Category Archives: Commentary

Cheering on the other WTO

Posted on by
Reply

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization that sets up the rules of international trade among member states, monitors the trade policies and practices of member states for their compliance with the international agreements, and mediates the trade disputes between member states if and when such disputes arise. WTO came into being in 1995 to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), created in 1947, that had been responsible for promoting free trade among nations in the post-World War II world economy by reducing tariffs and removing other restrictive trade practices. The idea of free trade promoted by GATT and WTO has been largely responsible for the phenomenal increase in the volume of international trade not only in goods and services but also in information.

While the World Trade Organization is well known as it is often in the news in today’s world of global capitalism, there is another international organization with the same abbreviation of WTO. Although not as well known as the World Trade Organization, this is the World Toilet Organization, which was founded on November 19, 2001, with the inaugural World Toilet Summit held in Singapore. The World Toilet Organization, or the other WTO, is committed itself to the task of promoting sanitary toilets as it was the unsanitary condition of toilets in the world, especially in the developing part of the world, that was behind the formation of this international organization. With the resolution passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2013, November 19 is now officially recognized as the World Toilet Day to bring the attention of the people all over the world to the importance of keeping sanitary toilets.

Even in the developed part of the world, toilets were not as sanitary as they are today. As a matter of fact, the word gofujyo is one of the polite expressions the Japanese used to refer to their toilets. The word gofuujyo actually consists of two words: go and fujyo. Fujyo is a familiar word for the Japanese who have read the Heart Sutra, or heard it recited, for the expression “fuku fujyo” appears in it, which is usually translated as “neither defiled nor immaculate”. Go, on the other hand, is an honorific word that is used to pay respect to whatever word that comes after it. Thus, gosho, which combines go with sho, the word that means “a place”, is the word the Japanese employ to refer to “the imperial palace”. Gofujyo, with go combined with fujyo, is therefore a polite way of saying “a place that is not immaculate”, suggesting that toilets in Japan used to be regarded as unsanitary places, which is understandable, considering that pit toilets had long been the most common type of toilets until the introduction of water closets in the twentieth century.

The Japanese perception of a toilet as a place that is not immaculate has since been radically changed with the widespread use of water closets. As with other imported products, water closets have gone through revisions and improvements in the hands of Japanese manufacturing firms. With the widespread usage of water closets, especially the type of toilets called “washlets”, Japanese toilets in private homes as well as in public places such as parks, train stations and airports have been turned into clean, even immaculate, places. As a result, the word gofujyo has gone out of circulation among the Japanese, replaced more and more by the word, toilet, which the Japanese condense into toire.

Keeping toilets clean and immaculate is very important to prevent diarrhea and other diseases that are caused by unsanitary toilets. According to WTO—the other WTO, that is—there are still over 1 billion people in the world who practice open defecation, including in such countries as China and India, despite the fact that these countries are now ready to join the selected club of developed nations with their remarkable achievement in economic development in recent decades. As a matter of fact, the practice of open defecation in India, which Mahatma Gandhi lamented some 90 years ago, has become so repugnant to residents and tourists alike that Narendra Modi, who became the prime minister this May, initiated a “Clean India” campaign to make toilets and clean water available to all Indians by 2019, urging all citizens to join him. Needless to say, it takes more than a government-led campaign to realize the goal set by Modi, for India will have to invest heavily in building the necessary infrastructure for sewage treatment, not to mention that for securing clean water supply and garbage disposal. But Modi’s “Clean India” campaign is a good start if it helps to cultivate awareness among the Indians about the need to have a clean living environment for sustainable development. It would be indeed a real accomplishment for the Indians when India, the country that gave us the Heart Sutra, can claim on the World Toilet Day in 2019 that their toilets are clean and sanitary, if not totally immaculate.

Embracing cultural hybridity in the world of global interdependence

Posted on by
Reply

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

It was in the eighteenth century that the word “culture”, which had been employed in connection with “cultivation” or “breeding”, started to take on a new meaning to refer to “way of life”. This transformation in the meaning of the word “culture” had a lot to do with the efforts of anthropologists who had gone about investigating the way of life of the so-called “primitive peoples” of the world. These anthropologists would soon realize that different groups of primitive peoples have developed different ways of life, reflecting the differences in the environment in which different groups lead their lives. Moreover, the way of life of a specific group is founded on a definite and recognizable set of logics that have evolved over a long period of time in a specific environment where the group’s life takes place.

The realization of the diversity of cultures in the world is behind the emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline. As a matter of fact, the title Edward B. Tyler (1832-1917), who became the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, had given to his book published in 1913 was Primitive Culture. However, by 1940, when Franz Boaz (1858-1942) published his Race, Language and Culture, it was widely recognized that there are diverse cultures in the world as there are wide variations in the people’s way of life. As the diversity of cultures came to be recognized, the concept of “cultural relativity”—the idea that no culture can claim to be superior to others as all cultures are relative—became the standpoint from which anthropologists went about studying cultures.

As contact and communication between diverse social groups with diverse cultures take place, transmission and propagation of cultures take place. Contact and communication among the world’s cultures mean that there exists what may be termed “intercultural” as a field in which one culture comes into contact and communication with another culture and through which transmission and propagation of cultures take place. Transmission and propagation may take the form of imitation and learning, which can be one-sided or mutual, but they can also take the form of imposition and forced adoption, involving friction and conflict between cultures. Whatever may be the form of transmission and propagation, what emerges is a “hybrid culture” that combines elements of the traditional culture and elements of the new, imported culture.

To recognize the hybridity of cultures means to recognize the importance of cultures not as isolated entities but as relational entities. But more than that, the use of the term “hybridity” is recommended because we need to go beyond cultural “diversity”. Cultural diversity tends to view each culture as something unique and already formed as all cultures are treated as relative to each other, not paying enough attention to the mutual learning that takes place between social groups about the other people’s way of life. Cultural hybridity, on the other hand, views each culture as an evolving entity that is constantly formed and transformed in the space of interaction with other cultures.

Cultural hybridity is a concept that explicitly recognizes that cultures are open systems. One definition incorporating such a systems view of cultures would be: “Culture is a set of ideas shared by the members of a social group with regard to their relationships to the natural, social and spiritual environment”. This definition incorporates a systems view of culture in that a social group is seen as an open system that interacts with its natural, social and spiritual environment. In the context of such systems view, culture is an evolving system that is defined by the interplay between tradition and invention, between preservation and dissipation, between order and chaos, between integration and diffusion. Indeed, we may recall how the so-called traditional Bali dance was “invented” by Walter Spies (1895-1942), when contact and communication between the traditional Bali culture and the outside culture took place.

Why is the concept of cultural hybridity important? While globalization in the economic and other areas of social life has brought about the hybridization of cultures, there are still those people in the world who cling to the old notion of cultural chauvinism, even imperialism. This is the reason why the world of global interdependence around us is full of violent conflicts and frictions between social groups with different cultural backgrounds. In recent weeks, we have been bombarded with the news about violent conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, between Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine, between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere. What tend to be forgotten by those who participate in these conflicts is the fact their societies are already hybrid societies in terms of ethnic compositions, religious affiliations, and linguistic variations, not to mention a variety of food and cuisine they enjoy. What is sorely needed for the individual living in the world of global interdependence is to embrace cultural hybridity as a fact of life and to develop a sense of hybrid identity that is needed for peaceful coexistence among social groups.