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Climate Lab: Japan, Part 5 – Insights, Continued
Going back to Japan feels like going home in some ways, and it had been almost five years since my last visit (just as the news there started covering something called COVID-19). My trips to Hawai’i [1] and Fiji [2] with the Climate Lab were novel, but I was especially curious how I would view my second home differently through Climate Lab lenses. Unlike Hawai’i and Fiji, I didn’t experience an overwhelming epiphany that resulted from an unexpected similarity between Japan and the US. Perhaps it’s because I was already familiar with the culture, so I approached our field visits in a fundamentally different way – or perhaps it’s because the two countries themselves are so fundamentally different.
I am often struck by my affinity for Japan, a place so drastically different from that of my native country – a place with low diversity and high cultural cohesion, and a place where I will always be welcomed but never fully welcome. The United States, on the other hand, long purported to be a melting pot, has never been a particularly friendly place for foreigners – now especially. In fact, we have such a diverse set of perspectives here – and a culture that enables vehement disagreement over them – that we have surpassed an adversarial environment (which can arguably drive progress when channeled correctly) and utterly embraced wholesale polarization.
The Best-Laid Plans
The concept of Paradox clearly resonated with me during and after our time in Japan, as it got its own designated post when I was writing about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. [3] Without repeating all of that content here, I will highlight that polarized relationships enable us to think more simply about a topic without having to consider the other side’s perspective – obviously, there’s often someone yelling it at us. The more polarized our camps, the less we evaluate the other’s perspective, and vice-versa, creating a vicious circle that widens a divide. While there certainly is disagreement and diversity in Japan, it can seem nonexistent when compared to the United States – and it makes sense that a culture focused more on harmony within the group offers more space for exploring alternate perspectives.
The question toward which I have gravitated in the Climate Lab, in my day job, and even in my graduate research [4] is the one of how we can bridge these gaps between perspectives, knowledge, and behavior meaningfully and effectively. In the world of academic theory, it’s a matter of identifying a common label for a group that includes both opposing parties and/or identifying a common goal toward which we can work together. In reality, that is far easier said than done. Our cohort of 16, spanning 12 countries and a range of industries, had the common ground of our coursework and travel together, but even when explicitly tasked with creating a final presentation that integrated experiences and perspectives from across the group, we still presented a siloed summary of our work across five separate areas without much cross-pollination or synthesis between them.
We learned in Hawai’i that effective engagement needs to be overt and intentional in order to get a representative mix of perspectives at the table. We learned in Fiji that establishing the “right” course of action relies just as much on understanding the lived experience of community members as it does the technical expertise of engineers. It was becoming clear to me that the focus of my time in Japan would be, after having welcomed a variety of perspectives, after having understood the value of each, how could we make effective connections that not only establish the desire to work collaboratively but ensure that it actually happens? We explored these ideas in September 2024, and they seem particularly relevant now, subsequent to November 2024.
Holding Space
In last week’s post I described a conversation I had with the former Vice Governor of Okinawa, who talked about the value of people connecting with their culture in ways that were meaningful to them, rather than having something forced upon them and ultimately creating a negative experience. [5] What that means, consequently, is that culture will evolve over time as new generations engage with it differently, but a culture that doesn’t evolve will eventually become unrecognizable and irrelevant. Evolution is constant, whether in culture, in business, or in nature, and things that don’t evolve eventually die out when conditions are no longer suitable for them. I – with my MBA hat – think of it in the context of business: you can’t innovate by doing what you’ve always done, and if you don’t move with the times, you will be left behind.
But change is scary, and scared people become less logical and more emotional, meaning that they are far more likely to double down on a comfortable belief (even if it’s patently false) than consider something that makes them uncomfortable (even if it’s necessary to consider). Further, if someone is afraid of change, appealing to them with a factual argument is probably not going to work. (That’s a lesson I am still learning.) What you can do instead is work to understand their perspective (which is also a lesson I am still learning – one that is especially difficult when I find myself in heated political debates with family members.) If you need a logical reason as to why it helps to start with questions instead of talking points, consider the fact that you won’t be able to craft a persuasive argument until you understand what points you’re debating.
