Sample Chapters
Conversations for a Global Child
by Damian Rentoule
A child needs to know themselves before they can know the rest of the world. This is where we start.
Introduction
Raising children for a global world? Where do we start? Just the act of raising them is tricky, in Japan, and everywhere else. If the experience has been any more or less challenging in past generations, we will never know. Memory is an unreliable friend so we can never really trust our perceptions of bygone days. What we do know for sure, however, is that the experience of raising children now is very different from anything experienced by past generations. Yet through a combination of doggedly clinging to what we know well and tentatively experimenting with new ideas, we forge ahead, raising our children the best we can. It is an experiment, one we will never be able to replicate, preparing them for a future we cannot, yet, see.
A newborn child, unfortunately, is not accompanied by an instruction manual. We are lucky babies are not, as who would we trust with the authority to dictate such a deeply personal task as raising a child? Even if we were to find someone with whom we could trust the directions, from the time the child is born to the time they leave home, much will have changed with the world and surely the child-rearing manual would be out of date. Can we use what we already know, from our experiences in our own lives to prepare our children for an uncertain future?
When it comes to raising our children, we trust our hearts, receive advice critically and do our best to face the challenges. To complicate matters, however, just as we are getting used to raising a baby, we need to adjust to raising a toddler, then adjust to raising a child in kindergarten, a child in primary school and so on until one day that child, thinking they are all grown up, leaves the nest and goes out into the world to make their own life. Then we need to adjust to being without them. These changes are constant and are the central challenge of raising a child. Three types of changes confront us in our journey:
Our children keep changing: The first problem with raising a child is that their developmental needs are forever changing. It would be much easier if they just stayed the same age. You are always getting used to one stage of their growth and development and they slip into the next. Just ask anyone who has sent their child to the first day of school. I don’t know how many times I have heard parents say something like, ‘I can’t believe she’s starting school already. Where did the time go?’ Whether it is kindergarten, primary school, middle school, high school or university, the emotion is always the same at each new step, especially as each step makes us feel older and time is never kind. There is no denying that. The changes are swift and unrelenting and you have to work hard to keep knowing your child throughout this journey.
Our world is not the same as our child’s: The second problem of raising a child is that we occupy a different place in the world than our child. This is more complex than the often quoted and potentially misleading notion of the generation gap. The idea of a generation gap suggests that there is a group of people linked by birth dates who somehow similarly see the world. This makes our world appear much simpler than it could ever possibly be. It is difficult enough to try and understand the world as it is today for ourselves, let alone how it must be for a child. The world of a child is distinctly different from the world of an adult. This adds a layer of complexity to trying to figure out what our child’s world will be like tomorrow, next year or in twenty years if we do not even really know what it is like today.
Our world keeps changing: This leads us to the third problem of raising a child. Not only are our children not the same this year as they were last year, the world today is not the same as it was last year or the year before. We are raising our children to be safe and happy in a world, the nature of which we are all hopelessly ill-equipped to predict.
As parents, we are not able to stop the changes. They are a fact of life. However, we can help our children to understand themselves and their world, to develop the skills and mindsets to inquire independently, so they will be able to reach their understandings. We will never be able to tell them everything they need to know but we can help them learn how to think.
All three challenges are experienced by parents all over the world, across all cultures. However, each challenge is encountered by parents in unique ways and this is no different in Japan. These challenges are not problems to be solved. They are our reality. This is how we experience the world. These are just ways of considering the world that can help us when making decisions about how we raise our children.
The ideas here are presented within the Japanese context, however, like any ideas, they are transferable across cultural contexts with a dash of imagination and a touch of critical thought. The discussion will move between the school and the home as some of the lessons we have learned in school may help at home, and vice versa.
Many of my experiences both at school and at home that challenged me to reconsider my perspectives and my identity, happened in Japan so I will start with a brief portion of my story from this part of the world. As you will see, my story has an oddly large amount of change and not-knowing in it.
