Crazy Asian Ethics

You may have recently seen this article floating around the internet. It's about the Tiger Mom:

Wall St. Journal - Why Chinese Mothers are Superior

The article talks about how she raised her daughters and if you read the comments there are a lot of critics on her techniques. Call them whatever you want, but I can totally see what she is saying and I think the reason why it is so foreign to people is because she raised her kids using an Eastern perspective and the people judging her are coming at her from a Western perspective.

Now do not get me wrong, I think she is hardcore Eastern (i.e. very hardcore Asian). And I think my being Japanese gives me the right to say this, because, well I lived it. I was raised in a similar fashion. I can remember my Mom drilling in my head that we need to do things "this way" not "that way" and these "things" would be repeated over and over and over and over again for years on end in the house, in the car, on the way to church, at the table, on vacation, etc. My brothers and I joke about it today as adults and call it the broken record parenting style. My Father would tell me on occasion that while people like to say we all are equal, we still need to be better, do better and drive to be the best at what we do to make sure everything is equal. These are the messages I heard growing up and when I read the Wall Street article I saw a lot of similarities to how I was raised.

I used to think part of it was my parents being raised during WWII and all of the prejudice and racial tensions they had to deal with. But reading the article made me realize their perspective on what was acceptable for their kids was not unique to them, because these standards were passed to them by their parents. So maybe WWII was not the real driver for their parenting style. If I were to sum it up, their goal was perfection. And that in and of itself is very Japanese. So even though I grew up in the United States of America all of my life, I hold that Japanese perspective of not being satisfied with just maintaining, but pursuing things with the goal of ultimate perfection. I think reading the Tiger Mom's article was very insightful to my own life because it made me realize I am who I am as the result of a culture thousands of years in the making. Right or wrong, good or bad, and however you think of it, it produces results and often times really good ones.