Kunishige, K. (2014). Diversity: Walking the line between cultures. Presented at Tertiary Counsellors' Hui: Univarsity of Waikato, Hamilton

1. Walking the line between
mainland's culture and
new world's culture
- Asian migrant’s
perspective
By Kou Kunishige
kou.kunishige@dcnz.net

2. 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 Marae
Friday, 11 July 2014

3. 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?

4. 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”

5. 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

6. 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/

7. How counselling/therapy works
for other ethnic people?

8. 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

9. 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…

10. 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…

11. 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.

12. SUSHI

13. 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)

14. Counselling in Japan
• Working with a young lady
who lost her voice
• Working with people who lost
their houses by tsunami

15. 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.

16. 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?

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. “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.

20. 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.

21. “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”.

22. 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?”

23. 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

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. The Anatomy of
Dependence: The
key analysis of
Japanese Behavior
Takeo Doi (1973)

30. Japanese Society
Chie Nakane (1970)

31. 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)

32. 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