Are there any great speeches or public speakers from Japan?

Question

There are a lot of great speeches and speakers in American history. Here's a link to some.

http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/previous.htm

I've been studying Japanese for a while now, and I've started to wonder if there are any great speeches that come from Japan.

Answer 1

Good question. I cannot come up with any.

In Japan eloquence is not considered a virtue as it is in Western countries, not to mention the fact that there seems to be no professional speech writer in Japan. So there's none that the Japanese will collectively remember as the most great speech in its history, like Sir Martin Luther King's for American people.

The only one that comes to my mind right now is geki-bun by Yukio Mishima that he announced just before his harakiri suicide, but it's not considered great at all.

Answer 2

Japan has no tradition about speech like in USA. The culture and politics and religion are totally different from American ones.

People generally know that politicians, advocators and preachers are all suspicious and opportunists even mass-communication too.

If you really want to study Japan and Japanese, change view point better.