Many people were warmed by the recent two-minute video provided by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo on Nov. 12 of Ambassador Caroline Kennedy's message to the people of Japan (www.youtube.com/watch?v=85PdDZ4xCvs) As of the time of this writing, nearly 40,000 people have viewed on YouTube this well-made video that is subtitled in Japanese and includes numerous photos and other images of her enjoying her previous two visits to Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as examples of official and people-to-people engagement in action. The themes of friendship, cooperation and mutual learning were the right notes to hit as she got ready to depart for Tokyo.
Fifty years ago this week, her father, President John F. Kennedy, had also prepared a two-minute message for the people of Japan that he intended to broadcast using the then-state of the art technology of Telstar 2, a communications satellite that had been launched on May 7, 1963. Unfortunately, the message, to be delivered on Nov. 23 in Japan, was not broadcast as scheduled due to his assassination.
Kennedy video-taped his remarks in the Rose Garden, which the stylish Jacqueline Kennedy had helped redesign, on Nov. 20. He began them, almost gleefully, by mentioning the pleasure he got by being able to deliver those remarks via this new technology for the first time across the Pacific, an ocean "which has appeared to many as a barrier rather than as a bridge" and noted this technology was an "indicator of how shrinking our world is and how important it is to establish the most intimate of relations."