Feel-Good Stories and the Unease Behind Them

I did nothing today and, unusually for me, watched television in the middle of the day.

An actor was talking about studying abroad when he was in high school.

He enrolled in a high school in the United States, but for the first three months, he was bullied because he was Japanese.

Apparently, the area was rural, and there were almost no Asian people there.

Then one day, at a school party, he gathered his courage and performed a dance in the center of the stage.

After that, the way people looked at him changed, and he started making more friends.

“In America, you have to assert yourself if you want to be accepted. That experience led to the entertainment career I have now.”

That was how the story was wrapped up.

In the studio, the other guests were moved. Some were even crying.

As television, it was a very neat and beautiful feel-good story.

But something about it bothered me.

First, there was this:

He was bullied because he was Japanese.

No matter how you look at it, that is racism.

Is it really something we can dismiss by saying they were only high school students, or that it happened a long time ago?

The next thing I wondered was why a high school student had been sent into that kind of environment in the first place.

Of course, you cannot completely control where someone studies abroad.

Even so, I could not help thinking that choosing an area with a relatively larger Asian population might have been one possible consideration.

And the part that bothered me most was the way television presented the story.

He overcame hardship.

Therefore, it was a good experience.

That was the narrative being consumed.

Of course, for the actor himself, it probably really was an event that changed his life.

I have no intention of denying his experience.

But I find myself thinking about something else.

There may have been other high school students who experienced similar discrimination, lost heart, and returned to Japan.

There may also be many children who developed negative feelings toward America itself.

Those people do not appear on television.

Only the people who overcame hardship get to tell their stories.

The people who could not overcome it become invisible, as if they had never existed in the first place.

That is why I become a little guarded whenever I see a feel-good story.

The problem is not that feel-good stories are bad.

But behind every feel-good story, there are always people whose stories were not told.

If we forget that, the phrase “hardship helps people grow” can quietly turn into something much more dangerous:

“People who suffered but could not overcome it simply did not try hard enough.”

Television is entertainment.

Maybe I am thinking too deeply about something I am being allowed to watch for free.

Even so, whenever emotional background music starts playing, I end up imagining the people who did not appear on screen.

Maybe it is because I have a difficult personality, but I cannot help wondering what exists behind a beautiful story.