| 114th Year, 11th Issue | Thursday, October 24, 2002 | Sparta, North Carolina |
About 40 members and guests of the Wilkes-Alleghany-Ashe Counties Carolina Club — this area's University of North Carolina alumni chapter — gathered last week for a dinner meeting at Olde Beau Golf Club in Roaring Gap.
The featured speaker was Dell S. Wright, an alumni distinguished professor of political science at UNC. Wright's topic was "Battleships, Bombs and Baseball: Historical (and Personal) Perspectives on 20th Century Japan-U.S. Relations."
The meeting marked the first such assembly of the chapter in Alleghany County.
Wright's distinctions include having served on a presidential task force on intergovernmental fiscal relations, as well as testifying before Congressional committees on the subject of federalism.
Wright, who said he has made about 25 trips to Japan, told the Oct. 17 audience, "One of the most worshiped images (in Japan) is Mt. Fuji. Japan has reached tremendous peaks after depths and valleys. We've had a century-long set of relationships with Japan. It presents us with issues and problems and kinds of challenges that hopefully we can learn from."
He described Japan as a "fragile superpower," stating that Japan has the world's second largest economy and is the United States' second largest trade partner. Japan also has perhaps the most homogeneous and deeply rooted of all national cultures. "Japanese is still very much a closed culture," Wright remarked. "There's a super-self-consciousness internationally of Japan and the Japanese."
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