VISITORS   IN   FREE   MOZAMBIQUE
First of all I must thank
FRELIMO people to have permitted, made arrangements
and thus helped my travelling in your country of Mozambique, as a photographer
and as a member of the Japan
Anti-Apartheid Committee.
Inside your country, I saw
many fighting, working, and
studying people in many
shambas or in bases, schools
and in hospitals. Your activities are almost the same as
those in your comrades' country, Guine Bissau, where I
similarly visited in 1971.
I must say I am deeply impressed with the progress of
your struggle, and I did see
with my own eyes how Portuguese have been exploiting your villages. And the
cruel forced labour, which
resemble gum-juice squeezed
out from cuts of gum trees,
makes us realize the figure
of imperialism and colonialism.
In Japan, we have a proverb, «One made a Buddhist image, but he forgot the
spirit   ol   Buddha». This
means that a finely carved
sculpture of Buddha can hardly appeal to the people if
the carver himself has forgotten   the   most   important
We must
learn from
the spirit of
your struggle
Tadahiro Ogawa, a Japanese photographer
and anti-apartheid activist, visited liberated
areas of Cabo Delgado
Province from April 22
to May 5.  He wrote
for "Mozambique
Revolution":
thing, in this case the spirit
of Buddha, which is the very
motive and element of the
whole work.
Here in Mozambique, the
«Buddhist image» is seemingly rather small. But great
and strong is your spirit.
Your schools are built under
the trees and have hardly any
big classrooms. Desks and
chairs are made by the bran
ches of trees. But your
schools have much greater
spirit and more essential spirit than ours. Your hospitals also teach us the way
hospitals should be based on
humanism.
It is easy for you to understand this, if you have a look
at the problems of pollution
in the so-called advanced
countries.     For instance, we
Japanese established big industries and our economy
seems to be considerably powerful, but we have lost some
very important things such
as clean air, healthy environment to live in, and so forth.
So I think there are many
things which careful observers must learn from the
«spirit» of your nation-building. (And, if I may add,
socialists in this regard make
no exception; they will also
learn a lot). We must study
the great spirit of your struggle which shows us the essence
of matters.
Lastly may I again extend my
thanks to the Party and all
the people of Mozambique.
I think it is my duty to go
back and tell the Japanese
people exactly what I saw in
this part of the world, especially how everyone was
committed to the construction
of a new order by revolu-
tionally changing their own
ways of life.