What Multiculturalism Means

By Chloé

One of the great things about our company is that we all come from different backgrounds and countries. We all have different opinions and ways of thinking and doing things. Especially since most of us are not Japanese natives, we also have to confront the cultural differences of the country we live in as well as those of our teammates.

As a French person, I grew up in a pretty multicultural environment but never had to adapt my own way of life to it. What I mean by this is that France is home to many different groups of immigrants, and you can interact with different types of people and different cultures. However, it is all by choice, and it doesn’t require any real give-and-take.

Growing up, everyone around me was born and raised in France so everyone had the same way of thinking and acting. I never had to worry about discrimination based on my skin color, my accent, or my religion. As I grew older, I chose to buy pad thai from the local Thai-owned restaurant, and dried hibiscus flowers from the African grocery store. In college I first became aware of my cultural privilege by interacting with coworkers of different cultures at my part time job and foreign professors at my university. But again, it was my choice, and I always had “Frenchness”to fall back on.

In France, being open about your feelings and expressing your mind is praised and valued as a quality (and it is true that French people like to complain and be critical about things). We are told since forever that one should have their own opinions about stuff and if you are someone who follows others, then you are not as accomplished as the others.

But then some people, like me, move abroad and are sometimes confronted with a new culture they have to adapt into. As adults our brains aren’t as flexible anymore, so we may have to be dedicated in order to learn about this new way of living that we jumped into.

Cultural differences when traveling are viewed as exotic, and you can choose to not adapt yourself because you do not live there. There is no pressure or need to adapt, unless you want to be really adventurous. I love learning about how people live abroad– their habits, how they do things, etc. So when I first traveled to Japan I was a bit prepared to fight the awkwardness of not knowing how to act. Yet still, when I went back to France I became aware of how different life can be depending on what country you live in. I also became even more aware that there is not only one way of doing things. There are multiple ways,and each of them is right.

When I came back to Japan a second time–this time to live there–the cultural shocks I experienced were different from the ones I had when I traveled there the first time. I experienced frustrations that were related to how I think and act and the “French way” of doing things. I knew that when Rome you should do like the Romans do, but even if I wanted to do everything correctly I still failed unintentionally. I remember arguing with the boss at the small restaurant I worked at because he was clueless about what I was unhappy with and why I was complaining about it. He gave me tasks to do and I was paid to do them, no matter what I thought about those tasks. Now that I think about how I reacted then, I think that the problem was simply that I was experiencing a cultural shock–nothing more, nothing less.

Nowadays I work in a better work environment, and I feel lucky to be a part of this team where we all care about and look out for each other. But as we are all from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, I can still feel some frustrations caused by my deep-rooted French spirit. Sometimes it is hard to explain how you feel about certain things because it is influenced by your own culture, and people around you might not understand this. So it takes a little bit more time to get everyone on the same page and a lot of patience to do so, too. I feel that keeping an open mind about how people react to you is the most important thing. In the past, I might have reacted a bit too intensely to things people did or said when they may not have had the intention of making me feel that way.

It is very interesting to live around people from different cultures. You learn every day a little bit more about the world and your own personal culture becomes richer. But it can be hard too, since you have to make your mind more flexible about how to interpret things that are going on around you. You have to let go of your home culture in many ways, or at least the person you imagined yourself to be within that culture. I wonder now, after almost two years have passed without going back, how my “Frenchness” has fared.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash