Cross-cultural communication （23）　

23）Middle-aged resident doctor from Indonesia
Since 2000, I have been accepting medical students and resident doctors for training at our clinic. Let me introduce you a rather unusual case involving cross-cultural issues. Eddie is a 40-something-year-old Indonesian man. He is well into middle age, but he is a pleasant resident doctor with a lively personality and a good sense of humor, despite his appearance.

There was a good reason why he was a resident doctor at his age. He graduated from medical school in his home country of Indonesia with excellent grades. However, for various reasons, he decided to do his training overseas. At first, he thought about the United States, which has the most open training system for foreigners in the world, but the medical school that Eddie graduated from was a newly established school, and it was not yet on the list of schools in the United States, so it was no good. The next country he chose was Japan. In order to do post-graduate training in Japan, you have to pass the Japanese National Medical Practitioners Qualifying Examination. Of course, this is in Japanese. Eddie had never studied Japanese before, so he was starting from scratch. He made a plan to master Japanese over a period of several years. During that time, in order to add some weight to his credentials in the Japanese medical world, he enrolled in a graduate school at a national university in Osaka, and while studying Japanese, he earned a doctorate in medicine in four years. After earning his degree, he passed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, and after two attempts, he passed the National Medical Practitioners Qualifying Examination.

By the time he came to train at Kido Clinic, Eddie had married a Japanese woman and bought a house, so he was quite something. I had been proud of myself for working hard when I was young and doing clinical training in America, but compared to Eddie's hard work, it was like a speck of snot. I think I learned much more about life from him during that month.

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