COMMUNICATIONS
Regular Feature
Greetings from the Outskirts of Kyoto vol.47
INOUE Shōichi (Director-General)
October 02, 2024
- COMMUNICATIONS
- Greetings from the Outskirts of Kyoto vol.47
In 2004, I lived for a while in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. I recently received a message from a fellow I met there during my stay. He was a master’s student at the time, and now lives in Germany.
Let me reflect on our first encounter. He was studying at a university in Tokyo until just before we met, and there had been invited to join the university soccer club. In fact, he grumbled, it was not just the university’s soccer club that wanted him, but loads of other teams as well.
The thing was that the Japanese assumed he must be a great soccer player just because he came from Brazil. But he had no interest in soccer. He was no good at samba either. He therefore wanted people to abandon their stereotypical understanding of Brazilians.
He is right of course. We have been trying to change biased views of Japan, but we may also need to reconsider our gaze towards other countries as well. It was the letter from my old Brazilian friend, and the memories it stirred, which prompted these thoughts.
