Cross Cultural Counselling in Japan

Abstract

In this article, the author argues the tendency of the Japanese towards yokonarabi—paying too much attention to being the same as others and responding too readily to even slight differences. The foreign residents in Japan consist of immigrants of Korean descents, the oldcomers, who formed the major minority group, while the Chinese and the Latin American immigrants are the newcomers. The practice of cross cultural counselling will be dissimilar for the oldcomers and newcomers due to the different levels of assimilation to Japanese culture and customs. The most important focus when engaging in cross cultural counselling with them is to train the counsellors to communicate in the mother tongue, and to develop the non-verbal methods for therapy.