Diversity Without Borders
Recently, I read a story on diversity in Japan.
To be specific, it was a series about the population growth in Japan and focused on whether migrant workers who were coming from Latin America, particularly Brazil, had an impact on solving the labor shortage.
The lead started with a young Brazilian woman who was told as a child by her primary school teacher, “You'll never speak Japanese like the Japanese, and you can't keep up. Why don't you go to a Brazilian school? Or back to Brazil?" Essentially, the teacher told her she had no future in Japan.
Fast forward eight years later...
To the teacher’s surprise, that young Brazilian was accepted to one of the top universities in Japan.
The story went on to describe how that young woman was among many others who migrated to Japan after the government began to allow some immigrants into the country as part of an effort to solve the country’s labor crisis. Now, Brazilians are the third largest group of foreign residents in Japan (followed behind Koreans and Chinese), and have become a big part of the country’s labor workforce. Almost 19,000 Brazilians have settled in Hamamatsu City, south of Tokyo. Signposts and billboards are written in Portuguese as well as Brazilian DVDs are found in shops.
What’s intriguing about this diversity story? It was published by the BBC, a media company based in the U.K. The BBC illustrated how it went beyond its own borders to write about diversity in another country.
It would seem quite rare for the U.S. media to write a similar story about diversity in France, Australia, China, or any other country. But perhaps, this BBC story could serve as a rich example on the kind of stories we can write here in the United States. After all, isn’t the United States just as diverse as Japan?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7097929.stm
Gwendolyn Mariano