Inter-culture

We were in my friend's apartment, trying to watch a football/soccer game in England from our location here in Japan. Suddenly, he pointed and shouted, "What the hell is that thing?!" I looked toward the direction of his finger and saw a cockroach sitting unabashedly on his balcony doorsill. It moved, and my friend flew into the air off his bed toward the opposite side of the room: "Bloody hell bastards!" As I reached for a magazine, he said without a change in intonation, "Wait! Don't kill it!"

I paused and thought for a moment how truly fantastic the world is. "Don't worry, my Hindu friend," I said. "There's enough Buddhist in me to keep me from doing something like that." I took the magazine and scooped the roach up and out the door.

I feel that I once misunderstood the meaning of the intercultural experience. Interculturalism takes place on every occasion of person-to-person interaction. It denotes the very process by which culture formulates and proselytizes, like moisture in the air becoming clouds. (It is to our advantage not to have a word like 'culturalism' with some disparate meaning), for interculturalism and interaction are by significance the same thing. The events that we more prominently mark 'intercultural' by habit, are those that are tinged by movements of interethnic, intersexual, or interntional currents. But these are no more culturally vital nor figuratively significant than any other -- whatever marine life might think, the sea is no less accepting of fresh water than of salt.

Still, there is something to this more highly unpredictable and eclectic sort of experience, as when last Friday evening I found myself sitting in an Indian curry restaurant after a two-hour German lesson (taught in Japanese) reflecting on whether or not my pronunciation to something I'd said in Chinese earlier that day had been adequately accurate.