Great speech performance

Martin Luther King Jr's Day is celebrated on the third Monday of January in the US. He is best known for the name of reverend King and he was civil rights advocate for Black Americans in the US. He is also known for giving his historical famous "I have a Dream" speech. However, I haven't heard his speech before, so I watched it on You Tube. Then I was impressed by his great speech.

The first thing I can think of when thinking of historical great speech is Lincoln's and Kennedy' one. However, I cannot come up with Japanese people speech. In the next moment, one question went through my mind.

"Why are Japanese people poor at speech and presentation?"

I have been thinking the reason is just Japanese people are shy.

As I thought about it more deeply, I realized some other reasons.

I have three reasons why Japanese people are poor at speech and presentation.

One is a structure of Japanese that a conclusion comes last. The second is 

that Japanese are homogeneous race and they have a closed-off village society called "Mura-shakai" The third is that Japanese people receive no training of a speech in front of people.

On the contrary, the situation in the US is completely opposite.

As for the first reason of the structure of language, a predicate verb always come after a subject in English. Then adding some additional information such as time and place. It's a structure that it's easy to understand what you want to say first.

Meanwhile, Japanese people tend to put their conclusion in the end of their conversation because of Japanese language construction character.

It's a disadvantage in speech.

As for second reason, American society is multi-racial. So there are few common recognition between races. Therefore, American people have to say clearly what they want to say.  Meanwhile, Japan is single race country and Mura-shakai situation. It means that there are a lot of common recognition in there. So Japanese people tend to make the other person understand by A and UN breathing(A-UN no kokyu) instead of trying to explain with words.

As for third reason, Japanese people don't receive any training for speech in front of people at their home and school. By contrast, American people receive a lot of training since the time of elementary school. Even elementary school kids make a power point document and give presentations in front of classmates. In Japan, most of people start giving presentation when they start working in society.

I think that American people are not good at speech from the beginning; they just get used to the stage through their tons of training.

These are the reasons why Japanese people are poor at speech and presentation. I personally think that Japanese people are good at thinking deeply and in detail, but Japanese people lack of output skill.

If they will get this skill, it's a double advantage

Written in Jan 15th and revised Jan 27th 

Reference URL

Reverend King "I have a dream" speech in Japanese translation page
http://longtailworld.blogspot.com/2006/02/i-have-dream-speech.html

You Tube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs