Cultural Barriers to Understanding

I had the most infuriating tutoring session last night. Yosuke had to read a speech by JFK for his English II class, and I wanted to make sure he understood this important quote from it: "The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened." He didn't understand what it meant, and it became clear that he had no concept of 'rights.'

So I gave examples - voting, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc - and went into detail about freedom of speech. After a while, he interrupted me saying that he didn't believe that rights exist. Puzzled, I asked him to explain, and he said it was because "everyone makes mistakes." I had to emphasize, again, that 'right' doesn't just mean 'correct' and resumed my explanation.

He told me he disagreed with the freedom of speech because people might yell or say inappropriate things. I told him it was okay to disagree; I just wanted him to understand what rights are. And yet he continued to argue that they don't exist. I still don't think he understands what a right is. It took an hour and a half to read about three paragraphs of the speech.

It's probably not his fault. That a sixteen-year-old can have no concept of human rights can only be a result of the group-minded Japanese society. Individual rights are not important in Japan, and Yosuke's stubborn indifference to them illustrates this. Japan and the US seem so alike to me sometimes that I tend to forget how huge some differences really are. (Did you know that in Japan, you are presumed guilty until proven innocent? And proving innocence is prohibitively difficult as the court system is nothing but a farce.)

I find myself in a difficult position - I need to help Yosuke understand this speech, but the ideas in it are completely alien to him.