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In all this
nice response to the article about Japanese honesty, it shouldn’t be omitted
from the conversation that enforcing community standards with a deep sense of
shame also has its dark side, as many Japanese will share privately. Protocols
for politeness far exceed those for sincerity, even when health and safety are
concerned sometimes. As some of you
know or have read, one of the reasons there is such heavy drinking among
working class men is that only when drunk can they say or do things that sober
they could not. It’s quite different than the Western concept of acceptable and
unacceptable behavior under the influence. Japan is a nation of many people living closely together on
a chain of islands, so that an excess of social rules for behavior is understandable,
but like so many other characteristics about this culture and peoples, they
excel at creating human infrastructures with heavy penalties for noncompliance. One of the
greatest complaints I have against traditional Japanese culture probably isn’t
a surprise: there still are too many restrictions on women and too few options
for them. There is occasionally reason to be optimistic but for the most part
this is a tougher struggle than in the West. I am intrigued by reading that
increasingly, young women, college grads or not, are refusing to marry. That
should shake things up a bit as worried as the gov’t is about population
growth, as well as the subsidies they are giving to young couples to have
children and remain in small towns. While I didn’t
study the culture or language as deeply as I should have while I lived there as
a teen in an international school (there were a few distractions, like boys,
and the Beatlemania that was the latest wave of Western pop culture worship) I
did have several friends who were early hippies and/or dropouts from US and
European society (circa 1968-74) who remained in Japan, forever seduced by its
culture. Some never left, some
have become true global citizens. I know
personal family stories that do not fit the international image of the mythical
Japanese. All that is to say I
tend to look at Japan today through the eyes of young women. But it doesn’t
surprise me that there is a lot of unrest and dysfunction among some/more males
in Japan given the pressure to succeed and the huge weight of failure imposed –
at least among the middle classes. The honesty characteristic is one I hope will
never fade away from Japanese culture, but there are others I’d be glad to see
disappear. It will be
interesting to see what this new generation creates and becomes. - KWC |
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