First landing in Japan in 1991 I knew so little about life here in Japan that it is hard to imagine now how I survived. It is not just that I knew little about Japanese culture, I knew next to nothing about culture itself. Likewise, it is not just that I knew so little about the Japanese language, I knew so little about the nature of language. I was a twenty-one-year-old university graduate without a clue, although I had no way of knowing that at the time. How do you know what you don’t know? Compounding my problems when I arrived in Japan, I knew little about myself as I had never been forced to notice what made me, me. I had not considered the complexity of identity until I was forced to do so in the face of other ways of seeing the world. It seemed like I had been in a bubble, a transparent barrier between myself and the rest of the world, but not by any means an impenetrable one. It was more a barrier of habit and in this sense, one created by myself and the familiar ways of my existence. Upon arriving in Japan, I found these barriers breaking down, rapidly.
This breaking down of barriers between people is the essence of change in our increasingly interconnected, global world. I think of global-mindedness as a deep awareness of the connections between a person and the multiple layers of community to which we all belong. I think it also involves the willingness to act for the benefit of others in these connected communities. I believe that this is the mindset our children need to develop to be prepared for both the challenges and the opportunities they will be facing when they move out into this increasingly interconnected world.
Global-mindedness is a deep awareness of the connections between a person and the multiple layers of community to which we all belong.
Using this definition of global-mindedness to help explore what it means to raise a child for an uncertain future, the following pages contain suggestions for you about raising your child for this global world. The ideas presented are taken from my journey of getting to know myself through my experiences over the years in Japan and other unfamiliar places. Also included are a few stories from my school life that have stuck in my mind that I hope will be helpful for you. This book is about conversations with your child and I hope the stories model the approach that you can take with your child to help develop global-mindedness. You need to keep getting to know them and they need to keep getting to know you. Your children will soon have to navigate the complexities of this new world, searching for the always elusive ideals of success and happiness and knowing themselves better is the most important step on this path. Parents, you can help them find their path.
Much of the advice here comes from my experience working in schools over the last twenty years in Perth, Brunei Darussalam, Tokyo, and Hawaii. As a teacher or principal, you spend a lot of time talking to children and their families about their hopes and their aspirations for the future as well as their worries and concerns for the upcoming journey, the struggles of their day-to-day lives. I have included in my suggestions some of the common issues that have come up through these conversations about raising children in a changing world. I hope they are of some use.
As for me, it may help you to understand some of my ideas if you know a little more of my story. A person’s history can never be separated from their perspectives and my childhood played a key role in preparing me to be very excited but utterly lost upon my arrival in Japan at the age of twenty-one.
Born in landlocked Canberra, Australia, in 1969, I saw just under two months of the 1960s, but unfortunately don’t remember a great deal of what must have been an interesting decade. As a child, you generally don’t have much control over the direction of your life, but when I was five, my parents moved the family north to live in the subtropical state of Queensland in a city named the Gold Coast. Children are rarely openly grateful to their parents for anything when they are young, but I recognized early that moving to a warm place by the ocean had been a good idea. In these early years, I realized that people in Canberra and those on the Gold Coast were different somehow so this was part of my early questioning of national identity although at the time I did not realize that this was the question I was asking.
I grew up in this coastal city in the 1970s and 80s, roaming the streets freely, frequenting the beaches with a severe sunburn until I was fifteen years old. During these sunburnt years, I developed a love of surfing and the ocean which has not left me yet, but I wear a hat now, in and out of the water. One of life’s late lessons. These formative years, Primary and Middle School especially, have a major impact on who we come to see ourselves to be. Most of this book is about the conversations you can have with your children during these years to help them explore their identities which are rapidly taking shape. To help them get to know themselves better and in doing so help them to make more meaningful connections with others.
At fifteen, I discovered the world beyond the beach. My parents moved to Papua New Guinea and through my final two years of high school and four years of university, I spent a couple of months a year in this amazing country. I can’t even begin to describe how different it was from everything I had known. These travelling years were the catalyst, I think, for my future wanderings. These began on a surfing adventure in Indonesia that led to a nearly penniless, twenty-one-year-old, monolingual and generally clueless university graduate arriving in Japan, still sunburnt from Indonesia.
At the time, I intended to stay in Japan for only a couple of months but ended up returning to the Gold Coast eighteen months later. The extended stay had much to do with the meeting of the person, a resident of Aichi Prefecture, Japan, who was to later become my wife. My first daughter was born on the Gold Coast and my second daughter was born in Toyota City where I worked on the Japan Exchange Teaching program, my second journey to Japan, although it wouldn’t be my last. This was a great time in my life. I loved the Japanese middle schools and learned much about Japan and myself. From this point in time as my daughters had arrived on the scene, I can only recall where I was or what I was doing by thinking about their ages. A parent’s life is their child’s story.
