Grinnel College, U.S. Hello, this is Reo Saito, and this will be my second article that I will be writing for The NewZ. I personally have a background of having a disease on my foot, and I believe that this gives me a deeper perspective on the differences of spending my time as a student in both Japan and the United States when having such disabilities, focusing on the acknowledgement of disabilities, as well as the environment in which people with disabilities are treated in these educational institutions. In our day to day lives, we may often hear phrases like “disability resources” or “accommodations for the disabled”, but what really is a disability? According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the definition is as follows: a physical, mental, cognitive, or developmental condition that impairs, interferes with, or limits a person's ability to engage in certain tasks or actions or participate in typical daily activities and interactions. Essentially, it refers to people who have a certain condition that deviates their ability to do something from the average masses of people, and that degree of deviation is usually somewhat large and noticeable. But you may be wondering. Every single person has different strengths and weaknesses, and their ability to do something may be different from someone else and that’s completely normal… Then where is the line that we can draw between someone having a disability or people having individual differences in their skillsets? To be frankly honest, I don’t have an answer to that and nor does modern society. For instance, let’s use me as an example. I was born with a deformed foot and have had to have 2 surgeries to be able to walk properly like most people. However, when doing daily tasks, my foot doesn’t really get in the way of accomplishing what I want to do, even though playing physical sports is often a challenge for me. Consequently, I never really considered myself as a disabled person, but rather saw myself as someone who prefers doing indoor activities rather than physical activities, since I’m not the best at them. However, someone with a similar condition that may not be able to walk without crutches may see themselves as a “disabled” person. To break all of this down numerically, let’s simplify each person as a vector with 5 different values, all numerically representing how good someone is at doing something. Let’s say that if we take an “average” person, their vector looks something like <50, 50, 50, 50 ,50>, with each value ranging from 1 to 100. Another person’s may look something like <46, 54, 58, 45, 52>. Someone else may look like <55, 59, 41, 42, 60>. Generally, in society, we would accept deviations from the mean if they were small enough, as we can see with these individuals. However, someone else’s may look like <10, 42, 50, 53, 75>. One of their values negatively deviates greatly from the meaning, meaning that their ability to do a certain type of task is impaired strongly. I believe that this is where “disabled” people are categorized in modern society. Whether we should label these people as “disabled” or not, is another question, which I will answer in the next chapter.Reo SaitoIntroductionWhat is a “disability”?16What it means to be “disabled” and the surrounding environment around such people
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