It
was interesting to see the difference of our foot and ears. Even though we are
same Japanese, we still have a lot of different body parts. Same thing can said
in race. It is nonsense to divide people by their skin colors. People will not
discriminate other people against their Greek foot or round ears. Then why we
discriminate people because of their skin color? It was first time for me to
hear the word, Nurture, but I agree with the idea. No matter what skin colors
people have, if people lived under the same culture or the environment, I
believe that the characteristics and the ways of thinking would be similar. I
am really interested in how cultures affects people and taking anthropology
class this semester. It was first time for me to learn about anthropology, but
I found it very interesting. If we observe people very carefully, we can
realize how big cultures affect people by the way people live and think. In the
last anthropology class, the professor invited the guest speaker, whose parents
are black and white. He said that he was discriminated from both black and
white people. Black people said that you are not real black, and white people
did not play around with him because they think that he is black. This story
made me think that how stupid to discriminate people by their skin colors. The
guest speaker seemed that he did not care about those who discriminated him and
found his own good friends through music. However, there are also many people
who care about discrimination more. I also will not feel good if I was judged
and discriminated by my skin color. The activity we did in today’s class was
very easy way for people to realize how meaningless to divide people by their
skin colors. I thought that every student in the world should take this class.
We
also talked about the aging society. More and more elderly people are
increasing in Japan, and there are not enough young Japanese people to work for
them. I have been taught this problem since junior high school, and the problem
become more real as I
grow up. One of the ways (or maybe only way) to solve this problem is to
welcome many immigrants to work in Japan. I am not sure whether this is good
for Japan or not, but I do not come up with other better solutions. However, if
we are going to welcome those immigrants more, it will be more important for
Japanese people to think about race and discriminations. It seems that Japanese
people usually do not have negative image toward white people, but toward
Korean and Chinese people (even though we have same skin color). This is
because of the long history of Japan, Korea and China has. I also think that
many Japanese people discriminate people from other countries not knowing much
about race or cultures. It is time for Japanese people to learn more about racism
and start thinking about immigrants. In the class of Culture Translation, we
saw the movie, GO, which is about Korean living in Japan and West Side Story,
which is also about race. Race has been controversial problem for a very long
time and people are still struggling to find the answer of this. In the West Side Story, there was a scene
where brown woman who wanted to help white people said, “Let me pass!” However,
the white people kept making fun of her and said, “You are too dark to pass.” No
matter how she tried hard to pass there, the white people would not let her go
not knowing what she were going to do was actually helping them. As a result,
she realized that it is no use trying to help them, and instead of helping, she
got angry and told them a lie. This scene is not only about them but also about
race. If we understand each other more and stop discriminating against people
from different race, everything will work out well.