One daughter started school in Perth, Australia. One started in Brunei Darussalam. One graduated from a school in Tokyo. One from Hawaii. Now, my wife and I live daughterless in Hiroshima as they pursue their own lives. That was twenty years of my life and it went by in a flash. Life is like that as we all slowly realize. Looking back at the past fifty years I would say, unreservedly, that the greatest joy in my life has been raising two wonderful daughters who are now pursuing their versions of success and happiness. It has also been the greatest challenge. Raising a child is our greatest adventure. All parents know this and all soon-to-be-parents suspect it and rightly fear it a little. I am hoping that some of my suggestions will provide you with ideas to consider for this journey with your child. Discard what doesn’t suit you and take what you can. Even the seeds of just one or two ideas that you had never considered can be useful. You never know where an idea will lead. I still recall an idea I had in about 1990 that changed everything that was to come, ‘Why don’t I just stop off in Japan for a little while…’
Chapter 1: Otherness
When I first arrived in Japan, I realized that despite the obvious cultural differences between me and my new neighbours, we were far more similar than we realized. This was an important understanding. At the same time I realized that at home, despite the obvious cultural similarities with my neighbours, we were far more different than we knew. This understanding was even more important.
It was a shock for me to arrive in a completely mysterious place like Japan and come to see that my lack of knowledge about Japan was only really rivalled by my lack of knowledge about myself. It was not only my identity but my culture that I knew little about. It is hard to see something that you are immersed in. The image of a fish in its home of water has been used to illustrate this. A fish may not be fully conscious of the water they are in, nor the comfort it brings until they find themselves out of it one day. Then the realization comes quickly. In Japan, I was the proverbial fish out of water.
After being forced to view my culture through the eyes of others, I came to suspect that my culture and my identity were different. I had never given this distinction any thought and had still not worked it out. You can’t help but question the distinction between culture and identity when you are confronted by stereotypes of the group you are supposed to belong to. We create stereotypes to make sense of the world by categorizing people, but when we see ourselves in one of the stereotypes, the veil is lifted. It can be funny or disturbing. Often both. Stereotypes are used to categorize others and it is useful to consider the implications of the idea of ‘otherness’ that has driven so much of our conflictual human history.
You can’t help but question the distinction between culture and identity when you are confronted by stereotypes of the group you are supposed to belong to.
Otherness is at the heart of the need for global-mindedness. It is the recognition of the need for division caused by our slavish devotion to pronouns. I can’t be me if you are not you. We can’t be ‘us’ if you are not ‘them’.
Counterintuitively, divisions are what bind us. We draw a line around our families, so we can be a part of them. This is our bubble. We draw a line around our friends so we can be a part of them. We include them within this bubble and they include us in theirs. We draw a line around the followers of our sporting teams so we can be a part of them, as well. Again, the bubble. At some point in time, people drew lines around areas of land and called them nations for much the same reason. We divide ourselves from others so we can identify with those on the inside of those lines. Some of the bubbles are small, some are large, but they all serve the same purpose, they help us to belong. We also use different bubbles for different purposes. The term global is about the bubbles in which we enclose ourselves and our attempts to recognize these boundaries as artificial, often necessary and useful, but still artificial.
Taking nationality as an example, I’m an Australian but I come from a certain part of a city in a coastal region in the East which ensured vastly different experiences than someone growing up in a mining town in the desert of the North-West. This boundary of nationality would bind us to each other by separating us from other non-Australians. But nations have regions and sub-regions with social classes, language groups, and histories that further divide the sub-regions. The divisions are complex and seemingly never-ending, although when people talk of nationality, these divisions can disappear into the background. These artificial divisions can be more apparent when you find yourself in someone else’s country.
I noticed this when I moved to Hawaii. I worked mainly with U.S. teachers, bound by nationality but separated by an incredible array of divisions. The way the residents of Hawaii referred to the other U.S. states as the ‘mainland’ reminded me of the way that the people of Western Australia would refer to the rest of the continent as the ‘Eastern States’, the individual identities of these places lost, such as the historic rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, now unimportant in their state of otherness in the eyes of a Western Australian.
