Standing
Imagine
two houseguests who stay in your home. Guest 1 likes a lot of
superficial things about your home. However within a day he starts
complaining about many things. He doesn't like your food, your choice
of furniture, your family's daily routines. He finds fault with
several customs within your home and insists that you adopt customs
he grew up with in his household. After a week, he returns back to
his home anyway. Guest 2, absolutely adores your home and family. He
goes out of his way to adapt to your lifestyle. A twist of fate
causes him to end up living with you permanently. He gets along with
people in your household. He works a job and contributes financially.
He basically becomes part of the family. After a while, he begins to
offer suggestions about how to improve things in your home.
Among
the Gaijin community in Japan are two camps, conservatives and
progressives. The former adore the culture and want to preserve it.
The latter see Japan as backward in many ways, and seek to make Japan
become more westernized. The thing is, neither of these camps have
standing in my view, unless they become immigrants instead of expats.
The expat is not deeply invested in the society. He has fun for a few
years then goes home. The immigrant is
deeply invested. He intends to live there permanently. He assimilates
into the culture, learns the language, raises a family there,
establishes a career, pays
taxes, and often becomes a
citizen and votes. You could say he has “skin in the game.” For
that reason, native citizens care about his point of view and
generally do not care about the expat.
Is this
unfair to the expat or temporary visitor? If you were an American
progressive, how would you feel about groups of Middle Eastern or
South American migrants coming to the USA and loudly agitating for
criminalization of homosexuality and more government funding for
religious programs? Most likely you would find it unseemly. You might
think, “Why don't they just go back to their own countries if they
like their culture so much?” At the very least, you would likely
hope that the American public will just ignore these interlopers.
No one is saying that the expat does not have a right to his opinion.
We have all been houseguests at one point. After one night at my
aunt's crazy apartment, I had A LOT of opinions about her
lifestyle. However none of it was really life-threatening, so I kept
my thoughts to myself. Similarly the expat can think whatever he
wants and voice his views wherever he wishes. However people are more
welcome to dismiss him, as he likely does not know very much about
the native culture, and his views simply represent his own
conditioned preference for the culture of his homeland. By contrast
the immigrant has delved deep enough into the culture of his new home
out of necessity. He is not on a vacation from his homeland; he is
establishing a new one. Because he is more invested and likely better
informed, his views are worth considering.
Japanese
society will naturally evolve as Japanese citizens live their lives
and make choices every day. I think that those foreigners that gain
standing by committing to the country have a place in shaping that
evolution. My advice to progressives is this: if you don't have
standing, don't act entitled to have people care about your opinion.
If you do have standing,
focus your argument for change on how it will concretely improve
things, not simply on the fact that “other countries do it, so
Japan should too!!” To conservatives I would say do not
blindly defend every aspect of Japanese culture simply because it is
Japanese. All cultures evolve and change, including Japan's,
sometimes for the better. Pick your battles. Focus on the things
worth conserving.
