I believe that Japanese people should pay more attention to the social issues in other countries.
When I say “social issues”, it means especially problems happening in developing countries like poverty. Japanese people tend not to get interested in the social issues.
Maybe that is because Japan is ethnically homogeneous nation. But in order to solve the social issues and to make the world better place, we, Japanese, need to pay more attention to social issues.
Why we should pay more attention to the social issues can be described in one word, which is “World Citizen”. World Citizen is the way of thinking that I am belong to the world not one nation, so that I am also responsible for the other nations than the nation I live in. In my opinion World Citizen is composed with two main ideas. They are “ “Understanding” and “Consciousness”.
Understanding is to understand what is really happening there, what people are suffering from, and what causes that problem. Today we can reach to whatever information we need to know through the internet. However we tend to get only informations that get our interest. For example, those who is interested in politics only get the information about politics, and rarely get other informations like economy, terrorism and stuff. This kind of phenomenon is called Filter Bubble. It makes us have biased informations. This Phenomena makes us indifferent to social issues.
Consciousness is to realize(or think ) that I am also playing a part of causing the social issues. In other word, to notice that we are not unrelated to social issues. For example when we waste food, that behavior might make poverty in other country worse. Today we, especially people who live in developed countries, behave as if we were unrelated to the social issues. But who brings that kind of problems to developing countries is us. We did. We need to know that.
Having two ideas I mentioned above, we can be World Citizen. And World Citizen take social issues as their responsibility. As a result, the social issues will be solved and world becomes better place. What we have to do is to gather all kind of informations and input knowledges about the problems, and to have a little change to our life for the people in developing countries by realizing we are related to social issues.
Once again, I believe Japanese people becoming World Citizen and paying more attention to social issues is an answer to make better World in the future.