Cross-cultural communication （75）　

75) Are Quebecois international?
In the summer of 2016, I gave a lecture to 80 Canadian family doctors. Including their accompanying family members, there were 100 people in total, and they had a plan to travel to Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka and Kyoto during their summer holidays, and also to interact with Japanese medical professionals at their accommodation.

We had received a request for a lecture from Claude, the leader of the group, by email two months earlier, so we had plenty of time to prepare. However, giving a one-hour lecture and a half-hour Q&A session in English was quite a stressful task. On the morning of Sunday, September 4th, I arrived at the banquet hall of the Osaka Hilton Hotel half an hour before the appointed time, and Claude greeted me cordially.

In my talk on the day, I talked about the characteristics of the medical care provided by general practitioners (family doctors) in Japan, and I had exchanged opinions with Claude many times beforehand by email, and I also talked about unique Japanese phenomena such as nursing care insurance and the difference in income between general practitioners and hospital doctors. The talk was an hour long, so I gave it in English, but as most people in the Quebec region of Canada have French as their native language, I gave the first five minutes in French.

I spoke the French part of the introduction off the top of my head, rather than reading from a script, so I think they were able to understand my French ability a little. When the Q&A session was over and it was time for a chat, a middle-aged male doctor in the front row said to me, “Dr. Kido is truly wonderful. He is Japanese, but he can speak both English and French, and he is active as an international person.” However, at that moment, I felt a little uncomfortable. They are also Canadians from the Quebec region, and even though they have a slight accent, French is their native language and they are fluent in English, so they certainly have the qualifications to be cosmopolitans. However, as is the case with Canadians in general, they don't seem to have much of a desire to go out into the world and make a name for themselves. Since they are from a French-speaking region, I included some of my experiences in Paris in my talk, but the response wasn't very good. On the contrary, the part about my training in Brooklyn was well received.

It is certainly true that Canada is a developed country in North America, but I have the impression that it is a little overshadowed by its neighbor, the superpower of the United States. Even in the United States, ordinary citizens are not very interested in world affairs, and it feels like a “huge country”, but Canada seems to be in a situation that is even worse than that.
Personally, I think it would be interesting if the “Quebec independence movement”, which has been going on since the 1960s, were to be fulfilled and the independent province of Quebec were to deepen its relationship with the EU, centered on France.

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