Last full day of the Oneness Asia Leaders Summit! Since I’ll be skipping the morning session tomorrow (and I believe most things are over tomorrow), I guess everyone will be spared from the daily recap. Unless I do a mega post, which I believe even my fingers don’t want me to do. But on to today’s recap!

Morning discussion session

Basically, the morning was the discussion session for the Finance committee. It was run by the dude that I saw giving orders the past few days, and unlike yesterday, it was completely in Japanese.

And I still managed to derail it for like 15 min.

Basically, the dude in charge (with the loud voice) is doing law, but apparently invests on his own too, so he was trying to explain the reading, which was an ADB paper on how the finance industry in Asia hasn’t caught up to the economy yet.

I sort of assumed it was talking about SEA, and kinda disagreed with the unspoken assumptions and lack of data and said so. It ended up with me speaking in English (he spent some time in America, apparently), and him replying in Japanese for the benefit of everyone.

It turns out it was on the whole of Asia, which I think is way too large a generalisation (a Vietnamese girl also said so), and I still harbour doubts about the validity of the argument, considering we don’t know the percentage of zero-leverage companies, the size of the Islamic Financial industry, state of government support, etc. And I said as much to him after the whole thing was over, during lunch hahaha.

He was a good sport about it though. Even though I told him that in AC, this would never pass, since they didn’t state the assumptions and the data was incomplete (in my opinion). Plus, if I generalised that much, I’m pretty sure I would be in trouble (even he agreed it was too broad). And then I told him his uni reminded me of AC HAHAHAHA. Anyone want to try and guess his uni?

The lunch bento. For some reason, I really like how the box looks, so I actually took a picture.

And this is the inside. The rice was cold, but the side were delicious!

Afternoon collaborative work

There was some limited-seating special talk in the afternoon, but all of us who didn’t go for it went for collaborative work instead. What that means is that we got mixed into groups and asks to summarise our opinions from the four sessions (Diplomacy, Environment, Resources, Education).

My group’s summary was: Problems are created due to differences/inequality – whether it’s in education (public vs private, or even the type of principles within private schools), Diplomacy, Resources (the have and the have-nots) and Environment. To solve this, we need to teach people how to create win-win situations that will eventually get rid of the differences.

Afternoon talk+Discussion

So the afternoon started with a talk by the expert – an investment manager at LaSalle. It was kinda like an introduction to the company and what investment management companies do, especially in real estate.

Personally, I thought the Q&A was more interesting. I asked about black swan events (if you haven’t, you should read the book), and apparently LaSalle expects a black swan event in the next 1-2 years.

And on the personal side, his advice to us was: work hard at what you like. Work hard at what’s in front of you. And then eventually, all those unconnected events in your life will be linked together and take on meaning.

Since we had a lot of time, there was another break and I went to talk to the lecturer with some others. Loud voice leader was there, and he was like “she’s good, she’s really good” *blush*

I think it’s cause of the morning HAHA. I’m totally not as smart please.

Anyway, we ended with a discussion on what you should invest in in the future, and when it was my group’s turn, I talked about IoT, of course. I was so excited that when it was my teammate’s turn, he was like “and it’s clear her passion is IoT” and the room laughed and all I could do was grin sheepishly cause it’s true.

The weirdest part was having an engineering student come up to me after that to ask about Industry 4.0 and IoT. I always thought that they would be more familiar with it than me, since most of it is very engineering based (and I did get mistaken for an engineering student at the trade fairs, until it was clear that I only knew the basics).

Finally, time for dinner, which was left to us to decide! M-Chan and I went to Tenjin Horumon, because I would not shut up about how good it is and she got really curious. There was actually supposed to be two other girls, but they ended up going with their groups.

This was one person’s portion!! I ended up having two bowls of rice and two bowls of miso soup with this. It’s way more than I usually eat, but just eating the meat alone would seem… strange. I felt like I should have rice with it.

And it turned out to be really great that it was just M-Chan and I, cause we got to talk a lot, and we discovered a mutual love for Shusaku Endo!!! So rare! And after dinner, we just sat around and talked about politics and country differences and such until the shops closed and we realised it’s time to go home!

So contrary to expectations, I got home the same time as the past few days. But this may have been the most fun day yet 😀