You don’t know others unless you get to meet them in person

I was attending a Japanese college as a foreign student 10 years ago. I was traveling through the Japanese Islands on a bicycle during my vacation. A man I met at a youth hostel in Sapporo shared criticism of South Korea based on anti-South Korea broadcasts in Japan. When I refuted him one by one by explaining that anti-South Korea broadcasts exaggerated extremely rare cases, he stepped back by admitting that his narrow exposure to South Korean people’s thoughts and behaviors through media was too simplistic and stereotypical. Then, he suggested riding a bicycle together.

After he and I returned to Tokyo, we often rode together. When we participated in the 200-kilometer cycling competition held in Chiba, he and his friend guided me through an unfamiliar course without worrying about their records, which led me to finish the race safely.

Looking at the survey results on social integration conducted by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs released early this month, I was reminded of this experience in Japan. In the survey, 92.3 percent of respondents pointed to the conflict between the conservative and the progressive as the most serious social conflict. In addition, 58.2 percent of respondents said they cannot date or marry someone with a different political orientation than their own, and 33 percent answered they are not willing to have drinks with friends or acquaintances with a different political orientation than their own.

It is a tribal instance of humans to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘others’ and stay guarded against those who are different from us. In the past, however, people had opportunities to meet with others with different ideas and beliefs, regardless of whether that was what they wanted or not, in family gatherings, school reunions, company dinners, or parent meetings. They were also exposed to the opinions of opposing sides on a topic through newspapers or TV news in a more balanced way.

It has now become natural to take care of things without meeting other people in person through smartphones, messenger services, and social media. In addition, many people have gotten accustomed to contactless environments during the outbreak of COVID-19. As YouTube has largely replaced newspapers and TV broadcasts, people tend to be only exposed to what’s agreeable to them and get together with only similar people.

Is it better not to meet strangers? A research team at Chicago University experimented on commuters on the train in 2017. Most participants said they didn’t want to talk to strangers and preferred commuting alone before getting on the train. However, the experiment demonstrated that those who were instructed to talk to strangers found their commute more enjoyable than those who didn’t.

In the same year, Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, started a series titled “Germany Talks.” It aimed to organize meetings based on online surveys between people with opposite ideas. The series expanded across Europe and generated astonishing results. Refugees and extreme rightists, homosexuals, and devout Catholics said they had come to understand each other. “Many participants expected something dramatic like heated arguments, but what they found was agreement and empathy,” Bastian Berbner, Die Zeit’s editor, said in his book titled “In Search of Common Ground: Inspiring True Stories of Overcoming Hate in a Divided World.” The Dong-A Ilbo also reported people who come to understand each other’s different ideas through conversations in the 2020 series titled “Polar opposites meet each other.”

People we encounter daily are not on one end of conservatism or progressivism –they stand somewhere in the spectrum between the two opposites. And that’s something that you cannot know until you meet them in person, like in my Japanese friend’s experience of meeting me 10 years ago and learning that South Koreans are actually different than how they are featured in anti-South Korea broadcasts.