Johanna Pokorny, Bronwyn Frey, Nicholas Feinig, Brenton Buchanan

In Japan, Professor Shiho Satsuka explains, the city of Osaka has a strong history of grassroots activism in advocating for issues of social inequality. Prof. Satsuka remembers this being visible when she used to take the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka in the 1980s and 1990s; upon entering the city, she recounts, there was a large billboard on the top of a building advocating for the liberation of the Burakumin. The Burakumin are a group of Japanese peoples who in the past were treated as social outcasts, and, even though this caste system is long abolished, they still experience high levels of discrimination in Japan. When she saw the billboard from the train, Prof. Satsuka was reminded that “Oh, I am coming to Osaka,” to a place that has this commitment to advocating for social inclusion and broadening Japanese notions of diversity.

As a mark of this diversity-driven commitment, for the past five years, graduate students from Japan have been coming to Toronto to learn about Canadian multiculturalism and diversity issues as a part of the RESPECT (Revitalizing and Enriching Society through Pluralism, Equity, and Cultural Transformation) Program at Osaka University. At the University of Toronto, they participated in the “Osaka Respect Summer School in Multicultural Studies: Critical Engagement with Diversity and Inequality,” supported by the Asian Institute and the Department of Anthropology and coordinated by Prof. Satsuka and Osaka University Professors Gergely Mohacsi and Steve Muller.

This year, the fifth and final year, twelve graduate students came for the intensive week-long program from April 26th to May 4th. While the program evolved over the five years, its core focus was on teaching the visiting students the possibilities, challenges, and realities of multiculturalism as a national policy in Canada and an everyday practice of living in Toronto. It was divided into three core clusters combining seminars and fieldtrips around the city. The program culminated each year in a joint-graduate student workshop, which brought together presentations from the Osaka University graduate students with students from the University of Toronto. While the program in Toronto has come to an end, there are plans for Osaka University to invite U of T students in 2019. The details of this will be announced later in 2018-19, so stay tuned!

While it might seem like the students from Osaka came to study the widely-touted and celebrated model of Canadian multiculturalism —and certainly this is a fantasy that the students often arrived with— this was not the main take-away of the program. Principal of New College and Professor Bonnie McElhinny explained that the celebratory narrative could be found elsewhere, but that this program offered something else. Hence, in the first of the three clusters, which Prof. McElhinny taught, she focused on “the critique of multiculturalism,” providing students with anti-racist and decolonial rereadings of multicultural policy in Canada, drawing attention to its marginalization of people of colour and its erasures of indigenous peoples. This was a challenging start for the students from Osaka University, many of whom came to realize very quickly that Canadian multiculturalism is not figured out or complete. They have posted reflections on some of their experiences from the past years here and here.

The students were challenged by experiencing the social, political, and cultural understandings of multiculturalism, explained Professor Girish Daswani, who taught the second cluster which focused on home-making and diasporic communities in Toronto. “They learnt about settler colonialism, indigeneity, race and racism, and the importance of specificity,” all in an intense and short week and all of which prompted them “to recognize how multiculturalism is more complex,” Prof. Daswani further explained. Dean of the School of Graduate Studies and Professor Joshua Barker, who taught the final cluster on urban life and infrastructure in Kensington Market supported by the Ethnography Lab, which Prof. Barker also directs, explained that multiculturalism is important to discuss because it is a pervasive feature of our social context. Many moments during the program pointed to the ways in which multiculturalism in Canada is more than a policy or model. It is an everyday fact and one which, as Professors Satsuka and Daswani both added, takes effort and has a specific, often fraught or myopic, history. Indeed, even for the U of T students involved as research assistants and presenters, who often take multiculturalism for granted, the program was a brief window into this complex history that is not necessarily taught comprehensively or critically, even in graduate student classes.

But this program was not all about Canada. As the Osaka students learnt about diversity issues here, they also taught those who have been involved in the program about Japanese engagements with diversity, especially in Osaka, which are rich and engaged. The Japanese notion of kyosei, translated as “co-living,” “coexistence,” or “living together,” is similar to multiculturalism and has emerged as a point of comparison. It was the central focus of this year’s program’s final workshop, which was titled “(Re)Thinking Diversity and Comparison” and engaged participants in a sustained discussion of comparing kyosei with multiculturalism. The comparisons have begun a larger conversation about more diverse and capacious ways of thinking about diversity; for example, kyosei might be generative for the way in which it decentres from notions of culture, as Prof. Daswani explained, or incorporates nature in complex ways, as Prof. Satsuka said, both of which Canadian multiculturalism does not do.

The students from Osaka also shared about themselves, their stories, backgrounds, and research, thereby letting U of T participants into their experiences of diversity and undoing a fantasy of a homogenous Japan. As both Prof. Satsuka with her example above and Prof. McElhinny explained, there is rich grassroots activism and community-learning engagement in Japan and Osaka that U of T scholars could stand to learn from. And there are more points of connection between Canada and Japan in this regard; for example, Prof. McElhinny highlighted that it was Japanese scientists who became involved early on in the mercury poisoning research at Asubpeeschoseewagong (Grassy Narrows) First Nation in northwestern Ontario, even as Canadian authorities ignored, or worse, downplayed, the concerns. In 1970s Japan, it was precisely these concerns about mercury poisoning that became a flashpoint and led to the emergence of social movements that engaged notions of kyosei. These past points of connection might prompt us to see how Canadians can learn further from Japanese scholars, making important future connections.

But diversity issues are not easy to unpack. Learning from each other about diversity is challenging, especially as Japanese and Canadian histories are very different. But it is precisely because of this challenge and these differences that there is also possibility found in putting these different perspectives into conversation. This is the challenge of diversity in action, explained Prof. Satsuka, adding that it is important to have the opportunity to put yourself in a position with people from a different background. And while Canadian multiculturalism seems to do so by claiming to create an inclusive space for diverse peoples, as the Osaka Respect program revealed year after year, this is from a particular Canadian history, and most often within a majority, dominant, white perspective. Both Professors McElhinny and Daswani, who were able to go to Osaka, expressed that visiting the city deepened their sense of the complexity that Japan brings to diversity and social inequality issues and their interactions with their colleagues from Japan. As Prof. Barker suggested, the program exposed U of T graduate students to a different national academic culture and to concepts and academic networks they might not already benefit from. Everyone agreed that having more U of T graduate students involved would be a benefit to them and certainly to the university more broadly.

International exchanges such as this are a kind of experiential learning that students often report as life-changing, explained Prof. McElhinny. This opportunity for cultural exchange has the spirit of anthropological fieldwork and of becoming attuned to diversity differently. There is the added benefit of learning directly from Japanese graduate students, scholars who are exceptional learners, listeners, and experts about the diversity issues faced in Japan. We —the Canadian “we” that is invoked on behalf of the nation and claims to be a diverse, multicultural “we”— could go further in exploring more diverse notions of diversity. For, as Prof. Daswani stated, “there are so many other ways of coexistence.”