Ethan Saw Awarded the 3rd Best Speaker Prize at 2017 Kyushu Debate Open

On 19-20 August 2017, together with some of my debating mates from Capstone Prep Hong Kong, I went along to Fukuoka, Japan to participate in the 2017 Kyushu Debate Open held at the Kyushu University Ito Campus.

Kyushu Debate Open was co-sponsored by the Faculty of Languages & Cultures, Kyushu University and International Society for Teaching Debate. It was supported by Kyushu University, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan and also the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.

I was honored to be paired up with Mr Harry Stovin-Bradford, the former President of the Cambridge Union Society as a Pro-Am team in this debate tournament (open category). After 6 rounds of debate, we managed to break into the Quarter Finals. We faced Japan’s best debaters, Northeast Asia’s reigning best university speakers and debaters who are very experienced. We debated the following motions:

• This House regrets the media emphasis on the gender of successful female professionals, i.e. female presidents;
• In Liberal Democracies where Catholicism is a prominent religion, This House Believes That governments should mandate the Catholic Church to denounce and remove versus that communities use to justify discrimination and violence;
• This House would disallow the practice of naturalising foreign athletes to serve on national sports teams;
• This House believes that the international community should abandon attempts to denuclearise North Korea;
• In times of crisis, This House believes that the state should withhold information that may damage public confidence;
• This House would permit employers to fire employees who publicly demonstrate politically extremist ideologies.

Even though we did not succeed to break through to the semi-finals, we were proud that we had faced the challenge head on in the spirit of swinging high and never being satisfied with anything less. We both had lots of fun and it was a memorable experience for us.

There were 144 participants, mostly university students from Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Philippines and Malaysia. For individual speaker score, I was ranked number 15 overall. And, I was awarded the 3rd Best Speaker Prize in the Rookie/Novice Category.

This was indeed a great experience for my foray into international British Parliamentary debating.

Well done to Ethan!