Walking the line between

mainland's culture and new world's

culture - Asian migrant’s

perspective

By Kou Kunishigekou.kunishige@dcnz.

net

TERTIARY HUI

Walking the line between mainland's culture and new world's culture

- Asian migrants’ perspective -

Kou Kunishige Diversity Counselling New Zealand kou.kunishige@dcnz.net Member of New Zealand Association of Counsellors Japanese Society of Certified Clinical Psychologist Japan Association of Family Therapy

Te Kohinga Mārama - University of Waikato MaraeFriday, 11 July 2014

Today’s Presentation

• Diversity Counselling New Zealand

• How counselling/therapy works for other ethnic people. Some counselling in Japan.

• How can we work with migrants/refugees/international students who have their own mainland culture and who need to live in new world’s culture?

Kou Kunishige

• Counsellor:– Masters in Counselling, University of Waikato, 2001– Guidance Counselling in Japan– DISASTER COUNSELLING for Tsunami Victims in

Japan, 2011 to 2013

• Translator:– “Narrative Therapy in Practice: The Archaeology of

Hope”– “Narrative Mediation: A New Approach to Conflict

Resolution”– “Supervision in the Helping Professions”

Kou Kunishige, part 2

• Author in Japanese – Narrative Conversations: Discourse and Agency

(2013)– How a narrative therapist saw the Kesennuma City

after 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (2013)– What can you do as a counsellor after a massive

disaster occurs? (2014)

• Psychiatric Nurse in Japan– Working with addictions

• Weapon System Engineer – Maritime commander system in a flag ship

Diversity Counselling New Zealand

• Charitable Trust, established in Sept, 2013

• Professional Counselling for Ethnic people in their own language as much as possible

• Community Development (CD) programs for ethnic people in their language

• Professional Development (PD) for Health & Social Practitioners– See http://dcnz.net/professional-development/

How counselling/therapy works for other ethnic people?

Counselling / Therapy is universal?

Sigmund Freud

Carl Jung

Michael White

Abraham Maslow

B F Skinner Carl Rogers

Alfred Adler

Viktor Frankl

Gregory Bateson

Albert Ellis

David Epston

Jacob Moreno

Gerald Monk

Jay Haley

Aaron BeckJohn Winslade

And More

Basics of counselling

• Being accepted, being understood, and being encouraged cannot have negative impacts on people, in general.

• An opportunity for people to express themselves without any judgment seems to be very important.

• If people can express themselves fully, it makes easier for them to move on to next.

• How methodology or theory will be so important to work other ethnic people? 　 But before you ask this question…

Transformation after it crosses a boundary

• “Attentive hearing”– Three main core conditions that Carl Rogers

considered essential for effective counselling• Unconditional Positive Regard• Empathy• Congruence

• “Narrative”– Narrative, combined with psychanalysis,

transactional analyses, CBT, Medication…

Psychotherapy is a cultural practice and largely affected by the language that describes it

After you utter words, you cannot completely control what you mean by saying them. Especially words

go beyond cultural context.

SUSHI

Diagnosis as a cultural practice

• Alcoholics – National Health and Nutrition Survey, 2012

• 24.2% Drinking more than 5 days per week– Male: 40.3% Female: 10.7%

• 10.5 % more than a bottle of wine, when they drink– Male: 13.2% Female: 6.3%

• Estimated 2,300,000 alcoholics in Japan

• ICD-10-CM F10 Alcohol related disorders• No. of Patients in the Hospital due to F10: 3,265

(2003)

Counselling in Japan

• Working with a young lady who lost her voice

• Working with people who lost their houses by tsunami

Working with a young lady who lost her voice

Harumi, 19 years old girl, moved to another city to study art after graduating from her high school. After some time, she stopped contacting Mother, so Mother went to her daughter's flat. She found that Harumi could not eat properly, not going out, not even talking to others. So she took Harumi home. But still she could hardly utter any words to others.

Working with Harumi

• Mother took her to my counselling room.• Harumi wanted to have Mother when she had

counselling sessions.

How could you work with Harumi and her mother?

Counselling Process

• No voices for 3 months, but playing with a computer.

Voice Actress

• Conversation with a pen and a notepad for another 3 months.

• One day she did not bring her notepad and pencil.

• She started to have part-time job at a book store. Then after some time, she took another venture.

Counselling people who lost houses by tsunami

• After the natural disaster on 11/03/2011, people had various symptoms mentally and psychically. such as confusion, difficulty sleeping, skin rash, and so on.

• If you ask a simple question, they could talk to you on and on. They wanted to express what happened to them.

• As a counsellor, you could feel that counselling really worked.

“Understanding”

• It is not possible to understand the person completely. But it is possible to develop a perception that we are understanding each other. When we share this perception, language and cultural issues won’t be the problem.

Culture & Language

• Culture & Language are weaving into each other. They can not be separated.

• If you exchange words, you are also exchanging cultural ideas.

• In other words, without cultural ideas, we don’t know what this word actually means.

“Be stupid”

• There are special carpenters who build temples and shrines in Japan. They ask you to be stupid, if you want to be one of them.

• If you become stupid, your intellectual filter will be removed and you can feel it though your own senses.

• Not explanations, but practices.• “I need to be STUPID”.

Context provides meanings

• To understand words you need to know their context.

• E.g., Use of adjectives can be very different from person to person, from culture to culture.

• “Can you help me to understand what this mean?”

Working with Migrants

• There are hopes and anxieties around migration.

• Various changes will be happening– What you do– How you behave– How much you talk– Where you go– What you eat

Mainland’s Culture

• People can develop their own identity from their own culture.

• At the same time, people often suffer from the dominating cultural practices. – E.g., cultural expectations on you as a girl,

woman, wife, mother, worker, and so on. Strict rituals.

New World’s Culture

• We tend to perceive New World’s culture in terms of what is missing compared with the mainland culture.

• It will take some time to discover something which does not exist in the mainland culture.

Discovering & Rediscovering

• Discovering something new in the new world for them to take in their life, and rediscovering something in the mainland culture for them to retain.

• Here, people might be able to find more choices.

• You can present a particular aspect of yourself according to a place or people.

What is needed to work with migrants?

• The amount of time you spend with migrants

• Please invite them to share their experiences. Then you can make sense of their lives.

• Through this process, they will know you and counselling more. They might be a future client or promoter for counselling in their community.

Our long term project

• To learn cultural diversity in counselling

• To bring forward wider stories of migrants, which have not heard yet.

• To build a good network of ethnic counsellors.

• To share our experience with other professionals.

The Anatomy of Dependence: The key analysis of Japanese Behavior

Takeo Doi (1973)

Japanese Society

Chie Nakane (1970)

Issues in Japan

• Hikikomori (NEET & no social activities)More than 1,600,000 people

More than 3,000,000 people if people who occasionally go out are included (2005)

• Futoko (Not attending schools)– Primary school (6 years): 22,327 students– Secondary school (3 years): 100,105 students (2009)

• Suicide – 27,858 in total in 2012 (19,273 males / 8,585 females)– 30,651 in total in 2011 (20,955 males / 9,696 females)

Suicides per 100,000 people per year

Rank Country Male Female Average Year

1 Greenland 116.9 45.0 83.0 2011

3 South Korea 38.2 18.0 28.1 2012

7 China 22.2 2011

8 Hungary 37.4 8.5 21.7 2009

10 Japan 21.7 2012

11 Sri Lanka 34.8 9.24 21.3 2011

37 United Kingdom 18.2 5.1 11.8 2011

38 New Zealand 17.0 6.4 11.5 2010

60 Argentina 12.6 3.0 7.7 2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate