eye because of the Japanese earthquake. It is Ms Kei. Ms Kei was born in Shanghai, educated there and very probably married to a Japanese national. I have never met Ms Kei in person in the real world. Our friendship happened online.

 

The first time I met Ms Kei, I was speaking English with my learning buddies in a virtual community. She came up on the mike and our conversation kicked off. She was not a regular visitor to the learning community. Over the years she joined us occasionally.

 

I had a hunch that Ms Kei was married to a Japanese national but she did not confirm it. She spoke Mandarin, the Shanghai dialect, Japanese, and English. I asked her how she learned the Japanese language. She said that she studied Japanese largely by herself, on a transistor radio in the 1970s and 1980s when she was a student in Shanghai. Her parents knew no Japanese whatsoever.

 

One year her family were all in Shanghai. She and her hubby raised a boy and a girl. Another year her family were in Tokyo. When she told me one evening that her family were living in Tokyo at the time, I was surprised. Her two children were then attending university in Japan. It seemed that they came back home on the weekend from their uni. I asked Ms Kei if I could chat with her two teens in English on the Web. She tried to persuade them to come over, but they declined.

 

As a matter of fact, Ms Kei helped run her family business in three regions of East Asia. She said that they operated their business in mainland China, Japan and Taiwan. She shuttled back and forth between the three locations every year. What business did they do? I failed to get a clue.

 

Ms Kei paid me compliments, saying that she was proud of me being Chinese. Also my English impressed her. She spoke English quite well, but she probably spoke Japanese much better. During the course of a conversation between us, her mobile phone rang. Excusing herself, she started to talk on her mobile phone effortlessly in Japanese. I heard it.

 

Throughout my school years, the Chinese history textbooks portrayed the Japanese as devils as a result of what the Japanese fascists did in China in the 1930s and 40s. The portrait of the Japanese in the Chinese textbooks is to some extent true, which I came to realise as my horizons were expanded. However, the portrait is a distorted one in some respects. The Chinese of my generation were fed by Chinese textbooks and media with a generalisation which could not reflect an accurate picture of the Japanese nation. Regrettably, this generalisation on the Chinese part has been fed further by some Japanese guys’ unwillingness to face up to history and by their attempt to beautify what their fathers and grandparents did during the Second World War.

 

Ms Kei was working and living in Japan for years. Over the years, though I did not have many opportunities to meet the Japanese, I have met online quite a few Chinese expatriates who were working or studying in Japan. I also came across a Hong Kong lady of mixed race, her mother Cantonese and father Japanese. I talked with her in English. I took all the opportunities available to learn about Japanese society through the chats.

 

Ms Kei helped readjust my picture of the Japanese. When asked whether the Japanese are evil as a lot of Chinese think, she did not answer me straightaway. Instead, she introduced one small slice of Japanese society to me. In Tokyo there are some open street markets where farm produce like vegetables is on sale. There are no price tags on the commodities there. Shoppers come and pick what they need. They deposit the money in a pot before they exit the market. All the shoppers pay more than they should. Ms Kei said that she could not imagine what would happen should such a market exist in China. I agreed with her. Her conclusion was that most Japanese people are kind, generous and courteous.

 

The first Chinese in Japan I have ever met online is not Ms Kei, but a pal called UFO. Her roots are in Sichuan. After her studies in a Japanese uni, she started working in a company there. I had for a long time known that Japanese electronics products were top-notch. Therefore, I had thought that Japanese workers must be very intelligent and capable. This pal called UFO said that actually in her company the number of Chinese workers outperform their Japanese counterparts. When a technical glitch crops up, it is the Chinese workers that the Japanese staff turn to for help.

 

Television and the Internet has brought to our very eyes what happened after the earthquake struck Japan. I believe most of the Chinese audience are impressed by the Japanese attitude towards the cataclysm. They took it as it came along. Their composure and their order in the face of a raging nature were in sharp contrast with our Chinese panic and chaos which was presented on TV when nature shook western Sichuan Province in 2008. Their poise and order also dwarf those Chinese who, subscribing to a rumour that the price of salt would go up because of the nuclear fallout in Japan, started panic buying the commodity in many parts of China.

 

In China there is Japan-phobia, and in Japan Sino-phobia. However, the majority of the ordinary people in both nations are peace-loving, sympathetic and compassionate. Luckily we live in the 21st century, in which age we are better informed of each other thanks to better communications technology. Radio, TV, newspapers, and the Internet have shrunk the world a lot. Television pictures of the tsunamis cast on NHK were real time as if they were going on somewhere in our own neighbourhood. On the Internet, national borders are in a sense torn down, thus making it a reality that people from different countries communicate with each other without any meddling from their individual national governmental propaganda. In the last few days, Chinese cyberspace has been inundated by comments on the Japanese earthquakes, most of which expressed sympathy for the victims. A small minority of Chinese derived pleasure from the Japanese nation’s misfortune, as if Mother Nature had helped them take revenge on the “devils” and the historical debt between the two nations had thus been settled. We Chinese do enjoy freedom of speech today, of which this is the best evidence. Better communication and freedom to express views and opinions will help most people in both China and Japan form an unbiased picture of each other. Never will extremism reign again!

 

It seems that the nuclear power plants in Fukushima are still causing more trouble, and radiation is on the minds of the whole world. I wonder if my friend Ms Kei and her family are still in Tokyo. I have not met her on the Internet for a very long time. Their family may be in Shanghai or Taipei. Wherever they might be, Shengliver’s thoughts go out to them. May they luck out.