In Hawaii, the people who had moved from the mainland states were often referred to simply as ‘mainlanders’. There were some mainlanders with enough money to create their niches and fit in nicely within their defined territories. Lanikai and Kailua had distinct personalities. Very Hawaiian, but in a distinct way. Quite outrageously priced real estate helped to create the lines of economic division, but it was not just the cost of a house that sorted these groups.
Another group that fit in perfectly within their environment were the Japanese tourists who created a great niche in Waikiki. I lived in Kaneohe, on the other side of Oahu so would often drive over the Pali Highway to Waikiki with my family to have dinner or to shop at Ala Moana. We always felt like we were slipping into a different role, becoming tourists. We loved the throngs of tourists out and about, unmistakably tourists but fitting right in. We loved to hear as much Japanese spoken on the streets of Waikiki as we would hear on the streets of Tokyo. Very Hawaiian, but, again, in a distinct way. Here, otherness was quite visible and an important aspect of the unique modern culture of Hawaii, which had also influenced identity in the surrounding waters.
In surfing culture, localism exists where people who live and surf near a certain spot discourage outsiders from surfing there. This is particularly common when places become crowded and there is competition for waves. I encountered some Hawaiian localism that I had heard about through stories in surfing magazines and the surfing movies I grew up with as a child on the Gold Coast. The North Shore of Oahu was a magical place that we could only dream of visiting, but one that had, at least in the stories, been protected in the 70s by local surfers known as the ‘black-shorts’, named for the colour of their boardshorts. As kids, we heard the somewhat exaggerated stories of the car-park beatings and aggression in the water. They were understandably resisting the invasion of the North Shore by outsiders quite assertively. Those days were long gone by the time I arrived in 2011 but still, those stories had left a lasting impression. Localism is common all over the world and arriving in Hawaii after eight years in the relatively polite surfing culture of Japan, I wondered how this would look on the world-famous North Shore. I wondered how I would fit in.
On my first trip up to the North Shore, I knew nothing at all except those stories. The nearly thirty kilometres of spectacular surfing breaks started, if you were driving from the Windward side of the island, with one break called Velzyland, one of the more localized breaks on the North Shore. I knew nothing of this at the time. After driving for an hour alongside one of the most beautiful coastlines I had ever seen, I saw people with surfboards walking to a track through some bushes that looked like it was heading to the beach. Not even knowing the beach’s name, it was good enough for me, I thought.
Walking down to the water I paddled toward the line-up, where surfers sat waiting for the next waves, feeling very much an outsider. Of course, I knew I was an outsider but hadn’t expected to feel it so intensely. The wave, like nearly all the North Shore waves, broke onto a reef and a group of surfers sat on their boards in a tight group, the reef a couple of meters below. Paddling toward them, I could sense two things. Firstly, from the glances they exchanged and their obvious comfort in this place they were locals. Secondly, they were not too happy at the thought of sharing their waves with an outsider. As I approached, conversation stopped and they all looked at me with a variety of expressions, none even close to inviting. They were all on shortboards and I was on a longboard which made it worse. Just another boundary between myself and this group of locals.
My self-preservation instincts kicked in and I paddled wide, around the group heading to a different place. This changed the atmosphere immediately. They could see where I was heading and approved of my simple show of respect for their home break. I received a couple of nods and even a ‘How’s it?’ as I paddled past them toward another break, close by. They had no interest in where I was going. Not many people did. I didn’t know the break but it looked surfable but just.
It turned out that the waves hit a reef in a spot that is a bit too shallow. One more thing I didn’t know at the time. One more thing to add to that list. The Velzyland wave broke on the reef to the right. The section of reef that I paddled to broke over a shallower section to the left. It was ridable but just and not pick-of the spots. Good enough for an outsider. The waves on the North Shore were more powerful than those I had been used to surfing in Japan. They were fast and shallow, so I should have done my homework before going out. By some miracle, I survived my first two waves on the North Shore without scraping on the reef or a beating from the local surfers. I went in before a serious injury struck and I never surfed at Velzyland again.
What I remember clearly about that day was that I did not know the name of the famous break until I came in. Walking back up the beach, board under arm, I asked a lady sitting on the sand with a couple of kids what the place was called. She gave me a look that suggested there was something wrong with me. I guess there was if ‘otherness’ is wrong. She said, ‘This is Velzyland! How do you not know that?’ Quite easily, I thought to myself, but simply stated the obvious, ‘First time,’ and apologetically continued on my way. I thought her response was a bit harsh as even she must not have known of the legendary Velzyland at some time in her life. We learn everything we know for the first time at some stage but this can be easy to forget.
