Seven years ago when I first arrived in Japan, I met a guy from Hawaii called Daryl, who later turned into one of my best friends in Tokyo. There is one piece of advice I received from Daryl that until today, I find it hard to forget. It’s an advice that I regret not believing sooner, yet I have had to encounter its consequences at times. The advice, while it sounded like a cynical joke and was thought to be taken lightly, turned out to be one of my fundamental reasons for feeling stagnation while living as an Alien 1 in a foreign land.
.. Daryl said, “No matter how hard you try, you will never become Japanese”.
.. “Even when you are good at their language?”, I replied.
.. He then continued, “Learning the language doesn’t make a difference”.
The feeling of belonging is something hard to manage. Back in my home country, I saw the same thing over and over. There were many capable and talented outsiders at work who put their tears and sweat into a project but ended up not being appreciated or rewarded. Instead, locals would get promoted and given the chance to make a lot of important decisions. It was a hindsight injustice, but for many people back home, this was the right thing to do. A local company needs to prioritize local people. Many talented foreigners ended up leaving, looking for other places that could offer them inclusivity and trust, or perhaps a sense of belonging.
I saw something similar in Japan. Despite its maturity in working systems with long company histories, professionalism is just another word used as a shield. There was actually no such thing as a merit-based reward system anywhere in the world. A business or a corporation was designed to have a totalitarian system because it is the most efficient way to make money. It’s a pyramid hierarchy where the higher-ups will always have the upper hand. The person in power decides what he wants, based on what he feels like and who he likes to work with. Almost no decisions are made based on data or merits, often just on a hunch or a good narrative.
I regretted that I had to learn this the hard way, despite this situation being shown to me through my own encounters, or even advice from other people. Perhaps I still wanted to believe in a world where people love each other without compromises, or a world where opportunities are not denied to a certain group of people, or a world where people can debate ideas regardless of their place in the hierarchy. But none of these ideas could actually live up to the real world. Because we are people, we are biased toward our own kind, and we use phrases like “to protect” as a justification to keep our race exclusive from others.
Young people who migrate to other countries often make these mistakes. They are too pure to understand the world just yet, or they have too high expectations of human kindness. They trust easily. Their eyes are full of flames - they want something better for themselves and for others, so they fight to achieve a sense of belonging. But they will reach a point of limbo, where they realize all their effort will not grow further, just because they don’t carry the same birthright as their colleagues, and their voices does not carry the same weights.
It undermines logic to think that Japan, a country that values hard work as a core part of its culture, would settle on a countryman over an outsider regardless of the scoreboard, relying instead on cultural justifications such as “a foreign person will never understand our culture”. The logic of merit is lost to genetics, which is apparently determined by fate of not being born in the right place at the right time. Daryl was right all along, from the start, exclusivity had been defined. Being good at the language does not make any difference. An outsiders will always be an outsiders.