AUTISM AND CROSS-CULTURE.

I was having an online chat with some friends (we’re all autistic, by the way) and one of them raised a point that I could relate to about why some autistics tend to get on better with immigrants and how some people diagnosed as autistic later in life might be someone who has married someone from another country and I thought it might solve a question I’ve been pondering, as to why many Japanese autistics tend to feel more comfortable in other countries yet many Western autistics like Japan.

The latter is not because of us like watching slow-flowing water and find looking at deer scare water features with the sound of a strumming Koto soothing, or sitting under cherry trees watching the pink blossoms form and fall in April, heralding the beginning of spring (yes, spring begins in April, in Japan, but the weather doesn’t really start to warm up until April-May). It’s because, in Japan, when you learn Keigo, or polite speech, you learn the ways you speak to certain people. For example, if you are a teacher in Japan, you could easily get away with telling a group of students to “Shizuka ni Shiyoo!” (Be quiet!) but if you said that to the company president you would bring great disrespect and dishonour and unceremoniously leave the company. You learn how to speak to people below you and people above you. In Japan, as a student, you bow to your teacher, in Australia, you don’t.

The rules of dealing with people in Australia are more nuanced depending upon many things. So, an Australian person may have a GP and a specialist, and their GP might prefer to be called “Doctor”, while their specialist prefers to be addressed by their first name, or vice versa.

I think back to an incident 27 years ago that my mother explained where a teacher at the school where she was a canteen convener saw a new student at the school when he came to purchase his books. The teacher spoke to the student, who replied with “G’day.” The teacher replied, “Don’t address me that way.” And later on told my mother that the student had no manners. As I dissect this, I say, one, the teacher wasn’t wearing a badge that had his name and occupation on it, as teachers tend to do nowadays, so the kid wasn’t to know that he was a teacher. Secondly, in my years at school, I had, on the one hand, a male teacher who had a silver watch and a gold watch and wore the silver watch with blue or grey (if he wore green and grey, he wore the silver watch) and if he wore green or cream or brown, he wore the gold watch. I remember, on May 15, 1991, he was wearing a red and grey striped long-sleeved shirt and green pants and his silver watch, and in November, 1991, a green shirt and grey slacks and his silver watch, to two teachers, one of whom would wear, say, a purple and white striped shirt and blue and black patterned drawstring shorts, or, a light blue long-sleeved business shirt and blue and black shorts, long socks pulled down and desert boots, and another teacher who’d wear a red and blue striped shirt and light blue and dark blue shorts, black socks and white shoes and if someone said anything, would reply, “When you’ve got trousers on, nobody can see your socks.” This teacher my mother talked of used to do a lot of things with the students, so he’d wear polo shirts with a waistband and tennis shorts, long socks pulled down and sneakers, so a reasonable person may not have taken him for a teacher, and he didn’t introduce himself, either. I mean, if he’d walked up to them and said, “Hello, I’m Jim Jones. And I’m a teacher at this school. Do you need any help?” The teacher might have been understandably offended, but he didn’t. As it was, I saw this teacher one election day, and he was working as an Electoral Officer, and I said, “It’s busy,” and he said, “Yes, Mate, it is.”

I remember with my Year Eleven Math Teacher, on one occasion, a student said, “Yeah, Mate,” and he replied, “Yeah, Mate, is not the way to address me.” On February 1, 1991, a student, who was trying to be smart, when he asked a question, replied, “You got me there, Buddy.” The teacher turned and said, “I am not your buddy. And it is time you treated me with more respect than you do your friends in the schoolground.” And, yes, in Australia, teachers are buttoned up at school because they have to be, but away from school, they’re not. I saw my Math Teacher eight years after school, and he called me “Mate”. And some teachers in Australia (they wouldn’t do this in Japan), if you know them away from school, as well, and say the teacher is Miss Mary Brown, she might say, “Out and about you can call me Mary, but at school, you have to call me Miss Brown.” In Japan, you call your teacher “Sensei” at school, and at home if they call to visit your parents.

In a different culture, this is more explicitly explained to you, whereas in the culture you are born into, especially Australia, you are expected to just get it. Despite my brown eyes, I don’t look Japanese, but I feel more comfortable around Asian people as what I have learnt of Asian cultures has been explicitly explained to me, whereas I’ve had to “get it” with the local culture. When I was little, I had to call all my parents’ friends and our neighbours Mr and Mrs, but when I was eight, and we moved cities, suddenly I was on first name terms with them and if I called them Mr or Mrs, I was told not to. Okay, I knew that you didn’t call your teachers by their first names (I remember one of my teachers HATED being called “Sir” and one day, a boy called him Mr, Sir, and he said firmly to him, “I don’t like it. I am not that good. I am not any better than you. The school doesn’t allow you to call me John. Call me Mr.”)

I felt that I didn’t belong in Australia, and in some ways, I still don’t. I tend to get on better with immigrants as they are already seen as being others, and so am I, as an autistic.