Fortunately, over the next five years, I found many more surfing breaks and in general, even though the Velzeyland crew were understandably not so keen on sharing that beautiful wave, I would say the surfers in Hawaii were much more welcoming than the ones I was used to on the Gold Coast with crowds often generating heated emotions in the water. On the North Shore, people understood that Velzyland was not for outsiders. This made sense considering how many more options were available and how intensely and irreversibly this beautiful, wave-filled stretch of beaches had been overrun by outsiders, forcing up rents and land prices as well as crowding the once remote breaks. To stay away from Velzeyland seemed to be a small concession.
Over the next five years, I thought of that afternoon at Velzyland every time I drove past the path leading down to that beautiful beach with the tight group of locals guarding their precious wave against intruders. Those early days in Hawaii once again showed me the complexity of identity, the seemingly random purpose of the divisions we create. There was also that slight sense of embarrassment at being an outsider, which follows us around whenever we try something new. I knew that I could live in Hawaii all my life and still be an outsider. I would have been sure of who I was, my identity at least partly defined by who I was not nor would ever be.
There was a lot of otherness happening in Hawaii. Living on the islands, as I had found, wasn’t a simple affair. There existed degrees of otherness that were difficult to understand as an outsider. I was an Australian on a working visa, a short-term resident-interloper, although life was simpler because of this as I knew where I fit in. I met mainlanders (the people originating from any of the other forty-nine U.S. states) from families who had lived in Hawaii for generations but were not considered Hawaiians, as that specific term was generally reserved for indigenous Hawaiians rather than non-indigenous residents of Hawaii, even long-term ones. This was not like other U.S. states. A Californian or a Nebraskan simply had to reside in those states to be a Californian or a Nebraskan. Not in Hawaii.
When I was offered my position as a middle school principal in Hawaii, I knew so little about Hawaii that it embarrassed me later. I was aware that the school was on an island called Oahu, but that meant little to me besides a vague notion that I had heard the name before in the surfing movies I watched as a kid. I knew the names of surfing spots on the famed North Shore but that was about it. At least, though, this was more than I had known about Japan when I first made that uncertain journey many years earlier.
As I noticed on my travels, the thought reinforced in Hawaii, we tend to categorize each other to an amazingly complex degree. It is difficult for adults to understand and even more so for children trying to work out how they fit into these labyrinths of borders within borders. Each border creates a fragment when it intersects another in the same way that a series of lines on paper creates spaces between the lines, each separate space defined by borders of different lines. It can be difficult for children piecing together their identities with so many fragments, especially as we often define our identities by our connections to other people. I am me because you are you.
In Hiroshima, I recently spoke to a man involved in planning an event intended to help build relationships between Japanese and foreign residents of Hiroshima. He asked a series of questions about my experiences living in Japan as a foreigner. I sensed a disconnect between what he thought that living in Japan as a foreigner was like and my experiences. The disconnect became wider and wider as we spoke until finally, he asked me what I thought about Japanese people. This took me by surprise and I was not at all sure how to respond. I should have known what to say having answered that question a hundred times since coming to Japan, although not for some years. I guess the question itself goes to the heart of this feeling of sameness in Japan, as it does everywhere else. The response that occurred to me was, ‘Which Japanese people?’
This is not the expected response, of course. It comes across as a bit antisocial, a conversation stopper, of sorts. People are generally interested in hearing what other groups think of their group, what ‘others’ think of ‘us’. After all, we are all social animals. Just as individuals construct images of themselves through the way that other people see them, individuals seek feedback from the groups they identify with. What is generally expected, at least in my experience, is to recount some generally held, relatively positive stereotypes. A good conversation starter. A reasonably polite way to break the ice.
As stereotypes are the broad generalizations that we carry with us to categorize groups of people based on some arbitrary quality such as nationality, they help us to organize the world around us but in doing so we run the risk of oversimplification. This is not unexpected as the purpose of this categorization process is to simplify our interactions with the world, otherwise, our brains could not possibly process the vast array of input it receives. In this way, stereotypes are necessary at a certain level but they present a limited, narrow view of the world. They help us to process information but it limits our perspective. Stereotypes do not reflect the amazing complexity of the individuals in the groups we have classified and we need to make sure that we see past the stereotype.
