Today, in addition to my normal style of lecture, I would like to add a slide show. I'll try to give various stories with whatever comes to my mind, using the slides with keywords, photographs, images and so on. The title of the lecture is called "The arrival of other kind," and the subtitle is "Where do we come from, and where do we go" which is the theme for today's symposium. I'd like to describe in various ways about this eternal theme which has been talked about for a long time in the history of human beings.

First of all, please look at this picture, which most of you should be familiar with. It's 2001.9.11, the New York Twin Towers. This picture jumped into our eyes with overwhelming reality. No comparison to the SFX of Hollywood. When this happened, a lot of media spread the thought whereby opposition to capitalism vs. Islam would intensify in the 21st century. When capitalist society spreads globally, religious and racial opposition intensifies. And it was commonly believed that the Islamic society was the leader for such opposition.
I felt tired of such stereotype stories whenever I heard them. Leaders try to make a new enemy in order to keep order, which is the usual practice they used from old times. Whatever the real intention of the accident was, those synchronized terrorist attacks had an exceptional style. There are various terrorist attacks happening in Israel all the time, and most of the methods are to load bombs onto a truck, and strike the target. However, in the case of 9.11, it was different. Airplanes with innocent victims on board were used to destroy buildings. Despite the scale, there was never such a cruel method ever used before. I heard that Arabs were discriminated in the U.S. on airplanes after this accident, and I'm afraid even in Japan, Arabs reminded many Japanese of terrorists.

But, generally speaking, the society of Islam is not the dangerous society the media portrays. The Islam religion took a much more tolerant policy of pagans than Christianity, when we look at our history. They didn't give any punishment nor oppression unless we openly resisted against Islamic power. There weren't any cruel rulers like Cortes and Pizarro. Speaking of a penalty imposed on pagans, it is said that there was only a "disbelief tax". In addition, Mohammed accepted Moses and Jesus as the prophets who appeared ahead of himself, and he respected Christians and Judaists as "people of scripture". And it is said that the hegemonic people of later Islam gave Zoroastrians and Buddhists a similar treatment.