“This is strange,” my daughter said as we sat in my father’s living room, “Why do Japanese need to find a Japanese in a remote foreign country?”
“I don’t know.” I felt a pang of guilt; I should know why.
We were watching TV in Japan and the program went like this. A Japanese comedian is assigned the task of locating a Japanese family that relocated to an unfamiliar foreign country, like Kazakhstan. He will go through a lot of trouble to travel to a hard-to-reach land and find the Japanese family. This travel part is full of mishaps and is kind of fun. Then, he knocks on the door of the family and finds the wife. He interviews her and learns how she met her husband. Then, he also interviews her kids and husband when they come home.
Strangely, they don’t talk much about the country where the family lives now. So, the purpose of the program is not to introduce you to a new country or new culture. The point seems to be that any Japanese living overseas would miss their friends and relatives back in Japan as well as tasty Japanese food. The audience in the studio who are watching the same video clip of the interview react with “Woo!” when they see the generous size of the family’s living room and utter a sympathetic “Ahh” when they learn about the local food that doesn’t look enticing at all.
It has the feel of a cult. Japan is best. You don’t want to live anywhere else but Japan! Few Japanese would question this. Like the salt that you put in soup to make the sweetness stand out, this underlying belief that Japanese have a unique and decidedly better way of living makes this program attractive to the Japanese audience.
I have to confess, however, by the second week, my discomfort and hesitation had disappeared and I’d joined the club. Normalcy is a very subjective thing.
My father had recorded some TV programs for me. Most of them were quiz programs on Japan. I especially enjoyed a program that shows how to improve your Haiku poems, flower arrangement and food arrangement. It’s all about how to do traditional Japanese things better. Comedians, actors, singers and authors are challenged with tasks, and get critiqued rather harshly and ranked according to their performance. I liked this program so much that I was deeply disappointed and even upset when I found out the program had been deleted from the DVR. I felt this urge to learn more about Japan. Where did this come from?
Another quiz show was all about Japanese history. It gives you enough clues to make you feel like you almost got it, even when you didn’t really. This program is designed with sophistication that mocks the contenders on the TV screen but pleases the audience in the living room. At first, I was a little hesitant to get caught up by the scheme, but soon felt comfortable and got sucked into the history fever. Here again, I became enthusiastic about Japanese history.
There’s nothing wrong about wanting to know more about your country. It would be great if you can be proud of your native country’s way of living and history. There seems to be no harm in this, except that the world that these TV programs represent is so closed and complete that they don’t encourage having any interest in other parts of the world.
This mentality creates a great challenge when we interact with non-Japanese. Most Japanese don’t know how to relate to non-Japanese, as they can’t find anything in common. Throughout their lives, what they have experienced was in Japan and about Japan. With little racial and cultural diversity, they’re accustomed to do the same things at the same time with little variation. Sure, there are good things about it, too. For example, there are very few picky eaters in Japan, as all children eat the same school lunch as their fellow classmates.
But this also creates an atmosphere where questioning the cultural assumptions can be taboo. So, we learn not to ask. When nobody questions, you don’t examine what you do and why you do it. So, when non-Japanese ask questions about Japan, we don’t know how to respond.
If you can’t find commonality with non-Japanese, and can’t explain what you know about Japan, you’re stuck.
In a seminar in New York for Japanese expats, I asked,
“If your eye met a stranger’s eye at a movie theater, what would you talk about with him?” One expat’s response was fanciful.
“I don’t have to think about that since that type of encounter will never happen to me.”
In the U.S., people get connected moment by moment by sharing individual experiences and thoughts. Our inability to relate to people who don’t know Japanese culture is isolating us and making us less effective in the world.
There is no silver bullet to boost our curiosity towards people in the world. But over the years, I’ve come to think that this is one of the keys: can we truly imagine other people’s love of their country?
Let’s start imagining that!