GIRL'S ESSAY WINS JAPAN TRIP

Helen Joseph of Cassiar, B.C.
will travel to Japan this summer at
the expense of the local Lions Club.
She will visit Japan for six weeks,
as a result of her award winning
essay.

HELEN'S WINNING ESSAY

Mr. Chairman, honored club mem-
bers.

It gives me a great deal of
pleasure and apprehension to be here
tonight giving a speech on why I
would like to go to Japan.

Setting a favorable example for
the younger students to follow has
let me to talk on, "Why I Would Like
To Go To Japan".

Indian students today, are the
parents and leaders of their reserve,
of the community of tomorrow. Win-
ning this trip would make me a
better person to meet the challenges
of the future and also would illus-
trate to other Indian students that
they too can and should work towards
goals that will broaden their ex-
perience outside the reserve.

A number of my friends have ask-
ed what life on the reserve is
really like. As much as I have
talked and tried to explain to them
what it is like, there is still a
feeling within me that the emotions
experienced cannot be truly tran-
slated - that the best way for any-
one to know what life is like in a
community, reserve, or Japan is to
be there and live their way of life
in their setting, eating their food
and associating with their friends.

I think the cultural shock that
I would experience in Japan would
be less than that of an average
middle class white student because
I met this shock when I was five. I
can recall quite easily, travelling
in a covered car for the first time

to Cassiar.

Transferring from a small high
school to a larger one in Terrace
is another challenge that I am glad
to have been able to meet and I
look forward to the challenges and
experiences of a Japanese way of
life.

The residents of Terrace are
faced with the problems of unemploy-
ment, lack of shelter, pollution,
etc. As Terrace only has a pop-
ulation of fourteen thousand and
is presented with these problems
to a minor degree, how much more
these problems must be complicated
in Japanese cities which have over
a million people.

Northern B.C. cities should take
a closer look at what industrial
expansion has, and is doing to the
conservation of the wilderness. As
it recedes further north to obtain
their winter supply of food. Les=
sons may be learned from the mis-
takes of settlers in other areas.

The position of the woman in
the Japanese society interests me
also. Is she getting more equal
rights, does she have seat in their
government, does she get a lower
wage than the men even though the
type of work and level of effic-
iency is the same, or has the
Woman's Liberation Movement really
started to infiltrate into Japan.

Other aspects of the Japanese
culture I am interested in are
architecture, the plans or designs
for the future, their religion, how
it differs from ours, funerals,
weddings and feasts, customs, and
generally the arts and literature.

I suppose my greatest interest
and reason for wanting to go to
Japan is a historical-ancestrial
one. Anthropogists believed that
our ancestors had originally des-
cended from Asia. They believed
there was a time when the two con-
tinents, Asia and North America,

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