Pluribus et Unum, Daggarook en Kakpraat

When I lived in Kochi, I was visited by a playwright who was doing research for a future production. Her topic: South Africans living in Japan. This got me thinking about my place here, as a citizen of a nation so heterogenous that calls itself "Rainbow", living in a land so culturally uniform that its ethnic and linguistic homogeneity exceeds 98%.

It has been nearly a year and a half since her visit, and since then I have spent a nearly equal amount of time in each country, letting this distinction set in. The raison d'etre for the job I am currently doing for Matsuyama City through CLAIR (Council of Local Authorites for International Relations) can be summed up in one word: "internationalization". But for me as a South African, it is more than just about helping Japan to upgrade its cultural interface with the western world. It is about being a representative for an entirely different mode of thought and way of being.

Let me illustrate by sketching a comparative outline of the two countries. South Africa is roughly three times the size of Japan, with slightly over one third the population. It borders six other countries, while Japan has no borders anywhere in its archipelago. It has eleven official languages; Japan, one. The South African religiously inclined can choose between Islam, Hinduism, more than seven different types of Christianity and a host of indigenous animistic religions. The 98% of Japanese who aren't Christian can choose between Shintoism and Buddhism, and often choose both, since they are not mutually exclusive. In essence, South Africa is the picture of diversity, Japan the poster-child of uniformity.

But heterogeneity vs. homogeneity is only the most obvious difference. Orientals and Occidentals think differently. In the west, individuality, at least culturally, is protected, encouraged and highly valued. In the east, the opposite is true: individuality, while not discouraged or devalued, is secondary to the collective. This is embodied by the relative prominence of hierarchy. Deference to authority is embedded in the Japanese language. This makes it a particularly difficult language to learn, and can pose problems for the foreigner who is not sure whether to address up, down or across the linguistic hierarchy in unfamiliar social situations. Coversely, the active socioeconomic promotion of previously disadvantaged and oppressed groups as well as the vigorous culture of protest and aversion to echoes of the apartheid past in South Africa turns the concept of hierarchy almost into an anathema. This dichotomy of individual and collective, combined with those of equality and rank, and variety and sameness, places South Africa and Japan at extreme opposite ends of an archetypal spectrum.

My job is thus not just to teach English and represent my country, but to bridge a conceptual chasm, with my mind on one end of the gap and my body and contemporary lived experience on the other. I have to show that engaging with the world requires much more from the Japanese than just learning its lingua franca. It entails cultivating an understanding that, contrary to its experience with the USA, engaging with the other requires more of a paradigm of equality than one of superiority vs inferiority; that the experience of diversity serves more to enrich than to threaten Japanese cultural identity, and that those in the west can be better understood with awareness of the relative sanctity of the individual over the collective. Moreover, I have to bring back home, whether through means like this blog or through embodied paradigms upon my return to South Africa or other western countries I am connected to, lessons from this side. These are lessons from a country whose society has been shaped by a series of natural and man-made disasters of devastating magnitude which kill tens of thousands at a time. Japanese people do not just know how to live in densely populated spaces, they know how to recover when those spaces are utterly destroyed. These societal traits were admirably demonstrated in the aftermath of the triple disaster of March 11th 2011 and stood in stark contrast to the way people in Louisiana behaved toward each other after Hurricane Katrina in the USA. Politeness, deference, notions like "reading the air" (ascertaining the nature of social interactions before participating) and "public face" vs. "private face" (knowing when, where and how to appropriately express emotion) go hand in hand with a moral code and a sense of civic duty instilled in the public school system from an early age to foster a resilient, productive and peaceful society.

While it is important for Japan and South Africa to remain on either end of the spectrum as respective exemplars of unity and diversity, it is also important for those of us from either country, suffiently familiar with our own culture to be representative, yet sufficiently marginal to get by for long periods in the other, to make the exchange. In doing so, we not only foster intercultural understanding, but help to resolve an important dichotomy in thought, easily encompassed by any armchair philosopher, but extremely difficult to bring forth into the world of lived experience. South Africans in Japan need, and are especially well positioned, to think with both eastern and western minds, to see the equality while participating in the hierarchy, to be individuals while functioning in the collective and to represent diversity in a homogenous context. While being the interface between such challengingly distant archetypes, we are priming ourselves and by extension the world around us to help develop a more syncretic approach to other troublesome dichotomies like science and the humanities, first and third world, male and female; ultimately, and all-encompassingly, yin and yang, for we are on the very cusp. And this world is in dire need of a union of opposites.