you can take the japanese out of japan but you can't take the japan out of the japanese. Do with this what you will.... but it's sort of true with everything. ;P

Yes at least for westerners in Japan, the situation is dynamically self-reinforcing. We individualists find ourselves in an excluded position in a groupist society. A little frustrating but ultimately it enhances our individualism and our feeling of individualism. Now this is a dynamically unstable situation and some foreigners get a bit of a Nietzchean rush losing their sanity altogether. Believe me I've seen it several times ... these types are usually found living in a kayabuki grass-roofed house in the deep inaka or hold several licenses to teach tea or bushido etc... Needless to say the Japanese media loves them. Koko wa hen da yo.

Shoot ... in my haste I didn't get enough consonants in there. It's "Nietzschean" isn't it.

Good grief, Marxy, you're back to your old tricks! Collectivism DOES NOT EQUAL Nihonjinron! Collectivist cultures DO EXIST and Japan IS ONE OF THEM! Deal with it!

Gert Hofstede called this cultural dimension 'Individualism / Collectivism', Shalom Schwartz called it 'Embeddedness / Autonomy'. Neither of them are Nihonjinron writers!

http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/licht/LPIL-tables.pdf

Why do you consider individualism unproblematical, but collectivism problematical?

sorry would you please translate the last part. My japanese is not really good at all. Something like 'this place' or "here...."

'Koko wa hen da yo' means 'This is strange' or 'this is wrong'.

Hmm, I don't think the other comments in the article are so value-free either:

"Magazines are fuelling fantasies with the Japanese, who think there are models everywhere and the women dress entirely in (Louis) Vuitton," Mario Renoux, the head of a French Japanese Society for Medecine was quoted as saying.

Some wonderful French gender stereotyping there. So these women are just plain stupid I take it?

Never mind the terminology of "strange illness", there's also:

"They are, in general, young ladies who have been spoiled and protected. Ill-prepared for Western freedom, they often go off the rails," the head of the French association Young Japan, Bernard Delage, said"

Looks rather like it's time to dust off those books about feminine hysteria. Where's Julie Kristeva when you need her?

So Japanese women go to Paris. Some (not all) of whom are not competent in French, some of them feel lonely and isolated from the culture around them. There's plenty of Europeans in that city who feel the same.

"They make fun of my French and my expressions", "they don't like me" and "I feel ridiculous in front of them" are common refrains heard by the doctors.

I know that feeling in Paris!

Why on earth do we have to define this supposed problem within a duel of collectivism and individualism rather than an issue of Parisian attitudes to foreigners and non-Francophones?

Changing the topic a bit and veering recklessly off on a dangerous tangent of some really terrible racial stereotyping, something I've found interesting is that in Paris or maybe in French culture in general, East Asian men seem to be considered chic boyfriends by French women. Are East Asian women any less popular in Paris than they tend to be elsewhere in Europe? Perhaps some of these depressed Japanese girls have gone to Paris looking for a romantic lover and have been unsuccessful?

Some Japanese girls do get odd notions into their heads. One girl in her late 20's I knew was learning how to sing skat and meticulously building up her stock of used kimono. Her grand plan was to emigrate to Germany, become a singer in a nightclub band and perform dressed in kimono. This, she reasoned, would be sure to net her a husband. She was actually more interested in living in France, but had calculated that her chances would be better in Germany. I didn't keep in touch so I don't know whether or not her plan worked. Other than her crackpot plan, she was attractive.

Japan IS ONE OF THEM!

Japan is "one of them", huh? Momus, you sound like you're Orientalizing! One of them! Not one of us! One of them!

Now, you see how it feels to have your statements re-edited to fit a purpose - in the same way that people "edit" Japanese culture to fit the "Groupism" mold. I just read this amazing chapter in Mouer and Sugimoto where they re-edit Japanese culture so that it sounds more Individualistic than the West - and it totally makes sense!

I want to do an essay on this soon, but the Collectivism vs. Individualism debate is not helpful for comparing Japan to the some kind of ridiculously reducted "West." There are better ways to typograph, if we have to.

Sparkligbeatnic: Your last post seems to anecdotal to really generalize about.

