The main focus of this presentation is the concepts of culture between professional anthropologists and civil activists in Japan, which are divided between statistic and dynamic points of view for projecting our society from racist nation to multicultural civil society in near future.

The Japanese governmental official term, Tabunka-kyo^sei (literally translation can be, “Harmonious coexist of plural cultures”), has been appeared in 2006 by the So^mu-sho^ (the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication). But we have recognized this term, kyo^sei (coexistence), as a governmentally authorized existence of aliens, for more than ten years. On the contrary the civil rights activists use same term, but they put the image that means the multiculturalism in political sense to this word, Tabunka-kyo^sei.

The problem is to analyze this terminological discrepancy, to interpret culturally this social condition, and also to act socially to realize our society more multicultural.

If we interpret this problematic term, kyo^sei, as a tolerance to heterodoxy, we can easily find many cases in our cultural tradition, for example, medical pluralism. Medical pluralism is termed the coexistence of many medical traditions and practices in a society. Japanese do tolerate medical pluralism condition, but do not cultural pluralism one. This phenomenon annoys Japanese civil activists to act for realizing our multicultural nation. We need to provoke Japanese anthropologists calling attention this cultural dilemma and to talk about cultural and medical politics from the ordinary life context.

Japanese edition of this page