Who do you respect most and why?

 

These are the questions that I asked to my students of a women’s university where I teach Business Communication in English on a weekly basis.

My intent was to have them think about their most important value in life or most important attitude to life to come.

And, ideally values to be pursued through business and business behavior should be consistent to such most important value in life.

According to a Japanese internet search engine company’s survey to anonymous internet users about most respected person, the top five most respected individuals are as follows:

 

#1          Own parents                    

#2          Nobody

#3          Great persons in the history

#4          Particular entertainers

#5          Own lover/spouse

 

My students listed the following individuals to be respected most.

             

Game creator and music composer

Takarazuka top star

Heroin of an American TV drama

Mother Teresa

Top female fashion model

Own mother

Own friend

Own teacher

Mary Antoinette

Japanese TV action star

 

They explained the reason respectively as follows:

l  Brilliant talent and ideas are expressed through clear messages

l  Continuous effort, hard work and creative artist

l  Having a clear dream with never-give-up spirit to make the dream come true

l  Self-sacrifice to help poor or diseased people

l  Lifestyle to keep her own beauty and her family in good shape

l  Hard worker and woman of action

l  Friendly, positive and helpful attitude

l  Inspiring and enlightening

l  Pride and nobleness

l  Tireless effort to explore own internal possibility

 

I believe that many people in the world tend to have an opportunity to be influenced, moved, impressed or enlightened by a person or the person's written books or biographies. As many as your country has, Japan has great persons, who deserve our respect. I subscribe a monthly magazine “Chichi”, which introduces real stories of great Japanese people in the past (history) and in the present days. One commonality through those great people both in the past and now is the existence of the period of large magnitude of difficulty such as their own disease/injury, loss of family members/partners, loss of their company/factory due to natural disasters etc. For me, I cannot think of how I could accept those difficult situations in front of me.

 

In a sense, it is true that the magazine only introduces success stories.  But it is still amazing to me that there are so many real stories, which are stranger than fictions, being introduced to subscribers every month. And when the heroes or heroines in the magazine look back the tough days, most of them tend to rather appreciate the difficult experiences saying because unless otherwise there were not that tall wall at that time, their stretch (growth) would have had never been achieved.This magazine is available only through direct subscription application to the publisher and cannot be purchased at book stores. Ye, the number of the subscribers is growing year by year, and now to be beyond 100,000. This big number of subscription is very rare for this sort of serious and sober media.

 

This small yet dynamic fact might be telling how much Japanese people are hungry and thirsty of ideal human model to be.