VOL. 1, NO. 3

OCTOBER 25, 2016

THE

NMUN KOBE TIMES
Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

With the Fall Comes Highly Spirited Delegates
More Confident and Eager to Represent Their Countries

As they wrapped up their Position Papers(PP), would-be participants in the upcoming
National Model United Nations (NMUN) to beheld in Kobe strengthened their positions as
representatives of six countries of Australia,
New Zealand, Ghana and Serbia, as well as
Somalia and Uganda. At the third NMUN session
held at the Kobe City University of ForeignStudies (KCUFS) on October 15, 2016, 36students displayed their passion to serve theircountries, as they grew more confident torepresent their countries with the knowledge
and policy ideas they nurtured over the last
three months.
The day’s class opened with a lecture by
Nina Nomura, a delegate of Somalia (UnitedNations High Commissioner for Refugees:UNHCR), who is a sophomore at KCUFS’s

English Studies Department, on how to make aspeech. In the NMUN, delegates make speeches
when setting agendas, participating in formal
debates and voting.
Nomura explained four steps that should
be taken in a speech. Firstly, delegates should
explain the purpose of the speech—how thetopic is essential to the committee. Second, theyshould introduce the countries’ policies. Third
they should provide background or evidence ofthe problem, and last, they should briefly
rephrase the points they mentioned. It is
important that the delegates should talk not only
from their country’s position, but also fromglobal viewpoints. Delegates also need to follow
certain protocols when they speak; start with“Thank you honorable chair and distinguisheddelegates;” and end with “Thank you.”(to be continued to the next page)VOL. 1, NO. 3

OCTOBER, 25 2016
(Continued from the first page)
Nomura also gave examples of how to speak in frontof people. Speakers should have a confident andsophisticated attitude. She recommends that they look intoeyes of other delegates, use gestures and control their
voices by changing tone or tempo to attract attention.
“Take the chance to express your ideas. If you do not takean action, nothing will be changed in your committee,”
Nomura said. After her presentation, all the delegatespracticed their speeches for 20 minutes before moving
on to the next presentation.

Koyo Hayakawa, a delegate of Uganda (United Nations Economic andSocial Council: ECOSOC) who is a senior at KCUFS’s International Studies Department, spoke on
how to make a Draft Resolution (DR). A DR consists of two parts: preambular clauses, which address someproblems that call for actions, and operative clauses, which show concrete plans for the problems
mentioned in preambular clauses. According to Hayakawa, good DRs generally contain four elements:
references to international agreements and past resolutions in preambular clauses; references to factual
situations or incidents using a 5W1H framework or some other logical progression in operative clauses;
sets of preambular and operative clauses that are connected with each other; and the inclusion of special
participles (preambular clauses) and present tense verbs (operative clauses) at the beginning, such as“Recalling” and “Urges.”
While Working Papers (WP) can be changed freely,
there is a limitation in changing a DR. Only operative
clauses can be modified—in a process called “anamendment,” which is made to strengthen consensus on aresolution—and delegates need signatures of sponsors(authors of the DR) and signatories (supporters of the DR)
to do so. When all of them agree, the amendment is calleda friendly amendment and the DR is amended. If evenone of them is opposed, it is called an unfriendly
amendment and will be voted on after debate closes.
During the amendment process, which takes
place between the end of the third day and fourth day,delegates have to be conscious of what is going on because theirpolicy may be removed from the DR by other delegates who try to change
clauses in order to make the DR more suitable for their country. Hayakawa suggested thatdelegates try to talk other delegates into favoring their ideas, or to put their ideas into other DRs, in orderto keep their policies alive.
The conference moves to voting on DRs after: 1) exhaustion of speakers’ list (all the delegates in thelist finish their speeches)/closure of debate, 2) consideration of unfriendly amendments (speeches by twodelegates each in favor of and against the amendment followed by a placard vote), 3) a procedural vote on
consideration of any motions for a division of the question, followed by a substantive vote to accept or
reject the division of the question if the motion passes, and 4) consideration of the methods of voting.
There are three ways to vote; placard vote, roll call vote and vote by acclamation. Placard votemeans that delegates vote by showing their placards to be counted. Roll call vote means that when adelegate’s country’s name is called, the delegate will express his or her opinion by saying either “Yes”, “No”
or “Abstention.” Vote by acclamation means to pass a draft resolution by consensus. About 80 percent ofresolutions passed at the UN are adopted by consensus.
2VOL. 1, NO. 3

