Can immigrants and expatriates ever be truly accepted?

One of the hottest topics right now in the news is Trumps clamp down on immigrants coming into the US and this made me think hard about the issue as an immigrant: I'm a fan of British Youtube Abroad in Japan. He is a British guy who lives in Japan and makes funny videos about his life in Japan as a British expatriate there. He recently did a video about some of the hate mail that he receives on his Youtube channel and one of these very hateful messages read, "how does it feel knowing that you will never be a part of Japanese culture? Japanese people will never accept you."

It is the kind of question that I have been asked before and today, I'll like to address this issue. Let's imagine that we're going deep into the Japanese countryside, far away from any big Japanese city, somewhere in the far north of Honshu. After hours of driving, we stumble upon a very small Japanese village in the mountains which we shall call "Enkaku" (remote), with no more than 250 inhabitants. It is a small farming community, mostly of elderly folks. They have never ever met anyone from outside the local area, never mind a foreigner. Heck, none of them have even been to Tokyo, never mind left the country. If I were to send you in a little Japanese village like Enkaku (say as an English teacher at the local school), you would definitely struggle to fit in as that is not the kind of community that is going to readily welcome a foreigner into their midst. I guess that will depend on how badly they want a good English teacher!

However, few of us who live/work in another country will do the equivalent of going to a small Japanese village deep in the countryside. Instead, most of us will be moving to big cities where you will encounter a far less homogeneous, a far more mixed and vibrant urban society. Maybe the elderly folks in Enkaku are curious about the new English teacher in town, but they simply do not speak any English and if the English teacher doesn't speak Japanese fluently, there will be a big language barrier. More to the point, perhaps the elderly folks in Enkaku are only comfortable socializing with people of a very similar social background as themselves and do not have the social skills to make friends with people from another country. In a tiny, isolated village like Enkaku, yes I can imagine there being such problems may arise when trying to work with such people especially if there's a language barrier, but what about in a big city like New York, London, Paris or Hong Kong? Establishing a meaningful social and professional network will be lot easier in a big city.

What is it like living as an expat in Japan?

This begs the question: are you only able to socialize with people who are of a very similar social background or are you more than happy to befriend someone who is quite different and possibly from halfway around the world? A lot of this boils down to one simple factor: are you curious about people from other parts of the world or do you instinctively reject anything unfamiliar? In the Abroad in Japan Youtube video, we learn about Chris' best friend in Japan Natsuki. Now Natsuki is in fact from a rather small town in Japan and speaks some English, but his English isn't great. Yet Natsuki comes across as a genuinely fun guy who is keen to find out more about Chris' culture and show Chris some of the more interesting aspects of Japanese culture. Chris even takes Natsuki on a trip to London to show him what England is really like, filming Natsuki's reactions for Youtube and you can see that Natsuki does express a genuine interest in British culture. With this unique synergy of mutual respect and curiousity from both parties, they have have a great friendship and have created some very interesting Youtube videos which have garnered millions of hits.

Personally, I would never deliberately look for friends based on them being similar to myself. I think that is a bit egotistical to use yourself the perfect yardstick - indeed, I have often criticized myself on my blog, I am only two aware of my shortcomings and faults. I've also talked about many of my friends who possess qualities that I admire but do not have, friends who are cleverer than me, more interesting than me, more talented than me. I'd love to spend time with such people who are better than me in so many ways and by that token that makes them different from me. Can I deal with that? Hell yeah I can. Indeed, I am quite happy to spend a day entirely on my own without talking to anyone - I would be quite happy to just sit down at my computer and spend a few hours writing or maybe watch a good film. If I want to spend a day with friends, I think I would be quite happy to spend it with someone totally different from myself because if I wanted to spend it with someone totally similar with myself, why not just spend the day on my own then?

I love spending time with people very different from myself.

