Plural Identities

Allophilia

We've inadvertently been practising allophilia at my company, Japan Intercultural Consulting, it would seem.   We usually kick off our seminars by asking the participants what they find positive about working with Japanese people (if they are European) or Europeans (if they are Japanese).  When we've forced them to be positive, we then let them get stuck into the 'challenges', because there are no negatives, just challenges, in the modern corporate world...  This approach could also be said to be in line with what is known as "Appreciative Inquiry", which means to start with what is right (about an organisation, for example) rather than what is wrong, which is the usual consulting approach.

More often than not, the European participants say what they like about working in a Japanese company or with Japanese people is the pure and simple fact that it is 'different', alongside predictable aspects like polite, long term planners, loyalty, calm, quick to help, stick to promises etc. 

I wonder what kind of results this sort of approach would yield if applied nationwide.  Whereas I can imagine getting some positive answers, based on actual experience of interacting with Hispanics from non-HIspanic Americans, I fear what kind of response one might get from asking somebody in the UK what they liked about Bengali British, or the "invisible minority" British Born Chinese.  Many probably would not have any experience on which they could base their opinions?  Or else they would find the question troubling in its implication that it is OK to generalise about groups of people based on their ethnic backgrounds.  Allophilia theorists say in response to this that:

efforts to fight racism often err in trying to abolish or minimise the difference between groups—telling people that “we and they are really the same” or “we all belong to a bigger group, and that matters more than any slight difference.”

The experience of Bosnia and Rwanda, where murderous hatreds resurfaced after decades of apparent symbiosis, shows that categories are resilient. That is one reason why Mr Pittinsky thinks that “mere tolerance is inherently unstable.”

Strangers into Citizens

Despite the fact that this campaign has been written about in the Spectator, is supported by Ken Livingstone, our Madeleine of the Sorrows and various Catholic churches, it seems like a good thing to me.

Bill Bailey on Britishness

A version of this was on telly last night, reminding me of the time I saw Bill Bailey at the Orange Tree, Richmond and wept with laughter, and also how very British he indeed is.  ...infused with a wistful melancholy... chipper... casual violence... Nectar Points

This one is good too - "we crave disappointment", "we're just a bunch of stoned, illiterate, wheezing, shagging, lardy bastards", although it does have the obligatory for British stand-ups in order to get whoops from the crowd anti-American bits too.

Cuba

Philippe Legrain links to a story in the FT a couple of days ago about the phenomenal level of remittances to their families back home by immigrants from Latin American and the Caribbean.  I was very struck by the chapter on this in his recent book, and talked about the "suitcase full of cash" which he says is the preferred method for Cuban immigrants with my Cuban friend a couple of days ago.  She says that actually it's not suitcasefuls of cash, but in her case suitcasefuls of clothes and sheets.  Apparently as a primary school teacher in Cuba she was earning $5 a month, but clothes, sheets, towels cost about the same as in Primark in the UK, and are worse quality.

The solution to survival for most Cubans, apart from relying on family members overseas, is to steal from their employers (who are all state run).  In my friend's case, she could not and would not steal from her school, so she made ends meet by taking on private pupils, which she said was "naughty".  I said surely it was not "naughty" in the sense of immoral, but illegal in Cuba.  She said "'naughty', 'illegal', 'immoral', it is all the same thing in Cuba at the moment."

She would like to bring supplies to her old school, she says, because even a suitcaseful of stationery would make a huge difference to them, but of course her family needs come first.  So, if you must visit Cuba "before it gets commercialised", please pack as much as you can into your suitcase for schools, or track down a Cuban person in the UK and ask them what you can take. 

