Sayonara, Mata Ashita

___I don’t know if there were any services on the internet which translate French into English and vice versa and make it possible to communicate between two sides of people. There are some for Japanese and other languages. For example, there has been one between Japanese and Chinese. But once I tried reading it but felt that translation didn’t work well. Chinese and Japanese are totally different languages each other and computer translation is not enough to tell the meanings exactly after translation into other language. But since Korean and Japanese languges have similar structures, web-translation can work relatively well. I knew a web translation service which is between Korean and Japanese four or some years ago. At that time the site was named Naver, and now, Enjoy Korea. I really like to read message boards of it, which Koreans and Japanese are making conversations through web translation.

___Since when I came to visit the site, I have often found a guy posting so many comments on Naver(at that time). At the beginning, his name on the web was 500710. I may be wrong but I guess his birthday was July 10th of 1950. I know little about him, but he was an active guy and lived in Yamaguchi Prefecture. He was not only bridging between Korea and Japan, also let so many Korean stay at his home. Some xenophobia who don’t want exchanges between Korea and Japan, for example, “and_yet”, have criticized him about what he was doing. In my point of view, I didn’t like Mr.500710 so much, because he made so much postings(multi-posts), wrote personal things onto the web which should be a public space, and was proud of showing his knowledge about Korea and sometimes about Spanish. But he treated everyone equally no matter how a person was hated by Korean or Japan side not only on the web, but also in real life. He had never got angry with malisious comments, and knew how to pass them off. And He was especially kind to young travelers from Korea to Japan. Several days before, I read his thread that was alerting Korean traveler saying that one of bicycle backpackers from Korea had been stolen all his belongings in a park in Osaka.

___Yesterday, in the midnight, I found a tread on “Enjoykorea”, posted by “hiace700″ (I don’t like him, anyway) that was saying Mr.shinobu7 was killed by a traffic accident. I was really surprised by reading the comment. Mr.shinobu7 was a quite popular guy in the category “Travel”, so many Koreans and Japanese posted comments soon. There is another Japanse guy”koyangi04″ who is disliked by almost the all Japanese. He, utilizing Mr.shinobu7’s death, wrote a “hate thread” to criticize other Japanse such as “and_yet” and so on. Then hot argument was caused between Japanese users of “enjoykorea”. I imagine how does Mr.shinobu7 feel if he was looking at the argument between Japanese from the Heaven. He had never insulted anyone, even “koyangi04″. Though I haven’t read Mr. shinobu7’s recent threads and comments on the Enjoykorea, I feel that I will be sad if I will never be able to read his comments forever.

___What he was doing was to bridge between Korean and Japan which look similar, but in reality, have different language, custom, tradition and way of thinking. International exchanges are always difficult. If there are differences and conflicts with other country, people usually think that “our side is always right and the other side is wrong” as if it was a precondition. In order to solve the problem and not to bring a destructive consequence(for example, war), someone should be there, who could understand from where the differences of opinion come, and try to bridge a gap between the two. I don’t mean Mr. shinobu7 was a person who could do that like diplomats do, but in different way, he had been playing a role as a citizen to help communication between Korea and Japan. I’d like to express about my condolence aa

___It seems that Enjoykorea is losing Japanese participants. Threads are seemed like almost occupied by Koreans. I think of some reasons, but I will not mention those now. What I am afraid is that by his death, more and more, Japanese would not come and write on the Enjoykorea. Though I don’t think the exchange between two countries as a whole would be declining by that, at least decreases my interest in surfing the internet. I am sorry for his death.

enjoykorea(Japan side)