Theories of Japanese Culture

Nipponjin wa Nipponteki ka? (Do the Japanese Fit Their Stereotype?) (Sugimoto and Mouer 1982) was written by two social scientists who have coauthored many books. The fact that Sugimoto's name appears before Mouer's on the cover is incidental, because the authors alternate the order of their names in successive publications. Both are bilingual in Japanese and English; both have worked in Japan and in the U.S.A. and currently teach in Australia. The main aim of the book is to counteract the tendency on the part of both Japanese and European/North American writers to regard Japan as homogeneous and/or unique in the world. The book consists of two main parts and transitional chapters. First, the authors review past theories on Japan and point out that, while these theories have been strongly influenced by political and ideological climates which changed differently in different countries where they were written, the assumption of homogeneity has invariably fitted well to different purposes. This review is well accomplished within the book categories the authors chose, but they failed to examine books contrasting Japan with other Asian, African, and Arabic cultures, as well as those which regard Japan as related to some cultures in Southeast Asia or other parts of the world. In the second main part of the book, the authors show that Japan is a heterogeneous culture, with differences between social groups, occupational groups, agegroups, etc. This part of the book has several conceptual shortcomings. The authors divide foreign theories on Japan into several periods. Until World War II, Japan was mainly a curiosity item for intellectuals looking for exoticism. In the period immediately following the war, the tendency was to regard Japan as a unified, homogeneous culture, a view convenient for the allied military occupation forces and economic planners. The authors distinguish two currents within this tendency: (1) to regard Japan as a retarded country which ought to modernize and (2) to preserve Japan as a primitive paradise lost to Westerners. In the early 1960s, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. began to compete in aid to developing countries, and the U.S.A. sought to use Japan as an example of a successful transition to American-style democracy. In the late 1960s, during the Viet Nam War, young Americans were searching for an alternative to the official American view of Asia. At the same time, various forms of political and social unrest arose in Japan, and theories of smooth Americanization became untenable. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, the countries of Europe and North America were preoccupied with events in other parts of the world: the Russian invasion of Hungary, the Suez Canal crisis, the Korean War, the Viet Nam War. Japan was seldom a news item and continued to be regarded as a country with war devastation, food shortage, and people in rags. When it finally emerged as an economic force in the news media of Europe and North America, it created the impression of a sudden success which could not have been achieved by methods familiar to Europeans and North Americans. Books on Japanese "uniqueness" became popular. Added to this was the interpretation that Japanese society had applied its traditional patterns to its economic modernization. By the early 1970s it had become fashionable to view Japan as more advanced than Europe and North America. On the Japanese side, before World War II Japan was materially inferior to Europe and North America and felt the need to emphasize its spiritual superiority. Another trend was to develop an endogenous methodology independent of imported social science methodologies. During the war, a chauvinistic flavor was added. Concepts and theories uniquely Japanese were considered indispensable to the study of Japanese society. Furthermore, comparative study of Japan with other countries was thought to be unnecessary. Immediately after the war, when Americanization was imposed, Japan came to be seen as primitive, feudalistic, and undemocratic. Theories advocating psychological and cultural "modernization" became popular. In the 1960s, Japanese theories concurred with American theories of smooth Americanization. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, theories of Japan's uniqueness were devised to explain its rapid economic development. At the same time, some American theories, such as Talcott Parsons's scheme of social progress, were refuted. The Japanese became extremely preoccupied with the questions of their inferiority or superiority compared to Europeans and North Americans. The authors rightly maintain that in all these periods both in Japan and in Europe and North America, homogeneity within Japan was assumed by the social scientists they surveyed. However, they fail to consider the work of psychologists such as Lifton (1979), which specifically focuses on individual differences, and that of anthropologists such as Iwata (1969, 1975), which considers Japan as related to Southeast Asian patterns instead of being unique in the world. As a transition to the second half of the book, there is a section on counterstereotypes. The authors list numerous examples of behaviors both among the Japanese and among the Americans and Australians which are contrary to the stereotypes. Many of these examples are excellent and insightful, but some are distorted or far-fetched (for example, their view that Japanese managers share a large office with their subordinates because they do not trust the latter). Furthermore, the authors fail to distinguish between individualism and relational heterogenism, for example, attributing to individualism the Japanese's tendency to perceive one another in terms of complex and differentiated social contexts in contrast to the Americans' noncontextual and undifferentiated egalitarianism and homogenism. The basic shortcoming of this section is that the authors ignore the considerations that (1) seemingly atypical behavior may be based on the same cultural rationale as common behavior and (2) similar behavior in two cultures may stem from culturally different reasons. The authors seem to be unaware of the detailed analysis of such behavior by the Japanese cultural epistemologists Kimura (1972), Hamaguchi (1982), and Iwata (1980). The second half of the book aims at demonstrating the heterogeneity within Japan. The authors show their data on the differences between social groups, occupational groups, agegroups, and the like, but their method has the following shortcomings: (1) Individual differences within each group are averaged out, and each group is treated as homogeneous. Consequently the authors end up with substereotypes corresponding to the subcultures, thereby defeating their own purpose. (2) The authors fail to see that within one individual there may be heterogeneous tendencies. Because of this, they arrive at the strange conclusion that any contradictory tendencies that may be found in Japan-for example, the severity of the samurai discipline and the lyricism of the appreciation of flowers-are attributable to different subcultural groups (in this instance, one military, the other lyrical). This conclusion ignores the well-established psychological fact of the complexity of the individual and is contrary to the findings of many researchers. In each Japanese, several tendencies are combined in individually different proportions: the change-oriented dynamism originating in the Jomon culture, which began 9,000 years ago, the lyrical appreciation of the harmony of nature and the philosophy of absorption, which began with the Yayoi culture 2,300 years ago, and the hierarchical, often martial I ? 1983 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, all rights reserved 0011-3204/2405-0007$1.00