How Westernized Is Japan?

by David K. Willis

The mistake is easy enough to make. The hotel is comfortable, familiar. Outside, floods of new cars, smog, some skyscrapers, good restaurants, all overwhelming, occasional glimpses of the palace moat, or the curving roof of a shrine. How Westernized the Japanese are! How similar to us! And yet…

The mistake is easy enough to make. The hotel is comfortable, familiar. Outside, floods of new cars, smog, some skyscrapers, good restaurants, all overwhelming, occasional glimpses of the palace moat, or the curving roof of a shrine. How Westernized the Japanese are! How similar to us! And yet…

Defining the Japanese today isn’t really so simple. Perhaps the only certain thing is that nothing is certain, but it’s probably wrong to draw sweeping conclusions from the number of soft-drink signs or carburetors.

Japanese as well as Western observers agree that underneath the Western facade, the Japanese remain essentially the same insular, competitive, group-minded, Asian people that they have been for many hundreds of years.

There are changes, of course. More Japanese sleep on beds, rather than on mattress-like futon. Toast and cornflakes are gaining a hold on the breakfast market, so long dominated by rice, dried seaweed, and soup.

More and more young people are getting married without the benefit of a go-between, then living away from their parents in ferro-concrete apartment blocks called "danchi."

Japanese men lead what amounts to double lives: up in the morning (most of them) for futon laid on tatami mats, into Western clothes, then mostly Western-style until evening and home.

A closer look at the office, however, indicates older attitudes: the playing of the company song before work, group calisthenics to piped music at three p.m.

One prominent American businessman has said it takes three years for an American really to understand how his Japanese staff thinks and operates.

One essential point, as outlined to me by sociologist Miss Chie Nakano – first woman to become a full professor at Japan’s most famous campus, Tokyo University – is the identification all Japanese make to group, rather than to profession. "I am with Sony," a man says when asked what he does. Only then does he say he’s an engineer.

Inside the group, mobility is great, ant extremes of wealth the exception rather than the rule.

Japan remains a meritocracy, with education the key to success. Tokyo University continues to feed the top ranks of government; Keio and Waseda, private universities, fuel big business.

Inside the group (family, business) politeness is elaborate bowing, and using different forms of address depending on the status of the person you’re talking to. Outside the group, people can be unheeding, elbowing and shoving on subways, ignoring rubbish an public streets.

"The Japanese have a great sense of beauty," says one Western professor, "but no sense of ugliness."

The key is the group. The businessman makes his decision always in his group, never alone. The government guides, molds, assists, and regulates the flow of credit and opportunity to a larger degree than in the West. Hence Japan presents a monolithic front to outsiders, leading to rapid growth: and to current outcries from Western Europe and the United States at the number of controls still in effect.

To most Japanese, the important issue is human relationships, of which they are most keenly aware: the interaction and interobligations of superior and inferior, of father and son, of ancestor and family-member. To a company, harmony within itself, and with its customers, plus growth, are more dominant motives than profit.

The concept of God as absolute has little place here. Shintoism (nature-worship) and Buddhism continue, but not with great numbers of active adherents, especially among the young. The Japanese, it is said, start with the human experience, and tend not to reach beyond it.

So beware the soft-drink signs and the shiny cars. Another businessman, an American, hesitated when asked whether similarities existed between Japanese and Americans of his acquaintance. "Yes," he said at last, "but nowhere near the surface. They’re deep, deep down."

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Reprinted by permission from The Christian Science Monitor. (c)1970 The Christian Science Publishing Society. All rights reserved.

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