Re:Canadians Adopted Refugee Families for a Year, Then Came ...
by Sukotto on Thursday March 30, 2017 @08:28PM
(#14000248)
You don't have public contact info in your profile so I'll post here :)
I don't want to spit on you (ew), but am interested in meeting some of my fellow Canadians living here in Japan.
If you (or any other Canadians reading this) are in Tokyo and interested in comparing notes over coffee, please drop me a line (email in profile).
Re:Canadians Adopted Refugee Families for a Year, Then Came ...
by mikekchar on Thursday March 30, 2017 @11:43PM
(#14001017)
Hey. I'm available at my username @ gmail. I really should put that in my profile. I'm living in rural Shizuoka prefecture, and don't make it to Tokyo very often, but I'd be happy to meet up sometime.
For me, nothing demonstrates that more than Canadian rejection of the "cultural melting pot" of the US in favour of "multiculturalism". I went to school in the age where we still sang God Save the Queen and recited the Lord's Prayer every morning, so it's going a fair ways back, but I remember actually being taught multiculturalism in school (which, as the perversity of this sentence shows, was perhaps an academic exercise). I distinctly remember being told over and over again: We are not American. We do not value a society with a single culture that absorbs other cultures. We value a society of many cultures that live together in harmony.
I think you will see a lot of variation wrt things like individualism in Canadian culture. For example, it is probably a strongly held belief in places like Alberta. But maybe in the small cities in Quebec or on the east coast, you're going to get a lot more responsibility for community. The string that holds it together, though, is the acceptance for a variety of insular cultures.
As other posters have mention, Canada limits immigration. I suspect that it would run into very similar issues to what the Australians have had to deal with in the past 30 years if it didn't. I always find it strange that my adopted home of Japan is probably one of the easiest countries in the world to emigrate to, but because of it's very strong mono-culture, immigrants generally do not stay. In spite of my upbringing, I enjoy living in a mono-culture -- a very embarrassing admission, and I invite all true Canadians to come and spit on me ;-)