On the evening of Sept. 10, I watched a NHK "Special" television program titled "The Ultimate Choice: Michael Sandel's global classroom." The theme of the 75-minute program was who should pick up the bill for reconstructing areas devastated by natural calamities like earthquakes and hurricanes, and especially compensation for disaster victims.
The moderator of the program was Dr. Michael J. Sandel, a political science professor at Harvard University whose classes have been attended by more than 1,000 students, a record high for any chair at that university. The transcript of his lectures called "Justice" has been translated into Japanese, making his name well known in this country.
Joining Sandel were eight students each from Harvard, Fudan University in Shanghai and postgraduate schools in Tokyo, and they had heated discussions on reconstruction of the northern Japanese regions hit hard by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, and the ethics related to it.