Sarmoung: Good points. There is nothing in the Japanese DNA that makes them any more of an outsider in French culture than Americans, etc. I do think that the average Japanese has an image of France being a very stylish place (like most Westerners do of Japan), but the information barriers between the two lands prevent the real story from becoming as equally well-known.

Back to Momus:

Why do you consider individualism unproblematical, but collectivism problematical?

I don't. I consider the typology to be heavy-handed and inaccurate. My point is not that collectivism is bad; my point is that the current generation of Japanese people would not necessarily choose collectivism if they had a free choice. I think you buy into a lot of fast and loose reductivist ideas that have been debunked.

Weren't you surprised when you were learning Japanese that the words for I (watashi wa) and we (watashi tachi) were so similar? Didn't it seem odd that Japanese speakers so often leave the subject out of their sentences entirely, as if who went to the store was rather immaterial? These things are running in the software. If you choose not to let them tell you something, that's up to you, but you're missing a lot.

the current generation of Japanese people would not necessarily choose collectivism if they had a free choice

I really find that outlandishly stereotypical, and much more reductive than anything I've said. You're aware that that sounds like the worst kind of right wing cant, aren't you? Free choice and individualism being, of course, the moral high ground of all self-righteous capitalist American swine who bring such values to foreign nations at the point of a gun (and worse) and expect to be thanked for it? You cannot expect ever to be taken seriously as a Marxist of any stripe if you say things like that!

Weren't you surprised when you were learning Japanese that the words for I (watashi wa) and we (watashi tachi) were so similar? Didn't it seem odd that Japanese speakers so often leave the subject out of their sentences entirely, as if who went to the store was rather immaterial?

This is really bad linguistic analysis that would be wiped completely off the table by a real Structuralist linguist. I wouldn't attempt to go any further with it. Japanese also doesn't have a "future past" tense; doesn't mean that the Japanese has no concept of the future past? And what does no sex differentiation or a dative case in nouns mean for Japanese society? And for bonus credit - did you ever notice that Japanese has way more words for "you" and "I" than English does?

I really find that outlandishly stereotypical, and much more reductive than anything I've said. You're aware that that sounds like the worst kind of right wing cant, aren't you? Free choice and individualism being, of course, the moral high ground of all self-righteous capitalist American swine who bring such values to foreign nations at the point of a gun (and worse) and expect to be thanked for it? You cannot expect ever to be taken seriously as a Marxist of any stripe if you say things like that!

Settle down. You read too much tacit support into my observations.

I do think that Japanese young people who now enter firms are way less likely to go drinking with their bosses when asked to. Not because they are proudly standing up to the Collectivist Authority in proud imitation of God's America! but because they feel that they have a life outside of work, which is more of a generational change than a cultural thing ingrained inside their heads.

I do particularly endorse this change, although I sympathize.

Weren't you surprised when you were learning Japanese that the words for I (watashi wa) and we (watashi tachi)

Also, just to clarify. "wa" is a partictle marking off the sentence subject, not part of the word for "I" (which by the way, would not be "watashi" if you are a man unless in some weird semi-formal occasion). If you wanted to say "we", it would be "watashi-tachi" or "bokura " - tachi and ra are just a pluralizers. (Ex. "inu-tachi" - the dogs)

I was not especially surprised when I learned this, seeing that not all languages are based on Indo-European grammar, syntax, and lexicon.

If they are so Groupist, why did they abandon Japan in the first place?

Because, as Ian Buruma explains in a chapter of 'A Japanese Mirror' entitled 'The Paris of our Dreams', there is a collective Japanese dream of Paris which it is perfectly Japanese and collectivist to pursue all the way to Paris itself. Only there do the Japanese encounter the difficulties of negotiating compromises between their own way of living and the Parisian way. Actually, most of the Japanese I know in Paris manage quite well, because there is a complementary French exoticist projection onto Japan. None of this Robert Duckworth 'tabula rasa of the 21st century Japanese mind' stuff for the French. They recognise the Japanese as hyper-aesthetic, refined, exceptionally talented, sexually attractive and civilised (especially if they're girls).

The Japanese I know in Paris are all in art, fashion and music, and their semi-religious feelings about their chosen media are matched by the semi-religious feelings the Parisians also feel about these arts. That provides a perfect cultural meeting point between the French and the Japanese, and if that doesn't work, mutual exoticisation (including sexual exoticisation) does the job. I'm sure Americans are staggered and appalled at how un-PC it all is, but tant pis, c'est la vie.

