Brain Biology

On the first day of class, we had a wonderful guest speaker who came from Japan to speak with us on different aspects pertaining to Indians living in Japan. Yuka Mizutani discussed how many Indians lived in Japan, but the Japanese government only wants the world to see them as only having Japanese people. As a result of this, the Indians had to blend in with the normal Japanese people and they were not allowed to have their own cultural identity. They were forced to speak and write Japanese to make them not stand out from the rest of the population. Many of these Indians lived in a certain part of the country, but the place they were living in was not supported by the government. Because of this, they could not receive any sort of financial help unlike all of the Japanese people. In our history, a lot of these Indians had to relocate in order for them to afford housing for their families just to survive. Before coming to this class and hearing about Yuka’s presentation, I never knew that Indians lived in Japan, or any other ethnic groups for that matter. I always had a closed mind on the people who were known as the Japanese people. So many other ethnic groups are often talked about, like Asian Americans and Latinos, but Indians are rarely ever talked about, if at all. Yuka pointed out that there are many centers for Indians to go, so that they can go to a place that would strictly focus on the Indian tribal cultural alone, while keeping these people safe from the outside world. I thought this was creative because often times, these Indians have nowhere to go to express themselves and their cultural traditions because it could be very difficult to find a place like that, especially when trying to find other people in the same ethnic group as them.