Temporary immigration

There's nothing like a bracing encounter with a taxi driver to shatter one's cosy liberal middle class vision of tolerant Britain welcoming hard working immigrants filling jobs indigenous Brits don't want to do.  Cocooned by a Today programme which runs an item on Blue Peter phone in scandals and John Hurrumphries frothing about the Channel 4 programme on global warming as its lead stories, I had failed to hear about the riots at the Campsfield detention centre.  My Brighton taxi driver had, and his view was "Who's paying for all that damage?  We should never be letting immigrants in here in the first place if you ask me".  I hadn't asked him, needless to say.  It turns out the detention centre has started taking in foreign criminals (the wrongly released ones) in addition to the asylum seekers it was originally designed for, and these people of course have nothing to lose by  further criminal behaviour.

Philippe Legrain has a chapter in his book suggesting that one way of overcoming objections to immigrant workers is to allow them in on temporary stays.  I can foresee lots of problems with enforcement, but I suppose if it allows both immigrants and employers to be more transparent with each other that the employment offer is simply low skill low paid work, this would avoid the kind of situation currently occurring in Japan, whereby foreign workers are being brought in as "trainees" but are in fact only exploited and not trained in any skills at all.

Welcoming immigrants

A Financial Times/Harris poll published a couple of weeks' ago showed that 47% of Britons believe migration by workers within the EU has been negative for the economy, and only 19% think it has been good, whereas in Spain 42% of the population believe migrants have been a benefit and only 24% think they have been bad for the economy.  Two-thirds of those surveyed in Britain said there were too many foreigners.  Although the government line is that the influx of eastern Europeans has been good for the economy, filling skill gaps and keeping wage growth under control, but not causing wage reduction or unemployment, they are introducing an immigration points system next year to give preference to young, highly skilled professionals and entrepreneurs.

Philippe Legrain argues, convincingly, in "Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them" (I'm about half way through...) that actually low skilled, unskilled immigrants are more beneficial  to the recipient country, being happy to do the jobs that native  populations don't want to do, at lower cost, and, as a group, repatriating sums of money larger than most official aid to their (usually poor) countries.  We may be in danger of doing what Australia does, which is importing highly skilled people to do unskilled jobs.

Targetting younger immigrants is more justifiable, as they are more likely to be net contributors in terms of taxes and benefits, particularly given our ageing population.

I think the British hostility to immigration shown in the poll is more to do with our national habit of disagreeing with or not understanding the theoretical, abstract or general, but in practice being unconsciously in agreement.  It's the "I'm not a racist, some of my best friends etc etc" stance.  We also need to realise it is not just our friends that might be "immigrants" but the people we rely on or are connected to in our daily lives - from my own life: a Cuban manicurist, my son's best friends' parents including Italians and Americans, a hairdresser married to a Gambian footballer, a South African dentist and South African vet, a personal trainer married to a Venezuelan water engineer.

Glass of white wine for the ladies

"Al Murray's Happy Hour" on Saturday night reinforced my view that it is the funniest thing on TV at the moment.  He must have felt too, as he sang "Killer Queen" with Madness, that life doesn't get much sweeter than this.

It's fascinating watching him play with his pub landlord character, particularly from a class perspective.  I remember him as an outgoing but not particularly loud fellow-historian a year below me at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.  Apparently he went to private school and is a direct descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray and has a British diplomat grandfather.  His audience (which seems to be a mix of middle class students and working class - taxi driver, betting office clerk, postman, pub of the week employees)  must surely know that the xenophobic Essex working class persona is a total fake, and yet laugh along, are not insulted by this very middle class, even upper middle class, person's parody of a working class stereotype, partly I suppose in the way that Alf Garnett/Jonny Speight allowed taboo subjects and suppressed prejudices to be expressed and then by covertly laughing at them, de-fanging them.

It is very very British and most of all in that it allows us to laugh at ourselves.  It got me laughing at myself, last week, when queuing for the check in at Narita airport.  I was being very British, joining a long queue on the assumption that if there was a queue I was doomed to join it, only to find, when I got to the end, that it was the Economy Class queue and there was in fact an Upper Class non-queue I could have not joined.

