Cross-cultural communication （100）
103) Cross-cultural considerations inspired by the cleaning man at the nursing home
This is a story from early summer 2018. I was doing the morning rounds at the nursing home where I work four days a week, and the cleaning man was just cleaning the hallway. When I said “Good morning” to him, he returned the greeting and stopped what he was doing to make way for me and the nurse. I think this is a normal scene in hospitals and nursing home in Japan. At that moment, I suddenly remembered the morning rounds at a hospital in Brooklyn 40 years ago. At the training hospital in America, there is a morning round with only the residents after the early morning round with the attending doctor every morning. During this attending doctor time, the cleaning work in the hospital also begins. When the doctors and the cleaning staff bump into each other, the cleaning staff will calmly tell the doctors to move aside, saying “You're in my way. The attending doctor will then reply, ‘Okay, everyone move aside,’ as if it were the most natural thing in the world. My colleague, who was looking at me with a puzzled expression, explained to me, ”In America, the cleaning staff are more important than the doctors. he explained with a grin. But if you think about it normally, doctors earn more than 10 times as much as the janitor, and they also have a higher social status. However, in everyday situations, both parties are equal, and neither side suffers any damage as a result of expressing their own opinions. (Well, there are exceptions in every world...)
Ten years after the residency in US, I started a private practice in a hospital in Paris in my 40s. Even here, there was a cleaning service for the building, but we doctors didn't start seeing patients until 9am, so the cleaning of the corridors started at 7am, and the cleaning of the consultation rooms started at 8am, so doctors and cleaners never came into contact with each other in the first place. One time, I arrived at the hospital before 7am because I had some business to attend to. The cleaners in the corridors and consultation rooms were all women of Arab descent. Most of the people cleaning the sidewalks in the early morning, just after they had left their apartments in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, were black Africans. So in Paris, there is a certain degree of correspondence between job type and race, and the times when people are working do not overlap too much. In America, there is no such system, so things like the incident I mentioned earlier happen. In large cities like New York, where on the surface African Americans (blacks) and whites are considered equal, they make their claims boldly. I think that the difference in the labor patterns and assertion of rights of the descendants of former immigrants from the US and France is due to the difference in the history of immigration from Africa. In the US, where immigration began a century before France, the legal status and economic background of African Americans is to some extent stable, but the economic status of Arab immigrants from North Africa and black immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa in France remains at the lowest level of society.
Looking back at our own country, Japan, there is a real possibility of a full-scale immigration policy being implemented to make up for the decline in the population. In order to predict and prevent the various problems that may arise at this time, it is necessary to carefully study the history of developed countries such as the United States and France that have implemented immigration policies.
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