The “Social Dichotomy” (i.e. the difference between a Japanese person and everyone else)
I visited my own “home” for the first time in two years for Christmas just last year. The travel agency didn’t give me enough time to properly transfer planes at Detroit and I ended up in Boston before my bags did. It took an extra two hours for the next flight to come in with my things, and that was just after about 15 hours spent on an airborne, compressed tin can surrounded by a random mixture of Westerners and Southeast Asians. One can imagine the kind of exhaustion I was feeling by the time I boarded the blue line at the airport station. What actively jolted me nonetheless though was the vibrancy of the atmosphere on board. Nothing could be quite more the opposite of my friend’s train ride back (i.e. silence, everyone looks the same, passed out business men, cell phones galore. etc., etc.). For starters, I don’t remember how many nationalities, much less what sort of unique cultural mixtures were represented by the individuals on my train car alone. Then there was the visible reality of class stratification; white collar business travelers fresh off the plane alongside working class Hispanics from East Boston (where the airport is located). Most people were talking to each other in animated voices. A girl in her early twenties was singing a couple of stanzas of Radiohead half jokingly with her friends. Nobody took notice of the wide spectrum of backgrounds represented in that single subway car. There was no consciousness of the three or four languages blending into each other in the background. I could perhaps count a couple of pulled out cell phones, tops. Alas, this was the home I left behind.
I can equally envision how a Japanese person could either feel completely liberated or completely horrified by such an unpredictable, unfamiliar atmosphere of diversity. The diversity is really the half of it. In Japan, there’s only one kind of Japanese person, culturally speaking. In other words, everyone over here fits into one of two general categories: Japanese, and outsiders. I call the latter “outsiders” because that’s what they are. It doesn’t matter if they’re married to a Japanese person, hold a job here, or even have Japanese citizenship. If the shape of the face and the mannerisms (alongside lifelong citizenship) don’t both match the criteria, the person doesn’t “count” as a real member of society. No kidding. It’s a simple dichotomy, and there never have been enough assimilated foreigners in Japan to challenge the status quo of Japanese identity being based on anything other than physicality and one’s reflection of cultural “upbringing”.
Tomorrow: “Part 2: The Reality of the Japanese Social Dichotomy—So, Is It Really Racism?”
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