Momus:

If the Japanese you know in Paris are all in art, fashion and music, then you clearly have a ridiculously unrepresentative group of friends. The same can and has been said about the people you meet in Tokyo. You do not meet, for instance, students at an unknown foreign language school in Chiba, many of whom have no discernable ambition in life, even when asked. Instead, you meet the artistic elite of Tokyo, who have a whole separate battery of things they say about Japan and about themselves as Japanese. You can't use personal experience as a sampling method when your experience is so skewed.

I'm also getting sick of your swaps at people from the United States. It's just damned arrogant to assume almost 300 million people share the worldview of a government elected first without a majority of the vote and again with one so small it isn't noticeable on bar graphs, or that they share the views of the people I expect you've actually met, the more liberal and educated elite. I may or may not agree with you on various points on U.S. actions and society, but please don't confuse your opinions of cultural trends with knowledge about how individual people in the United States actually are.

I wonder what would happen if you got into a real conversation with a real, smart conservative from Mississippi who just sees the world in a totally different way from you.

That provides a perfect cultural meeting point between the French and the Japanese, and if that doesn't work, mutual exoticisation (including sexual exoticisation) does the job. I'm sure Americans are staggered and appalled at how un-PC it all is, but tant pis, c'est la vie.

Hey, I thought all the Japanese girls in Paris were happy to exoticize/be exoticized until I read this article! I've never particularly was appalled - I had just assumed that was happening over there.

Actually a more likely cause of depression amongst Japanese ex-pats in Northern Europe is the weather. It has become difficult for me to conceive of living in a place where there are not flowers blossoming and sunny warm days even in the winter. Probably we can all agree, that bad weather alone could account for many of those depressive cases.

It's a little easier to generalize about the weather than other things. Things change though. Even the weather. To return to our topic, is an individualist or a collectivist society more likely to be able to deal with that problem? Any ideas?

I'd like to toss just a bit more anecdotal garbage in the mix here.

1) In my experiences dealing with Japanese women in NYC, I saw alot of the same dissapointment/alienation/culture shock. I've heard similar things from my friends from Atlanta and LA. At that time I wrote it off to the stress of being in a new place, now after seeing how US cities are portrayed in Japanese media (NYC == arts/music wonderland, LA == "Hollywood" (excluding of course "everyone in the USA has a gun")) I can understand a bit more why the dissapointment is so severe.

2) An amusing example of how the Japanese used to percieve travel/life abroad was the Tora-san movies where Torajiro goes to Vienna. I'm not saying Tora-san is representatve of all Japanese male's opinions, but this one was pretty darn funny.

3) what sort of extended stay would it take for momus to get over his illusions about Japan and go into a suicidal depression?

Actually it has occurred to me more than once that the thing which most makes Momus' look naive is the extent to which he is willing to discuss Japan with long term foreign residents.

Marxy wrote (in reference to the debate about individualistic vs. collectivistic societies):

I don't. I consider the typology to be heavy-handed and inaccurate. My point is not that collectivism is bad; my point is that the current generation of Japanese people would not necessarily choose collectivism if they had a free choice.

I'd like to add that though the "typology" may oversimplify things somewhat it is not inaccurate and in fact is quite helpful in understanding otherwise counter-intuitive social phenomena. Having some sort of theoretical framework does help me in coping with social situations that would otherwise surprise me or not meet my expectations in some way.

Interestingly, in my own experience I've found that Japanese are often better prepared for the cultural differences they meet overseas than are the foreigners who come to live in Japan. This may simply reflect the fact that there is more information available in Japan about life outside of Japan than vice-versa. Or could it be that those Nihonjinron, however wrong-headed in justification or reasoning, can be useful heuristics for dealing with the differences Japanese encounter when living in other countries?

Many of the Japanese I knew in LA seemed to explicitly understand why they wanted to stay on or go home. If I had to extract the major factor from the various stories I heard it would have to be the collectivism/individualism dimension. One woman told me that entertaining short term guests from Japan was tiring for her because she always felt she was expected to be able to second-guess their needs and intentions. For the same reason she had no plans to return. Another, upon returning to Japan told me she was very relieved not to have to work so hard on her "self" all the time.

