Part 1: Culture, Modernity, and Globalization

(1) Stereotyping Japan: The perils of national character

Analyzing Nicholas Kristof, “In Japan, Nice Guys (And Girls) Finish Together,” New York Times, April 12, 1998

See also Clyde Haberman, “Some Japanese (One) Urge Plain Speaking,” New York Times, March 27, 1988

Sidebar: If you are interested in a brief account of anthropology and national character, see Frederico Neiburg, "National Character," International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences [online edition]:10296-10299 [2002]

A. "economic animals": hard working, self-sacrificing

B. "selfless groupies": self-effacing, group-oriented loyalists

C. "deferential subordinates": hierarchically-inclined, consensus-seeking

D. "homogenous society": isolated and insular, now forced into the global arena and torn between Japanese traditionalism and Western modernity

E. "Zen aesthetes": reverence for nature, refined sensibilities, accomplished in aesthetic pursuits

F. "inscrutable character": preference for indirect expression and the non-rational and intuitive

G. "imitators, not innovators": always followers and copycats, never pioneers and leaders; imitative skill but not creative genius

Literally, national character is the characterizing a nation of people by one or a few attributes. It is the urge to see an entire nation as a person writ large—as "wily," "honest," "spiritual," "hard-working," and so on.

National character is a form of stereotyping, and stereotypes may be seen as "pathological generalizations."

A stereotype is "a belief that is simple, inadequately grounded, or at least partially inaccurate, and held with considerable assurance by man people" (Harding et al. 1969:4)

Japan was the first non-Western nation that the Western powers had to take as a serious equal, and it remains poised uneasily between the West and Asia.

National character is also especially relevant to Japan because the Japanese do it too. If we "Orientalize" them, they "Occidentalize" us. For example:

"Japan's history is as old as Europe's, but it has been subject to less outside interference and consequently has more spontaneity and continuity. Since the Yayoi period (c. 200 BC to c. AD 250), the Japanese have cultivated fields in the warm, moist climate of these islands. As a result the social structure has evolved into a form most suited to agriculture. Countless villages--communities formed for the purpose of conducting agriculture--sprang up throughout Japan, and these have survived down through the centuries. A comparison of any two villages selected at random will reveal structures that are almost identical...
"Japanese society differs from American society in that the atomistic individual never became established as the basic unit. Those who struck out on their own were exceptions, and today, as in the past, the basic unit of Japanese society is not the atomistic individual but the molecular group, most commonly represented by the household and the village. The household is like a monomer and the village like a polymer. The individual exists as an organic part of these groups.

"The basic internal principle in the formation of such groups is harmony. This applies to the current Suzuki government in the same way as it did to the Shotoku government of the early seventh century. The American values of freedom, equality, equal opportunity, and an open-door policy are alien to the traditional character of Japanese society..."

Amaya Naohiro, "Harmony and the Anti-Monopoly Law," Japan Echo 8(1):88-89 (1981). The article is an extended polemic against a proposed Anti-Monopoly Law on the grounds that the Japanese national character of harmony and compromise renders the law unnecessary and meaningless.

Compare this to a very different extrapolation from the same “characteristic” of group orientation by an American journalist:

"The point is that Japan is not a society driven by a Western moral impulse. Americans like to perceive themselves as involved in moral struggle, in trying to spread democracy around the world or in struggling over issues of conscience at home. Americans rally to what they perceive as a 'just cause.' Power has a slightly negative connotation...To be powerful often is to be immoral because one is presumably working against the interests of the average Joe. A nation accustomed to abundance can afford that perception.

“But Japan is a society where the struggle for economic power is paramount. The underlying assumption is not abundance but rather scarcity. The group, and by extension Japan, must win at any cost. Any tactic is acceptable. It's revealing that there is no precise equivalent in Japanese for the Western concept of 'fair.' There are conflicting interpretations. One is that if I have power over you, you submit on the surface while struggling to overturn me by stealth. If you have power over me, I do the same. When Japanese talk about one another, they don't usually say 'I don't like him' or 'He is not nice.' A more frequent insult is to say "He has no power' or 'He has no influence.'" William J. Holstein, The Japanese Power Game: What It Means for America (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990)

VI. What is the logic of national character reasoning?

A. Two populations are radically contrasted by a single or a few qualities (e.g., we Americans are "individualist" and "assertive" while the Japanese are "group-oriented" and "conformist").

B. Often, this contrast is an ethical inversion, by which our own society and its "personality" attribute is valorized as the virtuous, the strong, and the advanced, and the radical other is portrayed as weak, backward, or even evil (i.e., individualism is good and collectivism is bad).

C. Often, too, the contrast induces a historical amnesia about unpleasant or unfortunate aspects of ones' own society (conformist behavior is hardly unknown in American society and US history).

D. But the contrast is a useful "cultural exorcism" that displaces these unpleasantries on to the other society.

VII. What are the fallacies of national character reasoning?

A. National character essentializes a population in drawing a monochromatic, unchanging national personality, in relying on ONE feature, one quality to cover so much -- and in so doing, ignores history, institutions, and circumstance that continually shape and reshape people's behavior and beliefs

B. National character applies ethnocentric standards of judgment

C. National character homogenizes the varieties of everyday lives

The proper response to the claim that the Japanese are radically different from you and me is not that the Japanese are just like you and me, but rather that, in important ways, the Japanese are not like each other. The Pulitzer Prize winning historian of Japan, John Dower, astutely commented on wartime Japan in the 1930s and 1940s:

“It was not that the Japanese people were, in actuality, homogeneous and harmonious, devoid of individuality and thoroughly subordinated to the group, but rather that the Japanese ruling groups were constantly exhorting them to become so. Indeed, the government deemed it necessary to draft and to propagate a rigid orthodoxy of this sort precisely because a great many Japanese did not cherish the more traditional virtues of loyalty... What the vast majority of Westerners believed the Japanese to be coincided with what the Japanese ruling elites hoped they would become.” [John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986)]