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　　　　　　　　　　　　 Scared Children

                                                                                              Akiko Miyake

                                                        　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Kansai Toast Masters' Club
                                                       　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 March 11, 2001

        Once when I lived In the United States, I was asked to teach the Japanese art of paper folding to black children. At that time, I was interested to know what kind of books these black children liked to read. So I took some girls to a children's library in my university. But the experiment was a failure. When I led them to the reading room, they were so scared that they rushed back and forth like little mice, jumped out of the entrance, and then SCREAMED! What a tremendous scare they had!. The scare came out suddenly as these black children were taken into white people's library.

        Recently as the age of criminals is getting younger and younger, I often recall that scream. I wonder if all children, Americans and Japanese, hold an enormous amount of scare. Because coming back to Japan, I met another case, this time,of a Japanese.

        It was my brother's eldest son. He was a non-intellectual child of very intellectual parents. As he entered the primary school, his parents gave him the best books of their choice. No. .! He never touched them. It was his younger brother who read them at once.

        But he was great in something else, in catching any insects. All his classmates came to admire him. Also he was a great collector of the toys and the pictures of monsters, Gojiras and Dinosaurs. "I like insects and dinosaurs best!" he said. The insects are his own images, small unimportant, but lively. Dinosaurs mean the scares of entrance examinations. His father's Kyoto University and his mother's Doshisha University made his dark and imageless scare. So he was curing himself by imagining the horrible but interesting images of dinosaurs.

        Successful in his cure, he grew up to be a good mathematician. When he passed the entrance examination of the Engineering Department of Osaka University, on that glorious day, he went out and sold all the books that his parents had bought for him, and that he had never read. He brought home instead a big auto-bicycle, Honda. It was the declaration of his independence and his manhood.

        My conclusion is this. It is true that children are hiding enormous scare, but healthy children know how to cure themselves. The three black girls I taught in America knew to scream. They cured themselves all right by screaming. Some weak children may be defeated by their scare, and led into violence. But if we know more about their scare, certainly we can help them more.


(2001年3月12日　　関西トーストマスターズクラブ　例会　スピーチ原稿　B-9）

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