OCTOBER, 25 2016

After practicing a mock vote, the delegates broke into thefour committee groups and discussed the policies of thecountry they each represented, putting forward their ideas foreach agenda using supporting reasons from their PP which
they wrote for all to see on the white boards. Their mentors
and the head delegates gave advice on the ideas presented tohelp them develop their WP policies.
In the General Assembly (General Assembly: GA),
their positions were varied according to each country. Thedelegates of Somalia, for example, emphasized the fight against
terrorism. They stressed the importance of monitoring illicit
trafficking of nuclear material, which can be transformed into
nuclear weapons. The delegates of New Zealand supported theArms Trade Treaty (ATT) andpointed out that the UN should not overlook the illicit transfer of arms to non-state groups and should add
SALW (Small Arms and Light Weapons) to the UN Register of Conventional Arms.
In the ECOSOC, delegates tried to help each other by finding out other countries’ contradictions ora lack of information in their policies. For instance, regarding the idea of the delegates of Somalia to solve
domestic problems through education by the teacher-training program undertaken by the African Union
Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), it was pointed out that the approach lacks a universal point of view.
Nanako Ueda, the committee’s Assistant Director and the group’s mentor, suggested the delegates watch
for regional platforms on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR, see “Did you know?” below), the other agenda, inorder to catch up with the latest developments.
In the SC, the delegate of Japan emphasized empowerment of local women, citing a discussion inWAW! Tokyo 2015: World Assembly for Women, held in August 2015. Regarding the situation in North
Korea, the NZ delegate mentioned the importance of reinforcing international frameworks to control andstop proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
In the UNHCR, the delegates of Uganda, Ghana and New Zealand called for education programs fordisplaced children, while their Australian counterpart urged the establishment of mental health careprograms to help mentally scarred child refugees. A delegate of Serbia presented a housing construction
project financed by the EU, effectively utilizing unused land to provide shelters for refugees. It would also
create jobs for refugees, she said.
All the delegates turned in their final draft PP by the end of the day. The delegates were assigned toprepare speeches for agenda setting and to formulate WP ideas, two for each topic, for the next session to
be held on October 22.
~Did you know?~
Disaster risk reduction (DRR) is “the concept and practice of reducing disaster risks throughsystematic efforts to analyze and reduce the causal factors of disasters.” (http://www.unisdr.org/)
To implement this goal, the United Nations Secretariat for International Strategy for DisasterReduction (UNISDR) was established in 2002 based on the Yokohama Strategy and Plan of Action
for a Safer World that was adopted at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction held inYokohama in 1994.
Since the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake on January 17, 1995, which killed more than
6,400 people, Hyogo Prefecture and Kobe City have been at the forefront in research, education andcooperation on DRR. The International Recovery Platform (IRP) was launched in Kobe to support
the implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action adopted in the 2nd World Conference onDisaster Reduction held in the city in 2005. In 2007, UNISDR opened one of its offices in the city.
On 23 November, UN Forum on DRR will be held as part of NMUN’s opening events.
3

VOL. 1, NO. 3

OCTOBER, 25 2016

We found some students from overseas among the delegates at NMUN. Let’s’ listen to their stories
about what brought them to KCUFS and NMUN.

From Germany
The three German students Anna Deekeling, Nora
Halsternberg, and Kjell Schwarz are exchange students fromthe Modern East Asia Department at the University ofDuisburg-Essen, Germany. They have been studying East
Asia as their major, and started their exchange term in thisuniversity from this semester. During the upcoming NMUN,
they will be playing the role of the head delegates of Japan.
Anna talked about her interest in Japan since she was living
in a city in Germany where there is a Japanese district. Kjell
started to study Japanese in 2010 and decided to study
abroad in order to improve his language skill. They enrolled
From left, Kjell, Nora, Anna
in the Japanese language program at KCUFS, and additionallyapplied to participate in the NMUN as a big opportunity to learn more about Japan and interact ininternational society as representatives of Japan. Nora told us that she found it difficult to do research inorder to fill in her PP since she can find few sources in either English or German. It is already hard toexpress their policies and opinions of a country they are not very familiar with, let alone in front of thelarge group of Japanese students who are participating in the NMUN. However they are looking forward togaining some knowledge about Japanese politics, and to debate and negotiate with people from different
cultural backgrounds. (Yuzuri Funabashi)

From China
Dai Danyan is a first-year graduate student at KCUFS, studying in the
English Studies Program (Interpreting and Translation Unit). She is from
Shaoxing in Zhejiang Province in China and has studied Japanese for twoyears at a university in China. As her dream was to improve her Japanese
language skill and to experience Japanese society and culture, shetransferred to the Department of English Education at the KansaiUniversity of International Studies as a third–year student. After
graduation, she decided to move onto the master’s program at KCUFS tostudy translation between English and Japanese.
When Dai happened to be in the same class with some of the NMUN
veterans in the previous year, she was fascinated by their excellence in English. That
motivated her participation in the upcoming conference. Through this opportunity, she hopes toimprove not only her English skill, but also self-management skill in order to overcome difficulties. “Irealized that I need more time to study for the NMUN than I had expected,” Dai says.
She will be representing New Zealand (SC). "I share information with my partner more than once aweek, and as I’ve heard before, I found that Japanese are really good at cooperating with others." (HonokaMorita)
Staff Writers for Vol. 1, No. 3
Takahiro Kamo

Hiroka Abe

Honoka Morita

Nanami Takano

Sae Oishi

Shione Shiraishi

Tomomi Yamazaki

Yuzuri Funabashi

Hiroko Shiotani

Ayami Tomae4