As I was unnecessarily queuing, a man started to double queue next to me, almost edging in front of me.  I stiffened, gave sidelong glares (see Kate Fox, Watching the English, for more detail on this behaviour) and eventually said "Would you like to go in front of me?" (again, so British of me in my polite sarcasm).  He shrugged and said "no, no".  There was something about the "non" of the "no" that made me squint at his passport.  French.  The Pub Landlord bellowed in my ear "Rules is rules.  If we didn't have rules, where would we be? France!"

Other apercus from the Pub Landlord:
On the British when it's sunny: "Out come the shorts of hope, the pale legs of experience, the sandals of folly"
On being a single male Brit: "There's nothing sadder than taping Eurotrash.  There's no such thing as an ironic w**k."

Talking Italian

I was having tea with an Italian friend today - she asked for tea, not coffee.  She's been living in the UK for 15 years and has recently started a job which involves having to deal with southern Italians on supply chain issues. Easy, you would think, as she's Sicilian, but she says it is driving her crazy, and is reminding her of all the reasons she prefers to live in the UK.  "They have a completely different sense to me of right and wrong!"

I mentioned that I had been talking with a Japanese manager who had been sent to a factory in Italy, recently acquired by his Japanese company, to spread Japanese manufacturing techniques.  He was  not having much success. In response to my question of what three key things a Japanese expat manager in Italy should know (my three for the UK being: expectation that managers should be good communicators, need to respect status and job roles, must observe fair play and due process).  He said expect a totally messy decision making process with the end result appearing suddenly out of nowhere, to have to be a strong top down boss and a need to be flexible.

My Italian friend agreed and added, with regard to her preference for British 'fairness' and queuing, that she felt even more alienated from her original culture when she tried to renew her ID card in her hometown in Sicily recently, and turned up at 8am when the town hall was supposed to open, only to find it closed.  The official finally turned up at 9am, with a friend, with whom he had been having breakfast in a bar.  When she complained, he simply went into his office with his friend, and left her to wait.  When she complained further, he then filled in her form incorrectly (deliberately).  She complained again, and he told her to go elsewhere.  "But this is where I come from, there is no elsewhere!"  she protested. 

I asked her what she liked about the UK, and after some discussion, she boiled it down to the British lack of intrusiveness.  She gave as an example, that the Italians that she worked with felt they had a right, even after only working with her for a week, to pass comment on whether or not they liked her clothes. 

I think I will add 'lack of intrusiveness' to my Britishness list.

Random Italianness facts from recent surveys covered in the Financial Times:
Italians are the second most pessimistic after the French, in Europe, in terms of believing that life in their country is getting worse.
Italians take the least time off work (absence, not holidays) in Europe

Japanese dog whistle

Another Japanese minister manages to offend , this time claiming that Japan is homogenous and historically governed by the Yamato race.    Well actually Japan is relatively homogenous, with only 1% or so of the population being 'immigrants' compared to (if I remember correctly the chapter of Philippe Legrain's book I read yesterday) 8% in Europe.  Also, this sense of homegeneity was reinforced by the Shogunate's policy of closing the country off from the rest of the world for 200 years.  Nonetheless, the Yamato stuff is racist b******s and a much better description of the still very unclear roots of the Japanese is given by Wikipedia here.

Of course the minister is electioneering, a less subtle version of the Tory dog whistle.  As Terrie's Take points out, the more than 250,000 illegal immigrants in the Japan are worrying both authorities and now the voters. A recent National Police Agency (NPA) survey found that more than 55% of Japanese are concerned about rising crime by foreigners. This, despite the fact that recorded crime by foreigners fell a surprising 16.2% last year.  Various policies are being proposed, including making a certain competence in Japanese compulsory when renewing visas.  As Terrie's Take says, it would be nice to think this toughening up, or clarifying of rules, was in preparation for allowing more immigrants into Japan.