Charles Moore The Japanese Mind


In ouyrsuit of perfection, a sort of perfection mounted through the pre-conceived idea of ...

The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness peter N. Dale

The Japanese have long puzzled outsiders but it is less well known that they are often puzzled themselves.

In Japan there exist a vast and intricate body of theory devoted to the analysis of Japanese identity.--> nihonjonron.

This books argues that the nihonjonron constitute a coherent ideology of nationalism and holds that they should be treated as a mythologizal system rather than as serious contributions to social science.

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Over time the successive attempts of such works to define the Japaneseness of the Japanese have merely enhanced the mystery, adding glze on glaze to the over-lacquered idols of traditional forms of national deification.


21 The quest for identity

The nihonjinron not only entrap people with a contrived sicursive tradition to insultae the social structure from effective critique, but also militate against the emergence of an autonomous and individual search for identity.

20 When culture is seen as infrestruxtural, as determining all of the forms of social and economic life, history is made irrelevant, and social praxis is emptied of any element of libreating force and illuminative ower, since everything is seen as a symptom of the higher spirit, that enduring omnipresent yet ineffable entity with is called 'the japanese spirit.'

these slueths of autochtony, while anchoring th contemporary world to the bedrock of ancestral race consciosuness, profit from key deficiencies in the educational system, such as the lack of training in clear thinking and debate. It is as if an erudite immersion in tradition were an adequate substitute for analysis, wheras in fact such historical cultivation is often little more than a cultural placebo for a modern malaise.

When all social phenomena are riveted to the cast iron moulds of ahistorical identity, there can be no redress from crisis, personal or national, but only a perpetual recursion to cultural enewal as expressed in mindless sllidarity with the pristine virtues of the tribal past.

When Erikson has accustomed us to think of identity in terms of that complex process of inner struggle and growth through which the individual realises himself, the nihonjinron insist that in Japan identity is invariable 'group-orientated', and the term comes to imply the submergence of the individual within socierty, his coalescence with others, and the identity of subject and object, the inner and the outer world.

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therefore, that complex fusion of felt estrangement of self and society leading towards a dialectical reequilibrium between the two, in which the individual relaises himself within society, is alien in the notion of identity as understoof by the nihonjinron. Every inch of autonomous self-assertion by the individual is contested as threatening the hegemonic reach and authority of the corporate, national ideal. While intent on prejecting an image of japan's very possibility of individual, uniquely personal identity within Japan itself.

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West
Society Community
Individualism groupism
Horizontality Verticality
Egalitarianism herarchy
Contract Kintract
Private Public
Guilt Shame
urban-cosmopolitcan Rural-exclusive
Rights Duties
Independence Dependence

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It should be roughly clear at this point that much of what passes for a 'Japanese kind of logic' in the nihonjinron arises from a severe, defemsively combative endeavor to overcome a diffuse sense of inferiority to the West,

Shame over a self-perceived backwardness was a major spur for 'catching up and overtaking' 9oitsuke, oikose!) the West which formed the external model of modernisation.

This shame towards one's traditional past produced a literature of reverse identity, which placed all things foreign on a pedestal and demeaned anything smacking of the Orient.

When a sense of parity with the West was achieved, then shame is displaced as motivating agent by the pride of honour, Westernisation by a resurgent nolstagia for the authentically indigenous patrimony of culture.

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Ruth benedict's comparison between 'guil culture' and japanese 'shame culture'

shame as giverned by external sanction/ internal sanction
Guil cultures set a value upon internal norms for action, whereas shame cultures value external norms for action,

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"if we honour others, We must dishonour ourselves' Goethe

The resltess habit of measuring oneself against some monolithic 'other', engaging as it does powerful internal forces of shame, honour, and sensitibity to status, leads to amode of consiousness in which, as Rousseau remarked, 'once the heart has taken on this habit of making comparisons, it becomes impossible not to feel aversion for anything that surpasses us, lowers us, restricts us, anything that simply by being there prevents us from being everything.'

To out this another way, when the ego-ideal was defined in terms of 'Westernisation', all discussion of Japan's 'cultural uniqueness' tended to engender feelings of shame and inferiority. But when the Japanese economy began to mount a challenge to the hegemony of the West, the sense of shame switched to focusing upon the lost, original tradition.


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Nolstalgia for the past.

205 uniqueness thus became a code word applied to exiric phenomena whose attractiveness lay precisely in the way they gace lively contemporary witness to a world and life style transcended by the march of time and progress in the West.

John Whittier Treat

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Just as Japanese culture at the end of the twentieth century is hardly recognizable from the perspctive of traditional aesthetics, so too have the methods and aims of those who study Japan been damatically altered by the advent of new theories in the academy, on the one hand, and the dazzling speed of cultural change in Japan itself.

The World of Japanese Popular Culture

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Women Magazine


i have argued elsewhere that in Japan indiduality is more about being fashionable and sophisticated than about ctually doing one's thing.

Hendry (1986) argues that bringing up Chidren in Japan emphasize the importance of showing them good examples and encouraging them to imitate good behaviour.

Japanese only know how to follow.. immitate. they don't know how to carry on without an example.

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