Moderator: Tan Rin Sen
Session Team: Musubi
Rion Koshinaga (1st year, Department of Creative Innovation)
Tan Rin Sen (1st year, Doctoral Program, Environment Formation Field)
Shiori Ishizuka (3rd year, Department of Arts Policy and Management)
Isao Ohtsuka (CASIO COMPUTER Co., Ltd.)

"I want to support the children with overseas nationalities that no-one knows exist."

There are many very young overseas children who have come to Japan because of their parents' work. How important is it for these young children, most of whom don't speak Japanese well, to be supported by those around them? It was with the aim of providing this sort of support that Mr Sasaki and his colleagues established the Multicultural Youth Project.

Mr Sasaki himself came to Japan due to his parent's work just after completing junior high school. He studied Japanese at an independent school and then entered high school under the "Zaiken Gaikokujin-tō Tokubetsu Boshū" scheme, a special entrance examination for non-Japanese students. However, one year was not long enough for him to overcome the cultural gap between the two countries. Having just entered high school, Mr Sasaki found that there were very few opportunities for him to communicate with his Japanese classmates. The only classmates who were willing to talk to him were the really outspoken ones. Then, Mr Sasaki took his first steps on the path towards communicating with Japanese people. But there are many who aren't as fortunate as Mr Sasaki. It was because he wanted to support those who came after him and went through the same difficulties that Mr Sasaki started working on the Multicultural Youth Project.

Participant: Can you tell us what brought you to Japan?

Sasaki: My parents' circumstances brought me here. My father moved to Japan when I was four, and my mother joined him here when I was eight. I stayed in China until I was 15, so I spent seven years living with my grandmother. In China, I received what is known as "patriotic education", so my impressions of Japan were not good, to be honest. But I came to Japan with the idea of living with my parents. When I came to Japan, it wasn’t because I really wanted come. I think this is a common experience for many of the children I have helped who have come here from China. Many of them experience loneliness because they don't speak the language and don't know anyone.

Participant: What made you start working to provide learning support to younger students.

Sasaki: When I was in university, I was concerned about the lives of younger students. I also visited high schools because I was curious. The teachers I met told me that students like me weren't able to actively “co-exist” with the other students and their relationships with them were based on a separate existence. This prompted me to hold a range of discussions with the teachers and this led to me being asked to interpret at school seminars. But interpreting gradually leads to even more students who don't understand any Japanese. This problem made me think that I had to do something. So I pursued various avenues, including talking with the Kanagawa Prefectural Government and the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Become "Strong" by Knowing "Powerlessness"
Tan Rin Sen
(1st year, Doctoral Program, Environment Formation Field)

Personally, I think multicultural co-existence is essential.
Before getting involved in the Multicultural Co-existence Project, I didn't see "multicultural co-existence" as particularly difficult, so I didn't really give it much thought. My university classmates in China were all Han Chinese and came to the university from all over the vast area of China. Depending on the region they came from, their linguistic customs, their diets and even their values were all different. I think my time at university was really my first encounter with "multicultural co-existence".

After that I came to Japan and talked with my classmates at Japanese language school about how "we're all different" in terms of the color of our hair, our eyes and our skin. In the rapidly globalizing Japan, there are communities that are complex and diverse. In a country where the only official language is Japanese, I often came across people who spoke to me in Chinese. At times like that I felt like I also belonged to a large community and was able to forget about the differences between the people and cultures that I'd thought about while I was in China.

I moderated the session given by Seisho Sasaki, who works for the Yokohama City government. He conducted his session in Japanese, but it was not hard for me to hear the northeastern Chinese accent in his Japanese. His experience is different from the Japanese overseas students that I have met in the past. Almost all the Chinese people I know studied at a Japanese language school before going on to their respective universities. High-school graduation is the minimum requirement for entering a Japanese language school, so everyone is at least 18 years old. But he came to Japan with his parents just after completing junior high school. So at that point, he was too young to enroll in a Japanese language school. For a boy who'd had no contact with Japanese, coming to live in a strange country where he didn't speak the language must've been very tough. The difficulty of the Japanese language, coupled with his parent's lack of understanding of his position, extinguished his desire to learn. Through these sessions, Mr Sasaki and I have become friends, and he has introduced me to his friends. They are all Chinese people who came to Japan as small children due to their parents' circumstances. They are realizing that they have become a different community from people in China. In fact, those who have returned to China say they feel quite distinct from people of their own generation in China. I have talked to them in Chinese, but I have become aware of an odd sense of Japanese-like sensitivity and strictness in our conversations. All of them are involved in the Youth Project. Because they had the same difficult experiences as children, they have come together wanting to help their younger counterparts who are in the same situation. Through my interactions with them, I have come to understand that people have to work to achieve "multicultural co-existence".

I also first came to Japan as an overseas student after graduating from university, and our linguistic and cultural differences meant that things often did not go well. My experience of feeling powerless like that has enabled me to appreciate the importance of giving people in the same situation a helping hand. With Mr Sasaki's encouragement, I decided to get involved in activities aimed at helping overseas children in Japan, sustained by my experience of feeling powerless. In the future, I would like to gradually gain a deeper understanding of "multicultural co-existence".