A Few Links

I thought I'd start the week with a couple of links to articles I noticed today about other countries and cultures. The post about the Canadian mediator is in the works; I couldn't get to it this weekend because we had guests.

What happened to the Romanian Orphans is a new series that starts today on the BBC website: young adults who grew up in the notorious orphanages under Ceausescu tell their stories. A friend of my sister-in-law adopted two of these children, and I remember hearing her tell the story of going to get them; the conditions under which they and thousands of others were living, and the multiple medical and psychological problems she and her husband were coping with to try to help the children adjust. This was a brother and sister who had been confined to a single cage-like crib for the first two years of their lives. They had invented their own language and were unable to speak or relate normally to other humans, and one fo them had serious medical problems. The last I heard, they were doing well, but this series spurs me on to check. of course, many of these children never recovered and were unable to live "normal" lives. But many others have. I am looking forward to reading the series because I know there will be examples of the resiliance of the human spirit as well as stories of people who opened their hearts to help these children.

Another article speaks about racism in Japan. If you go there, take a look at the two photo-essays in the right-hand sidebar, one about a geisha in Kyoto, and the other about homelessness in Osaka.

Ethiopia, like so many African countries, is being devastated by AIDS and increasing numbers of children are becoming orphans. This article about European adoption of Ethiopian children tells about a Belgian couple; there are other related links in the sidebar, including a video about why Ethiopia allows foreign adoptions.

Comments

[butuki]

I'm going to have to take a deep breath and will myself to speak calmly about the articles about Japan. Such articles are so common that I often wonder if places like Japan can ever receive a fair assessment in the western media, without seeming too similar and as modern as the societies in which the articles are written, thereby depriving the publications of the strange and exotic aura that has been painted around Asia for such a long time.

I've been living in Japan most of my life, as a foreigner. I speak the language fluently and in many ways think much like a Japanese, so I believe my perspective on this country tends to offer far deeper insight than any foreign visitor can ever hope to attain by just passing through.

There are problems in Japan, some of them quite profound as the artcle suggests. Often I encounter notable episodes that involve my not being Japanese and it is quite discouraging, to say the least, when people make me feel that I am not welcome or even dirty. Quite a few politicians openly make derogatory statements about foreigners and there still is a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of legal representation.

But looking at the people daily and the progress that the country has made since I was a boy I think Doudou Diene's assessment of the situation is deeply misinformed. I doubt that he can speak Japanese or that he has spent any more time in the country than the 9 days reported in the article. I think it is ignorant and arrogant to assume that you can put your finger on a country's character just by visiting it for a few days.

Anyone who has lived in the country for a while and has made an effort to learn the language, get to know Japanese people, understand and employ Japanese customs and mannerisms, and taken the time to bridge the universal sense of "haji" (or public shame or embarrassment, which are one and the same in Japan) would know that for the great part the majority of Japanese are not racist at all, but merely very cautious and uncomfortable in situations that require thinking and feeling outside the established and age-old ethos that has developed here in isolation for thousands of years. Most Japanese are still mildly terrified when a foreigner approaches them, not because they think the foreigner is unsavory, but because they have absolutely no idea what to do when confronted by alternative customs and a language that is very different from their own, and don't want to be put in the position of offending. And in Japan saving face, both for yourself and for the other person, is everything. A foreigner will for the most part act completely outside this ethos, often coming in direct conflict with it. Until you understand that and why it happens you will never understand how Japanese think and feel.

I feel that Doudou Diene's assessment of Japan and his forthcoming recommendation to the United Nations does a great disservice to the Japanese and to the diversity of cultures around the world, in that it assumes that everyone operates under the same outlook and that only western concepts of ethos are to be respected. Using this same way of assessing a culture I think most westerners would be appalled by the conclusions that Japanese or Chinese or Koreans might make of places like America and Britain, but of course no one in the west takes these conclusions seriously, simply because they were not propounded by the westerners themselves.

One has to be very careful when reading articles that make sweeping statements about a society (in the same way that people caution me not to make sweeping statements about the States) as well as articles, like the one about the geisha, that cater to cliches seeded in the society in which they were written.

