Timed Essay (Journal # 28)

Maiko Harada
11/26/07
A timed essay

Victims of prejudice

There are many Chinese or Korean people living in Japan. When I was an elementary school student, many of them were bullied by Japanese just because they were not Japanese. Their parents were taken to Japan forcibly as slaves during the war, so there was no reason to be bullied. They did not do any bad things. Japanese did. They had a prejudice that they were bad. When I learned Japanese history and knew about that, I was so sorry for them because I did not help them even though my friends bullied. To exclude such a prejudice, we have to imagine if we were them and change our consciousness.
There are many prejudices not only about foreigners in a country, but also about sex, ancestry, disabled. We have to do imagine if we were them. We might know that they did nothing bad and there is no reason for a prejudice, and also we know it is such a sad thing to be a victim of prejudice. We should think what they feel.
After realizing these things, we have to change our senses of prejudice. Unless all we knew about this problem, we cannot clear this. If only I changed my thinking. If you changed your notion, your friends also will change. If your friends changed their notions, friends of friends will change their consciousness. There is no impossible.
If all we could imagine the feeling of victims of prejudice and change our senses of prejudice, there were no victims in the world. We all have same human rights and it should not be violated by anybody.