But yes, I am sure there will be some people like the elderly folks in the village of Enkaku who don't like to socialize with foreigners or try new things. Guess what? I'm not keen on trying to be their friends either - rather, I'd like to make friends with people with open minds, who are keen to learn new things and embrace new experiences. I have lived in worked in so many cities, in so many countries - I have traveled to many more on holidays and I am very pleased to tell you that there are plenty of nice people out there who will gladly befriend you and be your friend even if you have very little in common with them as long as you are willing to extend a genuine hand of friendship to them. You don't need to have the same religion, have the same kind of upbringing or education, or do the same kind of work - as long as you have a language in common to communicate in and share a desire to learn about the other person, then like Chris and Natsuki, you can forge meaningful, solid friendships anywhere in the world you go. And frankly, how happy people like Chris and I depends far less on how 'accepted' we are in this 'popularity contest' with the locals, but rather on how much money we make: the richer we are, the better the quality of our lives. Oh let's not forget the role of money in determining the quality of our lives. Life is so much more miserable if you're struggling to make ends meet. 

The fact is people are not asking the right questions: can someone like Chris move to a small village like Enkaku and truly assimilate, becoming exactly like one of the Japanese folks there? No, it would be impossible. But can a British expatriate like Chris move to a country like Japan, find a good job, have a healthy social life with plenty of good friends and be totally happy in Japan? Of course he can. So many people are barking up the wrong tree because they are not even asking the right questions in the first place. Those of us who move to another country do usually make a conscious effort to assimilate, to fit in, to embrace local customs and culture - but we are under no illusions that we are trying to pass ourselves off as a local who has grown up in that country. Besides, what we are trying to do is to build a meaningful social and professional circle of friends we can rely on, who are there for us and make us feel cherished. This is not a popularity contest: in fact, the only people who are trying to be accepted by as many people as possible are politicians when they take part in elections. That's when they go around desperately campaigning, shaking hands, kissing babies in order to win your vote. Some politicians do still go on to lose elections despite being 100% local. 

I live in London and the number of people I come into contact with on a daily basis is rather low - I probably speak to about 5 to 10 clients a day and then deal with a team of another 6 colleagues. Then there's my partner whom I live with and maybe I go down to the gym after work, I'd see another 5 to 10 friends or so there. I am excluding people like the cashier in the supermarket who assists me - thus on average I'd say I have meaningful contact with about 20 people on a weekday and probably about 5 to 10 on a weekend. That is not a lot but unless say you're a school teacher who has to teach many classes a day, that figure is probably quite average for an adult like me in London. Now contrast that to the current Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim and Asian mayor of London (though he is not the first Muslim MP election - there have been many Muslim MPs in the UK). People have looked at this election result and declared that British society is prepared to accept a Muslim and Asian mayor - someone like Khan is indeed involved in the ultimate popularity contest. Let's look at the figures of the 2016 London Mayoral elections.

Khan won a total of 1,310,143 votes, beating his closest rival Zac Goldsmith (the white, Tory candidate) who won 994,614 votes. Ironically, I didn't vote for Khan as I was so sure that he was going to win, I actually chose to make a statement by voting for the Green party instead as a protest vote. But nonetheless, Khan still won by a huge margin and credit to him, he worked very hard in his campaign to appeal to enough voters to secure his resounding victory. His campaign was effective and broke new ground because he had to reach out to a new generation of voters through social media and credit to him, he had a good team who helped him create a great online campaign (unlike Goldsmith, who made a terrible gaffe a few days before the election at an Bollywood event.)  Now imagine how hard Khan had to work to win hearts and minds during that election campaign and compare that to me when really, I'm really looking to please no more than like 20 people most days. Most of those people will be my clients and bosses who don't really care if I am a nice person or not, as long as I get work done efficiently. I've got no desire to do what Khan did, I really hate taking part in popularity contests. I'm staying the hell away from politics and pleasing about 20 people a day is more than enough to secure me a great social and professional network of people in my life who keep me very happy.

Indeed, Mayor Khan has to work very hard to appeal to so many diverse groups of voters during his election campaign whereas I have the luxury to pick and choose whom I want to be friends with and whom we choose to shun and this principle applies whether you have chosen to move halfway around the world to another country or if you are living in the very city you were born in. I value that luxury of creating a social circle of my choice very much. Allow me to talk now about a period of time when I realized the importance of this principle: my NS days. I served 2 years 4 months of national service in the years 1995 to 1997 and it was a very steep learning curve for me then. We were all Singaporean men of about the same age, often of very similar social background but were we all automatically 'accepted' just because of the seemingly homogeneous nature of the group? Far from it. You could never assume that people would befriend you on that basis in the army. Each relationship had to be negotiated on a case by case basis.