Perhaps an improvement over the current situation could be obtained if more sociologically realistic theories of cultural difference than the Nihonjinron such as the work that's being done by Kitayama and Markus, made it into the educational curriculum in some form. Understanding cultural differences within some framework seems like excellent preparation for adjusting to cultural differences.

I might add that even the eccentric girl in my earlier anecdote displayed a high degree of cultural and self- awareness, in that her combination of exotic dress and western musical taste (kouta or shamisen would attract too many otaku) was in fact something that could potentially interest a European male. And she seemed to know that her act would probably be a bit too tacky for Paris, where she really would like to live, but could go down well in a place like Stuttgart, which, I think, is where she was headed.

Japanese are often better prepared for the cultural differences they meet overseas than are the foreigners who come to live in Japan.

I think Americans have a problem with being foreign. Just as they tend to be great at anthropomorphising insects in 'A Bug's Life', so they're great at seeing essentially American characteristics in people all over the world; whether they're invading Iraq or living in Japan, the idea is that 'these people are just like us, or would be given half a chance'. There's a failure to see oneself as foreign, and a failure to see the Other as foreign either. Those ideas provoke anxiety. Now, I like Americans a lot, I've lived in the US and have many American friends, but this particular trait is a problem. It comes up in Duckworth's phrase 'the tabula rasa of the 21st century Japanese mind' and it comes up whenever Marxy reduces any talk of Japanese cultural difference to Nihonjinron stuff.

I think a much better way to deal with difference is to accept one's essential foreignness, and the foreignness of the culture one's visiting, and to allow a respectful mutual distance to define the relationship. I think this is how the Japanese treat gaijin, and the gaijin who thrive in Japan can deal with this better than other gaijin. I think 'mutual exoticisation' is, in these circumstances, a good strategy because, unlike automorphism (seeing others as versions of the self, dunno if that word exists) and imperialism, it recognises 'the good cultural other' and allows it to remain other.

By the way, I was helped towards this philosophy by an American, the lifelong exile Paul Bowles.

One girl in her late 20's I knew was learning how to sing skat and meticulously building up her stock of used kimono. Her grand plan was to emigrate to Germany, become a singer in a nightclub band and perform dressed in kimono.

I can tell you that she's changed her name to Hanayo and is now an internationally successful ex-geisha performance artist, photographer and singer. She lives in Berlin with her daughter.

http://www.hanayo.com/bio2/bio.htm

Momus said:

o they're great at seeing essentially American characteristics in people all over the world

I think you are describing the tendency of Modernist social science to reduce everyone to their rationalist motivations (ie, Economic Man). This is not uniquely American, although America is clearly the bastion of free-market capitalism and positivistic social science research, so I see why you are calling this "American." (Marxism and Neo-Marxism were German, no? Post-modernism was mostly French, no?)

However, my point is that it is equally ridiculous to write off all Japanese people as a reductivist and irrational Japanese Man who does everything different from the reductivist Western Economic Man. Japanese culture is different, but I - as a social scientist and not a philosopher - look for the economic and structural motivations at the base of Japanese behavior. The Japanese Government has been happy to push ideas of uniqueness as the semi-official explanation of Japan, so they can do things clearly economically motivated and hide behind cultural reasoning. All the trade friction in the 80s was written off as "cultural misunderstanding" while Japanese firms undertaking highly profit-motivated actions.

Cultural reasoning is soft and hard to prove and should be pulled out as a last resort. If we start the whole discussion by saying something like "lifetime employment exists because it is Japanese," we are ignoring the historical, socioeconomic, and labor-market-related reasons for the development. All I'm asking is to try to locate causative relations between cultural phenomena that at least take into account the more rational motivations of its players.

The Japanese are "collectivist" is too simple. Why are they collectivist? If they are collectivist, why can they not form spontaneous groups? Why are their non-work-related leisure activities mostly solitary like pachinko? Why do Americans belong to more groups than the Japanese? Seems to me that "collectivism" in the Japanese case just means a larger amount of social obligation to be involved with one's place of employment or school.

Again (and again and again...) there's really no point trying to deconstruct collectivism without also deconstructing individualism. You cannot wish away Asian particularities and continue accepting American particularities as if they were universals. What's rational in Japan is considered zany in America, as 'Lost In Translation' showed. Trying to find a common worldwide rationality is a waste of time.

