Madeline Horan
Madeline Horan
St. Olaf College
Participant in the 2010 ACM Student Symposium on Off-Campus Study
- Program: St. Olaf College: Asian Conservations: Meeting Sojourners - Beijing and Tokyo - January 2010
- Graduation: May 2012
- Majors: English and Asian Studies
Harmony in Japan
Mark Twain once said that the world owes you nothing, for it was here first. That is a Japanese way of thinking. In Japan, I saw that people bowed not only to other people but to their world, to the baseball field, the bus, or to the shrines of ancestors. They live their lives with the sense of how much the world has given them, and a sense of duty to give back.
This can be shown in the exchange of bows: no matter your rank, you are greeted with a bow. You, in turn, are expected to bow back. In this small gesture, a sense of polite expectation and delicacy between two or more people begins. In this way, interactions are not the undeserved raise of someone on a pedestal, but the exchange of duties towards each other. In the language, too, the style of communication promotes honoring someone else and humbling oneself.
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At left: Video of Madeline Horan's presentation at the Symposium.
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The result of this is a deliberately balanced communication that feels very calm and opens one up to the other's worldview. Communication in Japan, seemed, on the whole, peaceful and cooperative. In fact, silence is so prevalent in their culture that when I opened my mouth to speak on the subway system, I felt embarrassed because I had broken the meditative silence that pervades Japan. This silence is not, however, suffocating, but meditative, calming, and respectful.
Sitting on the subway, I found myself carried into calm meditations that I rarely get in the loud hustle-and-bustle of America. So as much as America paints a picture of Japan as a suffocating culture of hard work and high expectations, I found myself ultimately calm in Japan – and in the infamous subway system, of all places! Though individual voices are not well-heard in Japan, as a wave of people they move calmly and more efficiently throughout the world's ocean, past the small and frequent hurricanes of American self-righteousness.
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