The geisha has captured western imaginations for hundreds of years, and there is a great misconception that geisha are a deep part of everyday Japanese culture. For some reason many journalists come to these shores and become enamored with such anachronisms, masking a picture of a modern Japan with a Japan long gone. Geisha exist in miniscule enclaves in the historically reconstructed tourist towns of Kyoto and such. In every day life throughout Japan most people have never even seen a geisha. I certainly never have, and I've traveled throughout Japan, to places that most Japanese have not even visited, and certainly most foreigners have never been. A journalist visits Japan for a few days, naturally gravitating toward Kyoto, sees the culture of the geisha there, and brings back stories of "exotic", "anti-feminist" Japan. But it is a lie. If I mentioned this article to any of my Japanese women friends they would laugh in derision, because their world is nothing at all like that described by the article.

The homeless situation in Japan is bad. People have a greatly dismissive attitude about the homeless (mostly older men who came to cities from the countryside to work as itinerant workers and since then lost their jobs as companies downsized) and there is a great sense of shame in a society that deeply values its sense of "konjo" and "yamato-damashi", "diligence/ toughness" and "Puritan ethic". Men who have no families and don't work are considered the lowest of the low and therefore these men have little recourse to get out of their situations. The government does little to help; in fact it spends millions on finding ways to clear them out of the train stations, the parks, the riversides, and the entrances to office buildings at night, going so far as to installing bollards and spikes in the empty spaces in train stations or putting in baffles in station benches so that a person cannot lie down. Homeless people are routinely booed off trains, people shouting "You smell! Get off the train!"

Japan is as complicated and as gray as any other culture. I think it is high time that those people who make such evaluations first take a good, honest look at themselves first before making blanket statements of other societies.

[beth]

Thank you, Butuki, for this long and careful response. The reason I posted these links was not because I agreed with the content of the articles (as I'm sure you know) but to try to elicit first-person commentary from readers who know these cultures so that we can all learn something more accurate and profound than what is reported in mainstream journalism. Of course your last sentence is true. But it's unlikely that's going to happen, given the way journalism works today. For that reason blogs are a very important way for people to increase their own knowledge, and I think we need to be more intentional about using them that way.

[Marja-Leena]

We had a Japanese exchange student living with us for about six months, attending our daughters' high school. She loved the freedom here that she experienced for the year she was here. We heard that all the students experienced another culture shock going home, both boys and girls, yet slowly all these young people create change back home. Women are getting more freedom and having careers.

Our eldest daughter also spent time as an exchange student in Japan, in a smaller city, attending a women's college. She liked the working class family she lived with, whereas another girl who stayed with the mayor's family was treated like a servant. The college had elderly male professors who expected a meek traditional role of the students, which the Canadian girls resisted a bit!

We also have several Japanese friends who emigrated here, several are artists and they are very wonderful and affectionate people. One of them, when he goes "home" to visit, feels that he is ostracized because of being an artist, being a bit "different" and leaving Japan.

So. like Butuki said, I agree that there are no "blanket statements" to be made by non-Japanese when even the individual experience of Japanese people varies just as it does for us Westerners.

[Marja-Leena]

We had a Japanese exchange student living with us for about six months, attending our daughters' high school. She loved the freedom here that she experienced for the year she was here. We heard that all the students experienced another culture shock going home, both boys and girls, yet slowly all these young people create change back home. Women are getting more freedom and having careers.

Our eldest daughter also spent time as an exchange student in Japan, in a smaller city, attending a women's college. She liked the working class family she lived with, whereas another girl who stayed with the mayor's family was treated like a servant. The college had elderly male professors who expected a meek traditional role of the students, which the Canadian girls resisted a bit!

We also have several Japanese friends who emigrated here, several are artists and they are very wonderful and affectionate people. One of them, when he goes "home" to visit, feels that he is ostracized because of being an artist, being a bit "different" and leaving Japan.

So. like Butuki said, I agree that there are no "blanket statements" to be made by non-Japanese when even the individual experience of Japanese people varies just as it does for us Westerners.