You cannot analyse something so apparently simple as a business meeting without a whole range of cultural understandings. They cannot be left until last, and for someone who claims to be a social scientist, to say you plan to keep the tricky work of cultural understanding for use only 'as a last resort' is nothing short of dereliction of duty.

Momus:

Again (and again and again...) there's really no point trying to deconstruct collectivism without also deconstructing individualism.

Why are you assuming that rationalism = individualism?

My problem is that I have ceased to find "collectivism" vs "individualism" a particularly useful way to divide the US and Japan.

Trying to find a common worldwide rationality is a waste of time.

I am going to write an essay soon on orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy, which fits better and explains more. Both are different cultural systems and have their own rationality. So, I get what you are saying, but I don't think that the Japanese worldview is best described as "groupism" for reasons I have layed out before.

You cannot wish away Asian particularities and continue accepting American particularities as if they were universals.

I think that there are some universals. I don't think that Japanese markets are necessarily different in terms of economic psychology - when prices go down, people don't buy less. But structurally they are different, and there are different rewards for different behavior. Looking at the motivations and reward structures objectively, however, is an important task. White-collar Japanese works seem to work in the same motivational structure as 1950s American white-collar workers. There just wasn't a 60s counterculture to change the rules, which is why they look so different today. (Note - no endorsement of the American case.) Doesn't Whyte's The Organization Man sum up white-collar salarymen perfectly?

You cannot analyse something so apparently simple as a business meeting without a whole range of cultural understandings. They cannot be left until last, and for someone who claims to be a social scientist, to say you plan to keep the tricky work of cultural understanding for use only 'as a last resort' is nothing short of dereliction of duty.

But it's lazy to say "the Japanese are impossibly different" and call it a day. And even lazier to accept government public relations work as the true story. And much much lazier to make observations on superficial behavior without looking at the surrounding social structures and antecendents. "Cultural understanding" is one thing, but anthroplogists don't just say "it's different" - they look at the function of customs within a culture (or at least, the Functionalists do.)

You say - the Japanese go out after work with co-workers because they are a "collectivist" people and want to go out (implying they do not like to be alone.)

I say - the Japanese white-collar worker goes out with his co-workers to fulfill the social obligation of tsukiai necessary for future promotion.

These are both explanations for a cultural practice, but I think one at least deals with the fact there may be motives for reward - financial or otherwise.

Since you've never actually worked at a white-collar Japanese firm (which I have twice), it's easy for you to assume your view. When I worked for Kodansha employees were more than happy to go out all the time - stemming mainly from that company's ENORMOUS expense account freely used to pick up the tab for dinner. The motive here is clearly tied to the freedom of using the expense account. Entertaining me was their excuse to eat and drink whatever they want. The expense account is also one of the great perks of working at Kodansha, which compensates people for the long hours required. (Why do you need compensation if everyone wants to always be part of a collective?)

I worked two years later at a much newer, but more conservative company with no general expense account. Accordingly, there was a lot less excitement about going out by younger employees. All nightly drinking was lead by the fuku-bucho. Opposed to Kodansha, I was never taken out directly by younger employees. And we went to the same dingy downstairs bar every single night. Motives for young employees to come to this kind of outing were clearly tied to work-related obligation.

One more note: I think you (and I, sometimes) make a mistake of forgetting the huge difference in cultural values held by the different generational cohorts. The "collectivism" you describe is much more present in the Baby Boomer generation than the Bubble generation. There are a lot of Japanese marketing reports that talk about the differences in work-attidudes by age group. There are a lot of "individualists" who are leading the country's IT sector.

Well, you make some good points there. But I reject your 'convergence theory'. You say:

White-collar Japanese works seem to work in the same motivational structure as 1950s American white-collar workers.

That implies the exact 'anthropomorphism' I've been talking about, the idea that 'they're just like us'. But it's worse, because here it's 'They're just like we were when we were young.' A point I make again and again is that you cannot be asynchronic like this. There are no societies 'stuck in the past'. All societies are in the present. They co-exist and inter-relate now. To say Japan in 2004 is like America in the 50s is just nonsense. It would be nonsense even if Japan resembled that America in every detail, because that America did not live alongside contemporary America, contemporary China, etc. The context alone would make that a lie, even if the substance didn't.

