Cross-cultural communication （83）　

83) Invitation to a different culture: “Kaoru Kanetaka's World Travels” and Pan Am
Kaoru Kanetaka passed away in January 2019. We pray for her happiness in the next life. Her eponymous TV program, “Kanetaka Kaoru's World Travels”, ran for 30 years from 1959. For those 30 years, I think I watched this program every Sunday morning. When I was in elementary school, it was just a simple yearning to go abroad, but from when I was in high school, I think it became a trigger for me to think that I would like to work abroad in some way in the future. Of course, Ms. Kanetaka's English was perfect, but what I came to understand as a high school student was that, more than the English itself, she was able to respond with surprising flexibility to people from all walks of life and from all cultural backgrounds, sometimes elegantly, sometimes humorously, and sometimes with a bit of forcefulness. She was a living textbook for cross-cultural communication.

The sponsor of “World Travel” was Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), which no longer exists. After entering Osaka Medical College, I became more aware of the possibility of doing clinical training in America, and I also became more interested in Pan Am, the sponsor of the program. In 1980, I finally fulfilled my dream of doing clinical training in America for three years, and the place I went to was New York, where the Pan Am headquarters building was located. It was a huge building that seemed to block off Park Avenue, and on the top floor, the name of the company, Pan Am, was written in huge letters in a proud manner. After buying a used car in the area, I would drive up and down Park Avenue, even when I didn't have any business to do, and pass through the road that ran through the Pan Am Building. I was impressed by the cool images of Pan Am that I had seen in the “Around the World” travelogue, and by the actual sight of the Pan Am Building, and I was in awe of what an amazing airline company it was. However, by the early 1980s, Pan Am's foundations were already starting to crumble.

Well, in 1991, Pan Am finally went bankrupt and disappeared. After that, I continued to have a passing interest in Pan Am, partly because I had met a Japanese man who had been a former Pan Am employee. Around 2010, I happened to come across a book review of a book in English by Christine Yano, a Japanese-American sociologist and anthropologist, in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. The book was called Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways. In the 1950s, Pan Am recruited Japanese-American women in Hawaii and trained them to be flight attendants (the title of the book deliberately uses the term stewardess, which was the name used at the time). This was the first time that anyone other than white women had been allowed to work as flight attendants in the United States, and it was a groundbreaking move. In fact, the experiment was a great success. This process is described based on interviews with many of the early Japanese-American flight attendants of the time. The impact of this grand experiment in cross-cultural communication on the Japanese-American community in Hawaii is described from the perspectives of sociologists and anthropologists in an interesting way. I highly recommend reading it.

So, in this article, I have described the influence of Kaoru Kanetaka's “Around the World” and Pan Am, the company that sponsored it, on my interest in cross-cultural communication.

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