Cross-cultural communication （139）　

139) Which one is “communism”?
In June 2023, I visited the Institut Francais in Osaka, where I have been studying French, for the first time in a long time. The purpose of my visit was to attend a lecture by Ms. Masako Yamaguchi, the former Paris bureau chief of the Sankei Shimbun. (Over the past two years, all classes had been held online, and I had not been able to visit the institute in person.) She is a legendary figure who served as Paris bureau chief for over 20 years starting in 1990. The theme of her lecture was the political and economic situation in France under each president since Mitterrand, but she also touched on topics related to the pandemic. During the Q&A session, I commented on my experience participating in an online meeting with France in 2021 as the director of a nursing home in Osaka,Japan.

At that time, the remarks made by the female director of a nursing home in Paris, who was the French speaker, revealed the underlying strength of France in times of crisis. This was during the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic swept across France, causing a surge in deaths and the collapse of hospitals. The government issued a written request to nursing homes, asking them to refrain from sending residents with COVID-19 to hospitals and instead provide palliative care at the nursing homes. Both the residents and the majority of their families agreed to this. In addition, the government requested that medical and nursing students provide support at nursing homes, and many students responded to this request. Mr. Yamaguchi was also aware of this and said, “This is a French tradition and the very essence of solidarity.”

After researching related incidents online, I came across an event in China. In late 2022, over 100 students at Xuzhou Medical University in Jiangsu Province, China, staged a protest against authorities' demands to send them to the frontlines to treat COVID-19 patients. The reasons cited were the risk of infection and low wages. If I were to present the French and Chinese examples without mentioning the countries' names, I suspect many people would give opposite answers. This protest in China could perhaps be called a “mini Tiananmen Square incident.” If such incidents continue to occur frequently, the possibility that Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book “The End of History” (which argued that world history would end with the victory of democracy and free-market economics) might not have been entirely off the mark at the time of its publication is beginning to seem more plausible.

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