Breaks in the Mold: Culture Shock, and Non-Racial Japanese Minorities

This is an assignment from Behind the Mask, which is about minority groups within Japan. This is my response to the topic of culture shock.

It seems that almost all people who travel tend to compare the places they visit to the place that they are from. I am not an exception, and my standard for comparison is a small rural town in Virginia on the east coast of the United States. When I first got to Kyoto, it was not anything particular to Asian culture that hit me right away, but instead the differences that came from living in a big city for the first time. There were so many people and so many large stores within walking distance from where I lived. I would have to ride a bike and use a bus system for the first time in my life. My first reaction to Kyoto was one of shock. I had been told that it was a quiet town, but as my taxi tried to squeeze in and out of traffic headed towards my dorm, I was shocked at the number of bright lights and large buildings. For me, Kyoto is not a quiet town by any means; the number of people alone prevents me from calling it quiet. When I finally got over my initial shock of being in a city, it was things within the large population of Kyoto that struck me as strange. In my trips around the city, where were frequent, I began noticing several groups of Japanese minorities. However, the minorities I was observing were not invisible groups like the Korean residents or the Ainu, but instead groups that were quickly recognizable to the naked eye. My first recognition of a minority population came towards the beginning of the semester. I was walking in one of the commercial areas and saw a very heavy-set teenager biking down the street. To be fair, he was not very heavy, by American standards, but here in Japan, he was the only “fat” person that I had seen. To see only one heavy person in the hundreds and more I had seen on the streets since arriving in Kyoto meant that there was either a very small obese population or they all stayed hidden away. Even after several weeks in Kyoto, I had only seen two other heavy-set individuals, and wondered if it could be a fair representation of the obesity percentage in Japan. I realized that perhaps because of the intense pressure to fit into the “Japanese mold,” these individuals made an attempt remain in their houses as often as possible in order not to be ridiculed. In Japan, I imagine that this type of weight centered teasing would be much more harmful to the ego than it is in America, where many youth and adults cope every day with obesity, because of the Japanese pressure of conformity. This got me thinking about other visible minority groups and the types of barriers that set them apart.

In my first trip to the sento, the Japanese public baths, I found that most women were very comfortable with their bodies and being in the open as they walked from bath to bath, yet one girl, more attractive and youthful than the others, covered herself up as she walked from bath to bath. I had remembered our discussion in class on how Japanese people would rather be complimented on being exactly like everyone else than on how they were different. It seemed that this girl was trying to hide the youthfulness of her body, which set her apart, in order not to be seen as standing out. To her, her beauty seemed not something to be proud of, but something to hide, even within a group of other women, in an attempt to blend in. Even a positive trait, if it took one outside of the Japanese mold, was call for shame instead of pride. This baffled me, as beauty is lauded a great deal in the U.S. If people felt this much shame from being attractive, I wondered how the Japanese population treated those who struggled with physical deformities and handicaps.

Having only seen one or two handicapped individuals since arriving in Japan, I was unable to draw a conclusion on how Japan handles the minority group yet I discovered, in my research of temples in Kyoto, that people with a disability are admitted to the temples usually at half price and sometimes for free. I am sure that there are many logical reasons for why an individual with a handicap might deserve a lower price, for example, if the temple is not wheelchair accessible, or because they will usually bring a caretaker with them to the temple who will have to pay full admission. Yet for the temples to set a blanket policy reducing prices for individuals with handicaps shocked me. Although I am only making judgments on what I have seen and read firsthand, I believe that it would be very interesting to study the statistics of these populations in comparison with their visibility, as well as to research the way Japan views these groups as a whole.

Perhaps the things that shocked me the most was not that these minorities exist and are discriminated against, but instead that there is not the same type of positive/negative split here, with some groups being special in a good way (beauty) and others being special in what is viewed as a negative way (obesity, disability). In Japan, it seems that anything that makes a person different is interpreted as a negative trait. To break the mold here in Japan, one only needs to catch the eye for a second. This leads me to believe that a study of these visible minorities would be every bit as rich as the study of the ethnical minority groups for a completely different set of reasons. To be Japanese in Japan, one needs not only have the right ancestry, but also the right look. Lacking either one can set an individual apart as a member of a minority group.