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The first week of December was a week which was commemorated in many places as the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On a TV interview with people on the street in Tokyo the interviewer asked, "What does Human Rights mean for you?" More than one-third of the respondents replied, "Nothing special." I think that they don't feel the need or the concern for human rights in Japan, and they think that, like air or water, human rights are free.
This issue covers the violence and conflicts which many Asian countries have encountered. Why are many people in Japan unable to share in the suffering and pain of other countries, and unable to think of the suffering of other countries as our own? Masaki Yokoyama, a professor who teaches peaceology, talked to me about the values of developmentalism. He has studied developments in the third world and Japanese Official Development Assistance funds for many years. His remarks were very useful for me to come to understand the problem of people's lack of sensitivity to human rights. Quoting the words of Galtung, a scholar of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo on structural/indirect violence: he describes the enormous disparity between the developing and the industrialized countries as structural "violence."
Applying this approach to the information rich and information poor, such disparity can be seen as another kind of structural violence. This understanding could provide Asians with the means to explain and understand some of the situations we encounter. It would give us the tools to examine the various gaps between north and south; economic, educational, financial, and information gaps. Have these problems arisen because of structural elements in this world? Who is the cause of this violence? "It means nothing special for me," this psychology demonstrates the basic problem among assailants in the industrial countries.
On the other hand, many governments in Asia say that, in order to develop their countries, some limitation is needed. This is another factor which creates indifference about human rights and, in the worst cases, victimizes the people of their own countries. This government attitude just creates structural violence for the people of debt ridden, information-poor countries.
Maybe our ministry could become involved in diversity; carrying out education for both have and have-not countries, organizing social concern groups, where churches could become a center of activity, working with NGOs and even minorities in the community. Many church people were confused during recent economic recessions, because there were so few voices from the church to the community. I think keeping this wide understanding of violence in our mind, we could always be ready to speak the good news to our community with confidence.
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