The Past and the Future

Last night, I finished a 350-page history of Japan from the 1500s through 2014. I always find history interesting, and particularly so when I’m living in the country I’m reading about. I majored in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in college, but I have studied relatively little of the Far East. It’s often depicted as a civilization completely alien to the West, one where values, aesthetics, and even language structure are so different as to be almost incomprehensible at times.

Strangely Familiar

Seeing as I’ve been stuck in a room on a Navy base in quarantine, I can’t really speak much to all these things. What I will say, though, is that the history of this supposedly-alien country seemed strangely familiar.

For instance, I read yesterday about Japan’s reaction to the 1973 Oil Crisis, which brought an abrupt halt to the booming economic growth of the previous decades. In the face of this unforeseen emergency, Japanese citizens reacted in a manner that seems, at least to my Western-trained mind, inexplicable. Do you know what they did?

They bought toilet paper. That’s right – there was a “toilet paper panic” in Japan in 1973. This history book was written in 2012, long before COVID had become a household name. Turns out, people are people the world over.

On a more somber note, let’s go back even further – to 1923. In the 1920s, in the face of widening economic gaps, social change, and rapid industrialization, some tensions arose in Japan. Blue-collar workers formed labor unions and organized strikes to fight for higher wages. Many politicians closely affiliated with big business and entrenched bureaucracy made changes reluctantly. Tensions between upper and lower classes, employers and employees, city and countryside, flared up. Sounding familiar yet?

With all these tensions came another set of tensions along ethnic lines. Japanese factory workers struggling to support their families resented the cheaper labor force represented by Chinese and Korean immigrants. Some reacted with suspicion, slander, and occasionally, violence. In the wake of the Great Japan Earthquake of 1923, rumors abounded of immigrant conspiracies, and between two and six thousand people were killed by vigilante groups claiming they were defending Japanese property.

Going in Circles

Sound familiar yet? But wait – there’s more. How did these self-styled vigilantes know whether the person they were speaking to was an immigrant? They had them repeat several simple sentences and listened for an accent.

This bit of news stopped me in my tracks because it reminded me of another story. Let’s go back even further through history. This time we’re in the Middle East in around 1000 BC. The story is in Judges 12.

The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.

People are People

As it turns out, people are people; it doesn’t matter where, and it doesn’t matter when. The problems we are dealing with are not American problems or white problems or even modern problems. They’re just people problems – and it’s individual people, not social evolution, that is the solution to them.

This is not to say there are no differences between people or peoples. Of course there are! Often you can listen to a piece of music, or look at a painting, or hear the sound of a language, and you instantly know it’s Japanese, or Egyptian, or French. Individual cultures are marvelously, gloriously, enthrallingly distinct. How dull the world would be if we were all the same!

On another level, however, this demonstrates how much alike we are. When we look at a Japanese painting, we know it’s Japanese – but we also know it’s a painting. When we listen to a foreign language, we know it’s foreign – but we also know it’s a language. It is this very core of shared experience that allows us to truly appreciate the differences between us.

What am I trying to say? I’m not really sure. But as I spend the next couple years in a country not my own, I look forward to exploring the obvious differences – and I take comfort in remembering the underlying similarities.