We had our fifth Japan x Rwanda session on June 13th.
This time, we talked about the social disparities and inequalities seen in the two countries, including economical, gender, cultural, and regional ones.
As for the disparities present in Japan, we delved into discrimination based on one’s gender and educational background, as well as a form of discrimination peculiar to Japan, called “Buraku” discrimination. It was particularly interesting to have a glimpse of the educational disparities from a public health point of view.
Have you ever thought about the relationship between the length of one’s educational experience and their mortality rate? The graph on the far right shows the percentage of smokers based on one’s educational background. You can see that from the prevalence of smoking habits decreases as the education level increases, from left to right of the graph. Whether there is a direct association/correlation between ones’ educational background and their mortality needs a closer examination, but this figure tells us that there is at least a significant some sort of relationship between them.
I suppose we often witness people smoking in our everyday lives. When you spot someone smoking, you might think: "Everyone knows that smoking is bad for us, and yet why there are still many people smoking?... Also, secondhand smoke will bother those that are nearby the smoker as well… ugh.”
Having said above, why do we even know that smoking is bad for your health? That is because we learned it at school, right? So, it might be sometimes wrong to simply blame the smokers themselves for their smoking habits. We need to take their educational background and their demographics into consideration as well, for sure.
The Rwandese organizers gave us a presentation about their economical, cultural as well as gender-based inequalities.
Rwanda is known to be pretty advanced in terms of gender equality in occupational opportunities, with over 61.3% of the Congress members being female (as of January 2021). However, we also learned that there are still traditional perceptions of gender-based values embedded in Rwandan society, including the perception that women are supposed to do the housework and men are the ones to work and make their ends meet.
In the breakout room discussion, we talked about one of the questions raised by our participants after the presentation; "What efforts are being made to overcome the gender gap in both countries?”
One group talked about the changing social perception of the association between gender and certain professions and freedom of choice in uniforms. For example, the Japanese word for “nurse” that was commonly used until several decades ago, (看護婦), literally entailed a Chinese character meaning “lady”, and thus a view that nursing is supposed to be a female occupation was completely normalized back then. There has also been a debate about school uniforms in Japan, where many schools still require girls to wear skirts and boys to wear pants/trousers.
During the discussion, one of the Rwandan participants said something that really touched me, so please let me share it with you.
We are the change. The change is us. 私たちこそが変革だ。変革こそが私たちだ。
In response to this, the Japanese participants said, "The strength of the Rwandan woman cheered me up. I want to be able to make speeches that move people's hearts like hers did. I want to become able to give a speech that moves people like hers.”
Our world consists of people from very different perspectives and backgrounds, and hence it is sometimes really difficult to have everyone move forward with a shared universal goal.
Nevertheless, I was reminded that each and every one of us has the power to change our society, and that global peace building starts from us, individuals.
On June 20th, we will employ a slightly different format from our usual sessions, and we will have a session entitled: "Personalization Project Special Session - Let's listen to the voices of Palestinian youth”.
It will be from 21:00 to 22:30 JST. We will have four Palestinian guests to discuss how and when the whole conflict between Palestine and Israel started, and what is happening now there.
Please register here:
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