I think that the potential negative effects of stereotypes often do not align with the intentions of their use. The regularity that nationality-based stereotypes seem to come up in conversations is a testament to the drive that humans have to make a connection. When you meet a stranger from another place, often the only connection you have is some dubiously formed stereotype of that place. At least it is a start, but let us hope we can move on from this point.
As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stated in her powerful TED Talk, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, stereotypes contain an element of truth, but they mislead as they are just a small piece of a complex whole. In the search for our identities, we can cling to these small pieces and there is a danger in this. Sometimes people tell me that Australians are very nice and friendly. It is hard to know what to say. I have certainly met some Australians who are quite nice and others who, quite frankly, scared me. In this sense, the question about the general niceness of Australians again leads to the question of, which ones? Are they young, middle-aged or older Australians? Are they outlawed bikies or civil servants? Are they indigenous Australians who have been there for over 60,000 years or recent arrivals which in the Australian context means anytime between 1788 and the present? Which type of politicians do they gravitate to? Are they Australians who have travelled abroad or ones who have not left their shores? Are they monolingual or multilingual? Do they drink excessively, and revel in the fact, or do they not? What combinations of these qualities make up the person I am assessing for niceness.
Stereotypes contain an element of truth, but they mislead as they are just a small piece of a complex whole.
Once you start asking the questions that identify some of the complexities of the eclectic group of people who identify as Australians it is clear that a label is difficult and any stereotype will apply to a selection, but only a selection and only in a limited way. Again, just as part of the story may be true for a specific group it may be misleading for the whole. So when asked what I think of Japanese people, it is difficult to identify which cross-section of the Japanese population I should comment on.
To take students in Japan, for example, I met many middle school students while working on the Japan Exchange Teaching program in Junior High Schools in Toyota City. Nearly all wore the same uniform. Black, button-up jackets over white shirts for the boys and a blouse and skirt for the girls, all in matching colours and lengths with a name tag. Nearly all. There was another group, however, who existed in many schools, easily recognizable as they wore school uniforms with various adjustments. Some had very baggy pants while others used enlarged shoulder pads. Other uniforms had emblazoned dragons on the back or were made with bright material, red or yellow instead of the ubiquitous black. The students would sit on couches in the staff room and be counselled by teachers who had deep reserves of patience.
The students would walk around the school without going to their classes. Now and then, recent graduates would visit their old schools riding motorbikes onto the field to do burnouts, laughing while their former teachers chased them away. It was all festive, orderly in the predictability of the chaos, and quite confusing for me when I first arrived. It was like the student body had been polarized into these two groups, one large, one very small, living parallel existences within the same system, operating under different sets of rules and expectations. If I am asked what Japanese students are like, it is a longer story than you usually have time for so we tend to settle for the half-truths of stereotypes.
There is a danger of a group trying to conform to an artificial image of sameness without considering the impact it has on its members. While working in a Japanese junior high school I observed several cases where this dynamic forced people to the periphery, made them feel less valued. For example, I helped a student with an English speech contest not long after joining the public middle school. The student’s speech was about a problem with her hair. She had a slight natural wave in her hair. This had caused her much unnecessary heartache as, in her words, her teachers all though primary and the junior high school thought for some reason that all Japanese girls’ hair should be straight. Perming hair was forbidden so she said that she was constantly scolded about her wavy hair. The student would explain that it was natural. Her parents would explain, but there was always a new teacher who would comment on her hair, giving her the message that she did not fit in; did not belong. Students followed the teachers’ lead and consistently commented. She drifted further and further toward the periphery, to that area on the fringe where outcasts gather. She wanted to belong and be valued, as we all do.
When I met her, her hair was straight. A year before she had broken the school rules and had her hair straightened so that she could be someone she was not, someone with straight hair, someone who was not scolded for wavy hair. Someone who did not get pushed to the periphery. This was who people thought she should be so she became this person. It was an amazing speech, but the realization that we do this to children was terribly sad.