With all that said, it is not my intention to get into an examination here of how to engage someone from a different political camp. I’ve done that before, [6] and those skills are increasingly important in our world, but it’s not the point I’m trying to make in this post. My point here is something more foundational, more difficult, and more valuable: the concept that simply having a basic understanding of someone else’s lived experiences helps shape how you approach conversations, collaborations, or advocacy efforts with them without (intentionally or unintentionally) imposing your values on them. You may not have an adversarial relationship, you may even have a good relationship, but it is still critical to understand their experiences, their priorities, and their concerns – in short, what drives them to do what they do.
Back to Basics
When you hold the space for more than one perspective (up to and including embracing Paradox), it provides the opportunity for a more robust understanding of a complex issue. And just as I spoke about the importance of innovation above, it is also important to retain a connection to identity, place, and purpose – all of which are inextricably tied together in many places throughout the Pacific. As Maya Angelou said, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been,” which is why I genuinely appreciate Japan’s ability to embrace its cultural heritage as well as its modern innovations.
The morning after our closing ceremony and reception in Tokyo, we boarded the bullet train for a bonus day together, harvesting rice in Higashimatsushima, just northeast of Sendai. Ecotourism company Odyssey Nature Japan [7] offers a range of nature-based educational experiences in conjunction with local farmers, fishermen, and researchers, and they brought us to a family farm where we cut, tied, and stacked bunches of rice by hand in the traditional way. It is less common to see this kind of manual labor as agricultural technology – particularly rice harvesters – become more prevalent, but some small family farms still stick to the old way.
Spending time in the field was intended to underscore a connection to the land and tradition, as well as the important role small-scale, family-owned, organic farms play in the local economy. Certainly it’s not practical or cost-effective to feed the entire country on rice harvested by hand, but the experience of seeing how our food is grown or raised is a valuable one as we consider the various tradeoffs between climate impacts, food access, economic viability, and public health – especially when it comes to concepts like “big agriculture.” We discussed these topics as we gathered for a meal after our (brief) manual labor in the field, and it was honestly the most delicious rice I’ve ever eaten in my life.
A Fond Farewell
Understanding where we’ve been helps us make informed decisions about where we go next. Because of my day job working with communities impacted by shale gas development, I instantly recognized the dangers of unjust renewable energy development on Oahu. Because of the fears I see at home regarding my region’s eroding industrial identity, I instantly recognized the impracticality of asking Daku villagers why they don’t just move somewhere else or find a different source of revenue. Japan’s embrace of the paradox offers the opportunity to make use of traditional wisdom while exploring modern technology, and I am excited to see how those two things can grow together in my own work moving forward, particularly when it comes to bridging different perspectives.
We would have one more virtual session to wrap everything up in the weeks to come, but our last time together as a cohort was at an end. Back at Tokyo Station, our group filed off the bullet train and stood looking at each other, not wanting the moment to end, almost unsure what to do next. What we did next was put our arms around each other, rocking slightly in our massive group hug and blocking foot traffic with the circle we made. Gandalf’s farewell rang in my head: “here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship.” He also reminded his friends that not all tears are an evil, which is good because I was already making a lot of Japanese people uncomfortable with mine.
As I said during our closing presentation the night before, whatever happens next is up to us. We had already started discussing ways to keep in touch and plan collaborations in the future, and we were already thinking of ways to support the second cohort – remembering of course that our cohort would always be “number one.” As sad as it made me to see this year come to an end, I was grateful for the experience, which was truly life-changing and helped me through the darkest days of my life. And I knew that the best way I could honor this experience would be to take the value I gained and pay it forward. I hope this blog series has served in that purpose, but there are other efforts in the works as of now, and I will be talking about those a little more in a future post.
But for now, thank you for reading.
The Indo-Pacific Leadership Lab [8] is a program of the East-West Center, [9] with support from the Japan Foundation. [10]
As always, content on this blog reflects my personal views, and not those of any organization with which I am associated.
[1] https://radicalmoderate.online/climate-lab-hawaii-in-the-classroom/
[2] https://radicalmoderate.online/climate-lab-fiji-in-the-classroom/
[3] https://radicalmoderate.online/the-world-of-miyazaki-paradoxes/
[4] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137011435
[5] https://radicalmoderate.online/climate-lab-japan-insights/
[6] https://radicalmoderate.online/2024-general-election-part-4-depolarization/
[7] https://www.odysseynaturejapan.com/en
[8] https://www.eastwestcenter.org/projects/indo-pacific-leadership-lab
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