I joined the FWI conference for the first time this year. I was a presenter for the Spotlight Session. The 20-minute speech was short, but it was long enough to show my passion for the subject. My topic was the Jazz Solution to the Friendship Gap, which uses the collaborative structure of a jazz combo to suggest a way to address the lack of racial integration in social networks.
Jazz is a synthesis of western and non-western ideas that has become universal and global. I am an advocate for jazz-style thinking to solve diverse issues. I have finally launched my Jazz Solution website! Enjoy my first blogs, “Crazy Rich Asians Part I, II, III.
At every workshop and general session that I attended at FWI, people were talking about how important it is to make personal connections with diverse people. Equity is a big issue in every sector.
Dr. Craig Samitt, the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, mentioned that the longevity of people of color is 13 years shorter than that of white people. He announced that as an insurance provider, he’d like to focus on equity issues in Minnesota.
Communications is essential for transformation. Deeyah Khan, a filmmaker, had a great story. She helped a former white supremacist transform through her social action approach to her documentary film. The participants in a panel discussion were a film maker, the former Neo-Nazi activist and the son of a victim of a white supremacist attack. It’s great to see enemies or people they don’t agree with become friends.
My new Linkedin friend Steve Lam participated in this session with me and made a comment on our site. As he said, we’ve got to connect with people whether we like them or not. I think we can’t give up on conversations to break the silos that separate people. Only thoughtful communication can help us to increase our mutual understanding.
People in our society are too separated. I also learned that about one out of two Millennials feels lonely and isolated despite the fact they are the most connected among all of generations through “social media.”
We need to keep developing better personal connections among us.
(Adapted from my speech: “The Jazz Solution to the Friendship Gap” with a Japanese Perspective, The Forum on the Workplace Inclusion, 31st Annual Conference, Minneapolis Convention Center, April 17, 2019)
It is common to hear that Westerners tend to be individualists, whereas Japanese are more group-minded. It is important to understand that these cultural differences can shape how we perceive the world. American Sociologist Robert Nisbet describes it in terms of context. He said Westerners tend to think in a narrow context, like having tunnel vision. They like to identify a specific thing, and categorize it – while ignoring everything else. The Japanese are just the opposite. They are a high context culture, like using a wide-angle lens. They understand something based on its connections. Another way to put it is that Westerners are linear thinkers, while Asians are holistic thinkers.
We can see this difference if we examine the idea behind friendship in both cultures. In Old English, “friend” comes from a root word that meant liking or loving. Being friends starts with a feeling of the heart, a personal preference.
In Japanese, the word for friendship is Yujo, 友情. You can see these characters posted on the walls in every school in Japan . The first character Yu 友 depicts two right hands reaching out for each other. Basically, it is a handshake.
The second character – Jo 情– is composed of three sections – Heart on the left side, a growing tree and a blue color on the right side — which symbolizes clear, clean or true. So Jo means true or clean heart, and is translated as “trust.”
So the Japanese word for friendship, Yujo, means you and I reach out with true heart or “trust.”
Japanese Friendship is literally a social connection – a social network.
To generalize – in the West, friendship is a personal preference to serve the individual, whereas in Japan, forming friendships is a way to strengthen the entire community. The search for individual happiness is frowned upon – as you may have seen in the movie, Crazy Rich Asians. In the movie, the Chinese mother ridicules her son’s Chinese American girlfriend, because she puts her personal happiness before the family, the larger context.
These differences are not telling us who is right or wrong. Why do we need to have a winner and a loser? A better approach is to combine these two ideas of friendship — to synthesize them to create a fuller concept.
April 17, 2019