Humans Everywhere
Chukyo University in Nagoya , Japan is full of humans. Now this may seem like an obvious statement, but it is actually quite an amazing realization. When traveling to a foreign country where everything is different, from the language to the bathrooms, one begins to expect everything is different including those who live there. It is almost like one can not comprehend that someone who is so different is in essence the exact same as you. On Oct. 20 th a few lucky Franklin College students got to find out first hand that the foreign people all around them were not so foreign after all.
While visiting the Chukyo University a few Franklin students were invited to visit and participate in a Japanese discussion class. The topic of the day, ‘What does a human need?' The Franklin students were split up among four groups of Japanese students. The teacher gave the lesson in Japanese stopping periodically allowing for the designated translator in each group to communicate the main points the teacher had gone over. The groups were then given an assignment. Each person was to write down the top ten human needs, and then share them with the group. Temi Aromolaran, one of the Franklin students, was surprised “how what we said was all the same.” Oliver Rissi Carlson pointed out, “the first things they [the Japanese students in his group] were writing were family or community whereas I wrote independence first.” In fact all the Franklin students were amazed to find out that although the order in which the needs were written down might have differed almost each person wrote down the same ideas.
After organizing the human needs according to whether the need was for survival or for quality of life, or whether it was visible or not, each group then presented. Oliver said, that “after seeing all the presentations all the basic human needs were the same.” This is an astonishing discovery. One student later commented “It feels like I have had one of those ah-ha moments where all the differences disappear if only for a moment. I wish more had been here to feel it too.”