Pacific Island Times April 2018 Vol 3 No. 4 | Page 5

Brief Chat
I
f the thought of a university lecture evokes mem-
ories of a venerable professor reading a familiar
lecture from yellowed note cards, then viewing a
lecture by Professor Carl Becker would shake up your
thinking.
Becker is a professor of medical ethics and policy
at Kyoto University in Japan. Earlier in his career
he studied death and dying in the Japanese culture.
Since then, he has taught at Osaka, Tsukuba, and
Kyoto Universities, the first foreign-born scholar fully
tenured and promoted as a civil servant in a Japanese
national university. He is consulted by the Japanese
news media and has been decorated by the Emperor
of Japan for his studies of aging and dying in Japa-
nese culture.
On peaceful and
crime-free society
By Bruce Lloyd
During a recent guest lecture at the University of
Guam, Becker stalked the stage at high speed, data,
ideas and theories spilling out to a transfixed audi-
ence. Why do civilizations endure and why do they
fail? Some cut down all their trees, in the case of
Greece and Easter Island and others outgrew the food
they could produce internally to feed their popula-
tions, then resorting to other means to feed them-
selves.
“The first city of over a million was Rome, a few
years before the time of Christ. And next, it takes
more than a thousand years before [Queen] Eliza-
beth’s London in the time of Shakespeare and the
third, is Paris, in the time of Napoleon followed by
Roosevelt’s New York. And what do classical Rome,
Queen Elizabeth’s London, Napoleon’s Paris and
Roosevelt’s New York have in common? Where they
get their food? By taxes and borrowing from foreign
entities.
There was not enough food in Rome, Paris or any
one of these cities to feed their people. So they used
gunships, bullets, armies or taxes to extort the food
from other countries. The classical Romans extorted
the food for their banquets using Roman legions,
especially in North Africa and Syria and places like
that to bring in grain. And we in America, in some
places do the same thing. Through American colonies
in Latin America, through IT for coffee and sugar. But
the person harvesting your sugar or tea or your coffee
might be a seven-year-old because her parents can’t
make enough to send her to school unless she earns a
dime a day.
Now England is peeling back from all those years
of extortion. England is making a national effort to
make fair trade. Their trade needs, for the coffee,
sugar and tea, most of that goes to the parents of those
kids so the parents are not forcing those kids to work.
Now when my British friend came to Kyoto last
month, he said, “we’ll buy some coffee and tea.” At
the store he said, “’where’s the fair trade?’ Well, I
said, we don’t have much. ‘I won’t buy it if it’s not
fair trade. If you do, you, the foreigner, are extorting
this, promoting the system. Pushing these kids into
childhood wage slavery.’ We’ve got to be sure that
our coffee dollar or our chocolate dollar is fair trade,
so we can crea te a fairer society.”
During a recent guest lecture at the University
of Guam, Becker stalked the stage at high
speed, data, ideas and theories spilling out to a
transfixed audience. Why do civilizations endure
and why do they fail?
Becker said that for much of its history, Japan took
a different course. “Japan maximized its population
by 1560. We had 30 million people in Japan by 1560.
After that, there was no room for any more people.
So we had to learn ways to keep the population stable
and without creating big gaps of money or satisfac-
tion. We adjusted values to create a peaceful, almost
crime-free society for almost 250 years. And now,
the point of this is, the whole world, we’ve made it
crowded. We can’t support any more people on this
planet. How can we have such a crowded place, keep
it peaceful and not exploit people?”
How did they do it?
“We start with diet. In the 7th and 8th centuries,
Japan decided to stop eating animals, mammals. On
the surface, that was because they were Buddhists and
as Buddhists, we don’t want to inflict pain on animals
that we know can feel a lot of pain. And we know,
raising dogs and cats, pigs and cows they have emo-
tions and can feel pain. But the environmental reason
is that it takes 40 times more water and 20 times more
land to produce one ton of food value from a cow or a
pig than it does from rice. And our human bodies can
combine rice with beans to produce all the proteins
the human body needs. So with a rice and bean diet,
sometimes called the southern diet which is actual-
ly eaten in northern Japan, you can get by without
raising animals, killing animals and dealing with the
pollution that those animals produce.”
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