The Rashomon We Inhabit
- Dr Hezri Adnan
- May 22
- 6 min read
In 1950 — seventy-six years ago — the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa gave the world a film called Rashomon. It is a thriller, but not the usual kind. Through it, Kurosawa offered a permanent insight into the human condition.
In the story, a samurai named Takehiro Kanazawa is found dead in a forest. Four witnesses come forward. The bandit who ambushed him, Tajomaru. The samurai’s widow, Masago. A woodcutter, a kikori, who watched from the shadows. And, remarkably, the samurai’s own ghost, speaking through a medium.
They testify in court near Kyoto. One murder. Four entirely different truths. Each account distinct, each self-serving, each told as if it were the whole.
No one is simply lying. Each perceives the same event through the filter of their own fear, shame, honour, and identity; and constructs a reality that makes sense within their own world.
We have all heard that when two stories conflict, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Rashomon pushes that assumption to its breaking point.
The film tells a story about the human condition: that ‘objective truth’ is, in the end, unattainable. And if no single witness can hold the whole picture, then the only honest path forward is to gather many witnesses, many lenses, many ways of seeing.
That is precisely why cultural diversity is not optional. It is non-negotiable. And nowhere is that lesson more urgent than in the moment we now inhabit.
The Moment We Are In
We live today in what scholars call a polycrisis, defined by climate instability, geopolitical fragmentation, inequality, technological disruption, and the erosion of trust in institutions.
Kurosawa opens his film not with the crime itself, but at the crumbling Kyoto city gate under a terrifying, endless downpour. A priest sits there in despair. He tells a passer-by that he has survived famines, earthquakes, and plagues. But that this story, the story of this murder, is the worst horror he has encountered.
The priest despairs because the collapse of a shared truth is more terrifying than physical destruction. That ruined gate is the polycrisis we inhabit today. When crises converge and reinforce one another, fear rises. When fear rises, societies retreat into tribalism, suspicion, and the comfort of seeing only one version of events.
The temptation is to find a single story. A single truth. Worse, to demand that others see the world as we see it.But if Kurosawa and Rashomon teach us anything, it is this: no single witness holds the complete picture.
Culture Is How We See Reality
To most people, culture means costume, cuisine, or festival. These are beautiful expressions of culture, but the deeper meaning is the lens through which communities interpret meaning, locate dignity, and make sense of a changing world around them.
When we consider today’s great challenges, climate change, urbanisation, displacement, the rise of AI, we are, in a very real sense, four witnesses standing over the same dead body in the forest.
A community elder in rural Sabah, a financial analyst in Kuala Lumpur, a climate refugee in Bangladesh, and a technology executive in Silicon Valley will all perceive the same global crisis through profoundly different but equally valid lenses.
The danger is not that they see differently. The danger is when they stop talking to one another. When they believe only in their own lens, their own way of knowing.
This brings us to the core failure of modern development planning. For decades, global development has operated on the assumption of a single, omniscient observer. We believed that complex human challenges could be solved exclusively through technocratic blueprints, standardised economic indicators, and top-down engineering.
Consider the nature of the testimonies in the film. The bandit Tajomaru claims he killed the samurai in a magnificent, honourable sword fight of twenty-three passes. It is a clean, heroic narrative. But the unvarnished eyewitness account tells a different story. The two men were trembling with fear, slipping in the mud, flailing their weapons clumsily out of raw survival. Far less heroic.
This is exactly how top-down development models fail. Official policy reports often read like the bandit’s tale. Orderly, technical, flawless. But the reality on the ground is messy, human, and fragile. When planners in Washington D.C. or Putrajaya ignore local cultures, they miss the clumsy, human friction that dictates whether a policy succeeds or dies in the mud.
Development is not a clean mathematical equation. It is a dense forest of competing human realities. To solve the polycrisis, development policy must transition from the illusion of absolute, centralised expertise to a model of distributed wisdom.
A planner drafting climate adaptation policy in Selangor, for example, must see not only the changing river hydrology, but also the village that depends on it. She must understand its rhythms, its memory of past floods, its trust in those who arrive bearing solutions.
Nature As Culture
It is worth noting a small but significant coincidence. Tomorrow, the 22nd of May, is the International Day for Biological Diversity. Here we have two observances, both UN-sanctioned, one day apart, sharing a single underlying truth: diversity is not merely our aesthetic preference. It is our survival strategy.
In ecology, a monoculture looks efficient in calm conditions. But under stress, it can be catastrophic. One pathogen, one drought, is enough to collapse what seemed robust. Diversity is nature’s hedge against uncertainty.
The same logic applies to human societies and institutions. And yet today, the human equivalent of that principle is under assault. In corporate boardrooms and legislatures, especially in the United States, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or DEI, has been reduced to a slur. It is labelled a ‘woke’ agenda to be dismantled so that business may proceed unburdened by social concerns.
Such monoculture is a dangerous strategic error. When an institution silences minority perspectives, it disables its own radar system. It becomes blind to emerging risks, deaf to social friction, and incapable of innovation. The weaponisation of cultural grievances does not protect heritage. It damages institutional resilience, leaving societies ill-equipped to navigate a rapidly fragmenting world.
We would do well to remember. When a forest loses its diversity, we do not call it efficient. We call it degraded.
Malaysia As Living Example
Malaysia itself is a Rashomon in motion. Our nation is one shared reality perceived through many cultural lenses, be they Kadazan, Iban, Orang Asli, Indian, Chinese and Malay. We are not perfect. But we remain one of the few places where multiple civilisations continue to coexist within a single national story.
That coexistence is not accidental. It is daily work. Not unlike a marriage, not unlike a friendship. It demands listening when we are tired, holding our own version of the truth a little more lightly, and trusting that another lens may see what ours has missed. Every generation must choose it anew.
What We Must Do
The World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development asks us to do what the witnesses in Rashomon ultimately could not. To sit with one another’s truth, to resist the impulse to declare one version final, and to find in that discomfort the beginning of genuine understanding.
Let us invest in cultural practitioners, educators, artists, and youth leaders who keep that dialogue alive. Let us create spaces where people encounter one another as fellow human beings, not as stereotypes, not as threats, not as the villain in someone else’s story.
Let us be clear about what is at stake. Many conflicts today are not caused by economics or politics alone. They are intensified by narratives of fear, humiliation, and cultural misunderstanding.
Dialogue, therefore, is not weakness. Dialogue is preventive peace architecture. We must recognise that cultural diversity is the infrastructure of global stability, providing the framework required to prevent the polarisation that threatens to paralyse international cooperation.
Closing
The samurai in the forest had four witnesses. The world today has eight billion. If we choose to listen – truly listen — to the different accounts of our shared reality, we may yet find not a single version of the truth, but something more powerful. A collective wisdom that none of us could reach alone.
That is the promise of cultural diversity. That is the purpose of dialogue. And that is why we are gathered here today, to celebrate Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.
Terima kasih daun keladi.
A keynote remarks delivered at the World Cultural Diversity Day celebration at the South City Plaza, Seri Kembangan on 21 May 2026.
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