Japan has negotiated a Japanese way to be a postmodern society. Its modernisation is not westernisation. It will not inevitably 'converge' towards Western mores, as so much of your analysis seems to imply. It will continue to be legitimately self-conscious about its particularity and its otherness, and will go through continuous redefinitions of its relationship with its own past, with its Asian neighbours, etc.

What's the '1950s American' way of dealing with your Asian neighbours? The quesion doesn't make much sense, really.

I had written "(Note - no endorsement of the American case)" so that you wouldn't launch into the obvious anti-Modernization theory argument.

I agree that equating Westernization with "progress" is a bad idea, but we must look why America changed their system in the late 60s and Japan did not start to dismantle their one until now. (I am not saying dismantling is progress, but it happened!)

From what I am reading right now in M. Featherstone's Postmodernism and Consumer Culture, America had a new educated class that strove to steal power from the establishment by realigning the value of cultural capital over economic capital, and this battle changed the American workplace (a la David Brooks and Bobos in Paradise). This never happened in Japan due to a lack of a politicized New Middle Class, and I would guess, the relative newness/effectiveness of the system and a more desperate drive towards economic prosperity. (You don't dismantle a system when it's giving you 10% growth rates and you want to buy a color television.)

I agree that Westernization is not progress, but for most Japanese companies, the long term goal is an increase in profit and productivity. Seeing that the new Western model does provide higher productivity and that Japanese average productivity is the same as Italy (that's not good), some firms are starting to consider the new management techniques of the West as a solution. Not because they are Western, and thus inherently better, but because they provide a possible solution for what Japanese businesses are striving for. Nissan turned itself around with Ghone - not because he's a Westerner, but because he came in with new ideas and reorganized.

Re: Hanayo. Interesting link Momus, but it's not the same person. The girl I met is probably married to a Mercedes mid-level manager by now.

If it had been Hanayo, I would probably have made an effort to get to know her better.

Marxy wrote:

You say - the Japanese go out after work with co-workers because they are a "collectivist" people and want to go out (implying they do not like to be alone.)

I say - the Japanese white-collar worker goes out with his co-workers to fulfill the social obligation of tsukiai necessary for future promotion.

These are both explanations for a cultural practice, but I think one at least deals with the fact there may be motives for reward - financial or otherwise.

Taking part in a social activity for the purpose of improving one's standing within the group is still within my definition of collectivism because of the value placed on one's standing relative to the group.

This is close to one of the stumbling blocks I had with Japanese working life. A lot of the behaviour I could see going on around me looked obviously self-serving. And it is, but the important point to understand is that the 'self' is determined in relation to a group. It's "rational agency" but oriented towards improving one's standing with a group.

I'm still a bit disgusted by foreigners who take up such practices as frequent gift-giving at work too enthusiastically because it obviously looks like bribery. But looked at from another point of view, they are simply adopting a local practice.

This blogware seems to parse html tags strangely. The italics in the first section of my post should extend over the first four paragraphs. My comment starts from the fifth paragraph.

sparkling: its not just you who gets disgusted. I've seen my Japanese co-workers mock gaijin who try to "goma suru" the kacho/bucho.

a while back (December 15, 2004 12:18 PM)on this thread, Graham said the following:

I wonder what would happen if you got into a real conversation with a real, smart conservative from Mississippi who just sees the world in a totally different way from you.

and i would like to say that such a person may be found at the following URL.
http://www.thing.net/~roddys/blog/
naturally, he was put on a black list by his own government, but no matter...he's got a real zippity-do-da flair that helps him outshine all icky things.
kiss,
r.
p.s. hi marxy

You know, Fanon talks about this.

初めてで、緊張します。
I just found a same article, talking about the Japanese girls in Paris from Asahi News Paper.
2/2, 国際６面
If you are intrested, check it out.
It was intresting for me too.
　
突然ごめんなさい。気がついたから、取り急ぎ。

doesnt matter How Japanese are and French are.
They live as they are.. Is it necessary to analyse or what is your point to analyse them? Culture should remain as culture supposing it is unique. Something their own the way they do things . noone can tell what is the best culture