22 May 2020 Week 5 Response To Cultural Miscommunication

I never knew that the Japanese are considered a group culture and that it is not good to stand out. The Asian child who was selected to be the student of the week who began to cry and the parents who were not pleased with the public singling out of their child. I didn't know they would not want that for their child. And the saying that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. One example given was that if you stand out in a company you are most likely to remain in the mailroom because you need to be more a part of the group rather than to stand out and not be part of the group.

And I have lived in Okinawa, Japan two times, for six months each time. I was in the military and lived on base so obviously that was not enough for me to truly understand their culture.

This has put me to thinking about a service project I did while in Okinawa, Japan. There was a sugar cane farmer who was hurt somehow. He had a cast on a leg or arm as I recall and was not able to harvest his sugar cane as usual. The normal way is to harvest it a little at a time and place it in bundles on the side of the farm and on a certain day a truck would come and pick up what was harvested. Anything not harvested would not be picked up and therefore the farmer would not get paid. Because of this Japanese farmer's injury he was unable to harvest and in a week or two the truck would come and he would earn no money. So the English speaking branch organized a service project. We went on a weekend. There were about 10 or more people mostly white including missionaries harvesting under the direction of this farmer. We harvested his entire field in one day when it would have taken him weeks to harvest. I don't know what was more extraordinary about this, the fact that his field was harvested in a day or that a Japanese farmer had United States military volunteers harvest his field. In any case we made the news. I have a clipping somewhere from a local newspaper showing some of us in his mostly harvested field.

In light of what I have learned about Japanese not wanting to stand out, this Japanese farmer did and I now wonder if this affected him negatively in any way for not being part of the normal Japanese groups. I hope it did not have a negative effect on him. I know he appreciated the help and the fact that he was able to earn the money he needed for his family. I have always remembered this as a good experience for me where I harvested sugar cane for the first time and learned to do it with a machete.