Japan was the posting. It was not, presumably, the easiest posting for a man in his seventies who had spent his professional life in English-language entertainment. Japan required adjustment, cultural translation, the specific skills of diplomacy in an environment that was culturally distant from anything in Poitier’s background.
He served for ten years, from 1997 to 2007.
The diplomacy he practiced was, by multiple accounts, effective in the way that his acting had been effective — through genuine engagement, through listening as much as speaking, through a quality of attention and presence that made the people he was meeting with feel that they were actually being met. These are not different skills. They are the same skill in different clothes.
He also served as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador, a role that took him to various parts of the world and that operated in the mode of cultural diplomacy that his career had always, in some sense, been practicing. He had spent decades being a representative of something larger than himself — first of Black America’s aspiration toward full humanity and equal opportunity, then of the broader project of using cultural exchange to build understanding across difference.
The ambassadorial work was the formalization of what had always been part of what he did.
His connection to the Bahamas remained deep throughout. The values he traced back to Cat Island — the self-worth, the moral seriousness, the specific quality of rootedness that had survived the disorienting years in New York and Florida — never left him. When he wrote about what had shaped him, the island was always present. It was the ground beneath everything.