There were so many reasons to dislike an individual - I remember this guy who didn't know the meaning of teamwork, he would always see the short term gain in trying to do as little as possible without realizing how that would damage his working relationship with those around him. Oh there was no denying that he was as Singaporean as they came (oh he was typically Singaporean, right down to the perfect Singlish) - but was he accepted by the group? No, the flaws in his character meant the rest of us kept him at arm's length. We all bore a grudge against him because of his behaviour. What I did in that context was try to find common ground with the people I had to work with - do we have anything in common? If so, let's try to explore that to see if that can be the basis of a friendship. If not, never mind, can we at least strive to maintain a polite, cordial working relationship so we can get work done together? If this is the way I had to negotiate the relationships with the people I had to work with in a homogeneous environment, well that does dispel the notion that homogeneity somehow guarantees a level of 'social acceptance'. That would never exist even in a place like the remote Japanese village of Enkaku - such are human beings, we will still find a way to pick fights.

Us humans will always find a way to find conflict.

There seems to be this assumption that you would automatically get along with people who have a similar social background, who speak the same language as you, who have had the same kind of upbringing and education as you - that any kind of difference would pose a difference for you to bond as friends. However, my experience in NS taught me that was simply not the case; even in a socially homogeneous environment, people will still find a way to fight with each other.  My father fell out with his brother in the early 1990s and refused to go to the hospital in JB where he lay dying some years back - they were brothers and shared everything as children, yet that failed to cement any kind of relationship as they fought each other for decades until my father decided, "you're dead to me", refused all further contact until the day his brother actually died. So much for bonding with people you share a lot in common with?

But let's deal with the issue here: why do some people assume that immigrants will never be accepted in another country because they can never totally become like the people there? To answer this question, we have to take a time machine and step back in time a hundred years ago: 1917. That was a time when people were very much limited by technology: people did not travel, they didn't even have access to newspapers or magazines from abroad. If they wanted to read, they were limited to the books they had at the local library, if they were lucky enough to live near a library. Education wasn't as sophisticated and people were a lot simpler then. In 1917, people kept to their own kind by default because they just didn't have the resources to encounter those from other countries. So in those days, French people spoke French, lived in France, ate French food, celebrated French festivals and you could replace the word 'French' with Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Finnish or Dutch and you'll find that to be pretty much the case in any country in 1917. However, is this the case in 2017? The world has moved on in the last 100 years.

Even in a homogeneous environment, we will still find a way to create conflict.

Thanks to technology. Many of us have benefited greatly from the advantages that wealth and technology have jointly brought to our lives: as a result, many of us have a far more varied, more international cultural experience, drawing influences from sources far beyond where we live. We are no longer fazed by difference but become fascinated by it. When confronted with the foreign, our reaction has turned from suspicion to curiosity. I'd like to think the world is a better place for this change. And as a result, our criteria for friendships have changed. Someone like Chris can never be 100% Japanese even after years of living in Japan, but so what? He can be 100% nice, 100% sincere and 100% awesome. Likewise, my father probably shares 100% of his cultural identity with his late brother, but guess what? My late uncle was 100% an evil asshole and that's when even my father realized enough was enough and cut him out of his life. Can we have a moment of common sense here? What is your criteria when it comes to making friends? 

Finally, there is a huge difference between doing what Sadiq Khan did and what someone like Chris (from Abroad in Japan) is doing in Japan and what I am doing in the UK. What Khan pulled off is difficult but not impossible and what Chris and I are doing - well, it simply cannot be compared because it is not on the same scale. We're not involved in the same kind of  'popularity contest' that Khan is involved in as a politician. Now if you'd excuse me please, I'd better get back to work now as my boss has just emailed me something that requires my attention and my 'acceptance' by the company depends on my swift response to emails like this. How do you feel about immigrants and expatriates seeking acceptance in another country? Do let me know what you think on this issue please, many thanks for reading.