The following year at a different school, I started reading another speech. This girl had black hair when I met her, but it had not always been so. Her natural hair colour was lighter, almost brown, but this was not the person her teachers had wanted her to be. Dejavu. I wondered how many times this speech had been written, details different, but the same sad story of a stereotype-driven otherness and the cruel pressure to conform to some imaginary ideal of sameness. The stories were of people being forced to disregard aspects of their identity to be included. The story repeats itself in schools all over the world, just with different details. The heartbreak is always the same.
As with physical appearance, ways of thinking are also shaped by these subjective expectations. One of the problems that we face when developing our inside groups when we grow older is that eventually, we come to link ways of thinking with our identity. Although both thinking and identity are flexible and independent, we tend to be surrounded, for one reason or another, by people who think similarly. This may be because we are related to them, live close to them, speak the same language as them, go to school with them or work with them.
To consider multiple perspectives that may well conflict with the ones we have constructed, we need to make sure that we have some contact with other perspectives. We need to understand that even though how we think is an important part of our identities, the way we think is not a permanent state of being. We can grow and change our ways of thinking, our ways of seeing the world.
Seeing yourself through another’s eyes is a confronting experience that waits for everyone who steps outside their closest cultural affiliations. It can be a positive force to push us to revise our ways of thinking. In my case, the culture of national boundaries was crossed. I was an Australian stepping into Japan. It could be the culture of socio-economics; an under-employed person stepping into a rich person’s place of work. It could be the culture of religion; a Catholic stepping into a Hindu wedding. The culture of sexual preference; a straight man meeting his gay sister-in-law for the first time. The culture of age; a grandmother trying to understand her teenage granddaughter’s hopes and dreams. The list goes on. These are all cultural boundaries. Different types of cultures. We belong to many. They form thresholds to potentially unfamiliar places, as culture is what we share with a particular group in a specific place and time. We belong to many groups or communities at the same time so we don’t have a single culture. We have many. We are, in fact, the sum of our cultures.
Even though how we think is an important part of our identities, the way we think is not a permanent state of being.
Japan is sometimes described as a homogenous society which is a curious statement if we are the sum of our cultures. I can recall hearing this in my school days and at the time I didn’t think it was a crazy idea. Calling a group homogenous suggests that an individual has one culture. It suggests that a person is one culture. On closer inspection, however, homogeneity is revealed as a mirage, at best. The closer you get to it, the less clear the image appears, like fading pools of water in the desert. Before I came to Japan, I may have been better equipped to believe in this mirage of sameness but alas, knowledge can get in the way of the convenient stereotypes that have simplified the world for us.
It is merely a question of altitude which can be a useful analogy to help us understand our perspectives on people and their differences. At a low altitude, hovering above two people, we can observe them closely. We can see the obvious differences in the way they speak, the clothes they wear, the festivals they attend, the beliefs and values they carry with them. One may be an elderly professor at the famed Tokyo University and the other may have just left school to work on a construction site in rural Shimane. Just from this brief description, our minds are probably imagining some of their differences, even though we have never met them, or seen them, or spoken to them, or attended a family celebration with them or sat by their bedside during sickness. From our low altitude proximity, we could identify many differences between these two people even if we observed them closely for just a short while. If we talked to them, we could identify many more. No stereotype survives a close observation. We would discover that they are both unique individuals.
As we move away from them, higher, gaining altitude, the individuals recede into the distance. They are joined by more individuals in our view and the individual differences which were so obvious at a lower altitude are blurred the higher we go. The more people we see, the less difference we can discern. At a specific altitude, all of Japan comes into view and it is at this altitude in which the myth of homogeneity or sameness is born and nurtured. Unfortunately, there seems to be some sort of glass ceiling at this point as we often do not keep rising. We maintain the exact altitude that allows us to observe the nation, but not beyond. Our upward movement often seems to stop at this view of national borders. This is true across the world and as a species, it is our Achilles heel.
If we went higher, our view would encompass the whole of the world, the entirety of humanity. If we developed the ability to move to just a little higher so that our perspectives included us all, we would experience a much more peaceful world. Of this, I am sure. It seems to be an arbitrary choice to stop at this altitude which provides a perspective of disjointed border-riddled humanity.
National borders and national identities are useful, of course, however, to recognize the difference between sharing certain qualities and being the same, we need to look more closely at the nature of culture. Specifically, we need to look at the things we share that are not readily visible because much that is unseen shapes who we are as individuals. This is only seen under closer observation.