Moderator: Ryohei Tanaka
Session team: Rhythm-mix
Jung-Hwa Yu (2nd year, Masters Course, Department of Visual Communication Design)
Ryohei Tanaka (1st year, Department of Design Informatics)
Wang Xin (3rd year, Department of Arts Policy and Management)
Kimiko Matsumoto (CASIO COMPUTER Co., Ltd.)

"I was more relaxed overseas than I was in Japan. There's not the same pressure to conform."
Having experienced overseas life and travel many times, Mr Matsui fled Japan, drawn to the freedoms on offer overseas. But he later came to realize that people all have to deal with their own circumstances, and starting thinking about what he could do in that environment.
He says that the lifestyles in many countries prompted him to think about what he himself could do.

After returning to Japan, he got involved in helping children who had grown up overseas, as well as their families, in his role as Director of the Tsurumi International Lounge in Yokohama City.
In the process, he met a 2nd generation Filipino girl. Faced with this girl and her distress over the fact that she had started life outside Japan and wanting her to feel proud of her own roots as a filipina, Mr Matsui decided to work on writing a manga called "Jose Rizal" (the Filipino revolutionary). He then took up a position in the Agency for Cultural Affairs, wanting to draw on his own intimate experience of having actually lived overseas to put in place structures that would enable people to think of themselves and others in a positive light, so that this kind of distress around the differences between Japan and overseas countries would not arise in the first place.
I hope that this provides everyone here with an opportunity to think about what you yourself can do and what you'd like to do.

Participant: I am involved in educational activities for refugee children. There are sometimes situations where some of the children can't eat the same meals for religious reasons. This has shown me that, in Japan, where we often use slogans like "We're all in this together" or "We're all friends", there are often cases where children raised overseas are upset because they get special treatment and have to be handled differently from those around them. Mr Matsui, you have such wide-ranging experience, how do you feel about the way children raised overseas are treated in Japan?

Matsui: In my previous job, I worked as Director of the Tsurumi International Lounge. That included supervising primary schools where around 20% of the students were born and raised overseas and I'm still in close contact with the schools' PTAs. What I've observed in my conversations with them is that "the children watch the adults carefully". This may not apply to everyone, but children are the mirrors of adults, and when they express things, they do so directly. Considering the problems of children is no different from thinking about the problems of adults. In Japan, the idea of everyone being the same is rooted in a strong sense of comfort, and I think that people are starting to look differently at people who act frivolously in that context. But on that topic, I'm increasingly hearing the expression, "We're all different, and that's fine". Certainly I think there are very few people who would deny that there's such a thing as individuality. But society's rules when we become adults still do not include structures that value individuality.
I think the situation where we take for granted from a young age that other people are different from ourselves is tied to the existence of the "multicultural co-existence natives" that we should be aiming for. Whether or not teachers in the primary schools in Tsurumi ward are accustomed to multiculturalism, it is a breeding ground where they don't make a fuss about it. The thing that the children are most curious about may well be the puzzled awareness of the adults with respect to multiculturalism.

Maybe We're Gradually Getting Used to It
Ryohei Tanaka
(3rd year, Department of Design Informatics)

The expression "multicultural co-existence" is one that I don't recall having heard and that I don't really understand, having come across it for the first time on this course. I came to the conclusion that its meaning is a fusion of the two words multicultural and co-existence, and referred to "global connotations" and "lifestyles based on mutual understanding between neighbors and others". Living together with an understanding of our mutual differences. It was in September that I took this interpretation to be pretty much correct, and I had the three-month preparation period and the period leading up to the event to put some really deep thought into whether I could take it on board emotionally rather than just understanding it as a piece of knowledge. There were two triggers where I recognized key points that I needed to understand.
The first trigger was when I settled on the title and summary text for the event held at the beginning of December.
"This event provides an opportunity for people from many different generations and everyone from students to working adults to come together and listen to speakers addressing the topic of multicultural co-existence and to then form your own view of multicultural co-existence through interaction."
Based on this sentence, I ran up against the obstacles of what multicultural co-existence was for all the team members, whether we could understand as clearly as it was explained, and whether we as administrators could ourselves take multicultural co-existence on board. For the question of "what is multicultural co-existence", various ideas were presented in the first interactive course and there was a lot of discussion. However, in December, everyone confessed that they didn't understand, the conversation stopped and we were left with period of silence.

The difference in the tone of the conversations on this topic in September and December made a strong impression on me.
By the time December came, everyone had their own interpretations of multicultural co-existence through their interviews with the various speakers. There were also small differences between my interpretations and those of others, but I thought those differences were important, however small they might be. The team members found themselves in a dilemma because collectively they couldn't adequately summarize and put into words their detailed individual thoughts, but they also felt that those thoughts were too important to be left out.
Thinking about it now, I felt that in the course of that conversation, we were generally moving in the same direction, but there were differences, and in the sense that we mutually recognized that fact, it was a space where we formed an understanding of multiculturalism.
The second trigger was when I was writing the introductory outlines for the speakers.

Choosing the right words was vital during that process. In the first draft of the outline for Moderator Mr Matsui, I used the expression "Filipino half-breed child". I used that expression without thinking about it, but it was pointed out to me that it was "likely to be offensive to that person". Certainly, while it is an expression that is often used in normal conversation, in that context the term "half-breed" could also be discriminatory. I was completely unaware until it was pointed out to me that the child in question might be offended by it. Putting another person's life into words is an invasion of that person's personal space. Precisely because it is not my story, I have to choose my words carefully so that they do not reflect my own unconscious biases or opinions. While it might be OK for me to say them to myself, saying them to others can often give offense, so I always need to be careful with that sort of thing. At primary school we were taught to put ourselves in the other person's shoes, but this made me realize the difficulty of using words to express ourselves. In writing the outline, there were many times when I had to stop, re-watch the video and revise the text. It is very difficult to write text that will be accepted by another person, but I think it consists of carefully considering the other person's viewpoint and finding words that are appropriate for that perspective. Adopting that attitude also gives you a deeper understanding of the other person. I concluded that word selection formed a part of one aspect of this consideration.
I think these two triggers were realizations that I came to by virtue of the fact that I happened to take part in this Multicultural Co-existence Project. It may be that others who took part this time were spurred to do so by an enthusiasm like my own. Finally, listening to various people's impressions, this event may not give rise to any revolutionary ideas that will lead to more widespread multicultural co-existence, and it may not have significantly changed my own thinking, but I feel like it's been a first step towards building an "attitude of gradual progress towards understanding" among the adults. As is true for me now, I can't say that being conscious of an attitude of trying to understand is a natural condition for me. But I do now have hope that imparting that consciousness to children will help to create "multicultural co-existence natives" who do not have the barriers built out of peoples' attributes or place in the world. One day, when a generation is born who see this event as "Out of date. No longer needed", then I think we will be able to say that this event was a success.