Year 2016 was a presidential election year. One morning, I turned my car radio on while driving my daughter to school. A lady on radio said,
“If Trump becomes a president, Miley Cyrus will vomit and then move to Canada. But first, she vomits!”
She emphasized that point.
My daughter chuckled in the back. The radio personality continued.
“I don’t like Miley Cyrus, so I’d like her to move to Canada with Trump.”
I cracked up with this one.
Fast forward one year, and it’s now May, 2017. I’d hoped that the U.S. would be on a more positive path by now. However, some people still tell me,
“I want to move to Canada, but it’s too cold up there!”
One of my friends says,
“But it’s not that easy. Uprooting your family is a big deal.”
I agree with her, but the fact that we can even consider to move to a different country to avoid domestic political turmoil illustrates one big difference between the U.S. and Japanese mindsets. Most Japanese who live in Japan would not even dream about moving to a foreign country for that reason. A few Japanese may toy with the idea of spending their retirement years in Australia, for instance, to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle. However, Japanese who actually spend their retirement years abroad are extremely rare. Let alone families with children who want to educate their children in Japan.
The biggest barrier is language. Some Americans told me after they return from a trip to Japan,
“They don’t speak English!” I thought it was common sense that Japanese speak Japanese, and Chinese speak Chinese and French speak French. Yet, Americans expect everyone to speak English. I find it a bit amusing that “Americans” speak “English” instead of “American”. A high school student who was in the US from England once told me in effect, “How arrogant my English teacher is to correct my British English. Americans should learn the language from us!” Well, her English teacher wouldn’t agree with her, but it is true that American’s attitude towards language can rub other people in the world the wrong way.
In any case, there is no other country where Japanese is spoken as a national language, and this poses quite a challenge to the Japanese who consider relocating overseas.
Japanese attachment to Japanese food can also be a high hurdle to overcome. And it isn’t just about the taste, but even how the food is served. When I have sushi at a mid-range sushi restaurant in the U.S., I’m distracted by the sounds that servers make with plates and tea cups. At one time, I asked for an extra plate, and here comes the waitress holding a plate vertically and then slamming it on the table. The plate didn’t break but it did break dance for several seconds as I watched it, sighed, and ended the dance. One waitress put a new plate of sushi pieces on top of the plate that I put aside so that she could clear it. And that lukewarm tea. You really can’t cleanse your pallet with it. These things won’t happen in Japan where “customer is god” and all the cultural codes are shared and followed.
“Geography is history.” I once heard a professor declare. Geography also shapes people’s mindset. Living in a nation of islands that are located far from the continent has a great impact on Japanese mindset. Japanese know that Japan is part of Asia geographically, but, we tend to feel somewhat distant from other countries in the region.
Being a small country also has influence on Japanese mindset. Over the years, I have spoken with a number of Japanese business clients who suggested global warming as a topic for small talk. And each time, I have had to explain that actually it’s a politically contentious subject and that they may want to avoid talking about it. I also recommended that they use “climate change” instead of “global warming” as there is no consensus yet in the U.S. that the earth is warming up. When my clients hear that, they are speechless. They wanted to talk about climate change, as it is of global interest and they assumed they could connect with people from other countries discussing a common interest of all human beings.
When something happens to others in a small racially homogenous country where a single language is spoken most of the time, you feel as if it had happened to you. When Japanese see on TV the houses destroyed or people stranded by a typhoon or a guerrilla storm (a huge amount of rainfall in a short time), they feel it as their own issue. And they developed a consensus a long time ago that the global warming is the culprit of these natural disasters.
Japan is almost as large as the state of California and 126 million people live in that space. Japan has a small amount of land and a long coastline where people’s lives are susceptible to natural disasters. On the other hand, the U.S. has a vast land and limited coastal borders, and while Americans feel for those people who have been hit by a hurricane or tornado, those locations where the events occur are often not near where we live. I suspect this may be one of the reasons why Americans have various views on climate and its impact on human life.
Common sense is only common within a country where people share geographical environment. This may be an overstatement, however, there’s some truth in it. Geographically framed common sense makes the world interesting and challenging at the same time.