The fuck?
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I thought the issue was that schools didn’t want children dying their hair (from black to “tea” brown). But to take it to a place where you ban people whose hair is naturally that color is obviously depraved.
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Yeah. I always tell new expats to not try and change the ESL industry they’re now part of because their flaming failure will just make them hate an otherwise wonderful life experience.
Honestly few non-Japanese make it past the three year mark here anyway, most don’t last more than a year.
See, the thing for me when I was in Japan was listening to the complaints from the expats there and all I could think was, “Son, you wouldn’t last a week in Korea.”
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Well, the story has made the news in Japan itself and my wife has looked into it a bit (she’d told me about it before it’s come out of Japan).
The school is actually one with a bad reputation (as in, full of wayward kids). Considering they actually tighten their overall rules year after year (and are apparently extremely strict with everyone), I imagine they are trying to improve their image with this.
As a matter of fact, it appears that around Osaka, most schools (but not this one) use a system where they periodically grade pupils natural hair color (from black to brown-light brown) to make sure kids don’t dye their hair.
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No, they aren’t. American standards aren’t good enough either. We Americans question them all the time. Not all of us, but that doesn’t prevent those who do from having good reasons to say those who don’t are wrong.
To do so we appeal to concepts like dignity, honor, respect, and equality - principles that Japan itself officially agrees with, as set out on a whole host of (for example) UN Human Rights Commission documents that forbid discrimination based on color, gender, ethnicity, and other factors. See http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/human/index.html. And because there exists a standard both Japan and the US officially are supposed to adhere to, we can discuss who is closer to reaching it.
I don’t know enough to have an opinion on the general situation on the ground in Japan. And there are definitely lots of bad arguments in the comments above. And other countries are way worse. But if no one can say a custom is wrong, no one can make the world better, and sometimes it takes a mix of local and outside thought to notice and fix a problem.
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They refuse to change the rule so they are following it to its logical conclusion to make clear that there will be absolutely no exceptions.
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totally. They’re not hurting anyone, leave them be.
Thanks for the well phrased reply.
Seems like to me (in my limited time there, only about 5 months aggregate) this sort of thing is the stereotypes people have of foreigners before they get to know them. This is definitely a thing–I’ve had plenty of interactions where people just told me they don’t speak English, even when I was speaking Japanese. Some of this is them being rude in a roundabout way, but it was never a problem with anyone I was actually friends with.
Worth posting:
Indeed stereotyping foreigners you don’t know well is a thing there. From other gaijin I knew there, the better they adapted to language and culture, the more like a local they were treated (as @Israel_B has said he’s experienced) . I don’t think it’s all that different from very homogenous communities in the western world.
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Indeed, it’s interesting to see how various Japanese families with children around here (Toronto) carefully gauge how many years their children can live outside Japan before they will be forever considered foreign.
Two years seems typical with three at the outside. And that’s with the children attending school in Toronto that matches the Japanese curriculum.
As one cousin put it, without restraints young people tend to grow in ways that make it difficult to fit back into society. Or as she also put it, you can get used to behaving like a child (i.e. speaking your mind). (She loved her time here, but then it was time to be a grown up.)
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The horror! The horror!
Look, there are real challenges in being a visible minority in any culture, but if this is the worst experience that he faced (and I doubt it was), he kind of lucked out, especially in a immigrant-scarce country like Japan.
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Swathes of Osaka have been trending to extreme authoritarianism in the past decade. They had a real Hitler wannabe as governor for a while who made all public servants (including teachers at public schools, garbage collectors, etc.) with tattoos registered themselves on a people with tattoos registry.
Even Japanese adults who’ve lived overseas go through some serious reverse culture shock on return.
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It’s not that terrible, it just illustrates that even after a ten years of doing everything right, and being an integral part of the community, he was still not considered fully human.
Thats your interpretation really.
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Regardless of position or function, some people stick to the SOP and if a problem arises, they followed protocol. They don’t make the rules just follow 'em analogy.
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It is the experience of my friend as he related it to me. You can brush it off, but that’s how he felt.
Imagine if, say a person from India did the same kind of residency in the U.S. and had the same sort of going away banquet, but with some American steak and mashed potatoes with gravy and such. Then they don’t give the Indian any utensils, because ‘y’all eat with your fingers, right?’ It’s absurd, and would never happen. But in Japan, sticking in such a final micro aggression is par for the course. Disgusting.
I’m sure you’re quite happy being super gaijin, but it’s dismaying to see you try to rationalize naked racism and xenophobia as some kind of cultural difference instead of a major problem that Japan has and should be trying its best to solve.
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I guess I’m sorry for your friend he felt that way and since you don’t seem to have first hand experience I’m sad that you’ve come to this conclusion.
