Are You Deaf Enough? The many ways to be deaf in Japan
Being deaf does not mean the same thing everywhere in the world. The Japanese Federation of the Deaf has made a great amount of effort to understand what it means to be deaf in Japan but the definition is convoluted and heavily debated. In this essay I look at factors which separate Japanese deaf pe...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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2014
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1946/18008 |
| Summary: | Being deaf does not mean the same thing everywhere in the world. The Japanese Federation of the Deaf has made a great amount of effort to understand what it means to be deaf in Japan but the definition is convoluted and heavily debated. In this essay I look at factors which separate Japanese deaf people from their country, each other, and other foreign deaf societies to determine why members of the deaf community so vehemently oppose each other’s definition of deafness. I conducted three interviews comparing the Japanese disability module of deafness to Iceland and the United States of America both of which share the same oral roots as Japan but have evolved into a modern cultural module. Finally I bring historical context to understand how the Japanese mentality has developed after the Second World War to make the possibility of adopting a cultural module of deafness in the near future unrealistic. |
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