スクリプトは事前提出されたものですので、ビデオの音声とは異なる場合があります。

The Art of Letter Writing

OGUMA Chihiro (Kanazawa Technical College)

Nowadays, we can easily communicate with our family and our friends using the telephone, cell phone and e-mail. It doesn't matter where in the world we are or they are. Back in my great-grandparents' day, sending letters was the only way of communicating with family and friends in distant places. Wives waited for letters from husbands in battlefields and sons smiled when they got long, handwritten letters from their mothers who worried about them working in faraway places like Tokyo. The letters wrapped them in warm affection with each word, each sentence they read. The letters had the power to help shorten the distance between them by reminding them of home. They could hear the writer's voice, smell the home-cooked food, see the festival they were missing.

Friends write to me every day and I write to them but, they're not the kind of letters you put away in a shoe box and treasure when they've yellowed with age. They're not even on paper, in fact. The kind we exchange on a daily basis are just e-mail messages, quick little text messages typed out on our cell phones. Don't get me wrong. They are a useful part of my life, just not anything special.

In fact, e-mail was a life-saver for me last year. It's how I stayed in touch with my friends and family in Japan while I was living in New Zealand on my school's overseas study program. It was great to be able to hear what was going on back at school, what my friends were doing and also very convenient for asking my mother to send me things that I missed. These e-mails were nothing special; just short messages.

Then one day, a big box arrived at my homestay family's house sent to me by my mother. It was full of some of my favorite Japanese foods and winter clothes. Inside was also a letter, a beautifully handwritten three-page letter on pink stationary from my mother. I unwrapped a pack of Hi-Chew strawberry candies and sat down to read. She told me my brother was thinking about going to Kanazawa Kosen and studying really hard to get in and, about my other three brothers and how my sister and her son were doing. She talked about all the things going on in our neighborhood. She asked about how I was doing: Could I understand the teachers? Was I getting enough to eat? How was my homestay family doing? She told me to get lots of sleep and reminded me to be myself. Three Hi-chews later, I finished the letter and felt this intense connection to my mom, a closeness I had never felt after reading one of her e-mails or even after talking with her on the phone, even though what we talk about is the same kind of things. Perhaps it's because when you write a letter, you write more slowly than when you type and choose your words more carefully and more clearly express thoughts you may not have realized were there. I was lucky enough to get three more handwritten letters from my mother over the year and each time I read them, with or without the Hi-chews, they had the same effect on me. I keep the letters in a shoe box in my room and take them out and read them whenever I'm feeling sad.

Cell-phones, computers, e-mail … all make our lives more efficient and are an important part of our lives. Most of us can't even imagine a world without them. And we should use the technology we have to make better use of our time since we're all so busy today.

People send and receive tens, even hundreds of e-mails and text messages every day but, when was the last time you wrote a handwritten letter to someone you care about? When was the last time you got a letter in the mail from someone special in your life? When you go home tonight, why don't you turn the computer off, silence your cell phone and sit down and write a letter to someone you love? Select your words carefully. That special person in your life will really appreciate it. The art of letter writing shouldn't disappear altogether just because we live in a world with computers and cell phones. I hope we never forget the power of a handwritten letter.