I wrote that 19th century Japanese "were not surprised to find that poor Americans did as they are told and followed the laws, but they were astounded to see that rich people did not think of themselves as above the law, and were polite to others."
I mean they were shocked to find that everyone, rich or poor, followed the rules. In Japan, the rulers made laws for the peasants only, while they themselves did whatever they pleased, and took whatever they wanted. On a whim, they might strip a powerful landowner or businessmen of all his worldly goods, break up his family, and send him to a gulag offshore island. So they got the impression that wealthy and powerful Americans were craven, cowed conformists. So did visiting European nobility. For the same reason, they terribly misinterpreted what Americans considered to be ordinary politeness and fair play. They saw it as a kind of weakness -- kissing up, as it were. They would only bow to someone equal or from a higher social class, whereas Americans would tip their hats to any respectable citizen. They could not understand why powerful people did not always run roughshod over the community and steal everything not nailed down. It was considered the right of powerful people to do that, just as it is today in Russia or North Korea. They visited Congress and saw Democrats and Republicans sitting down at the table after the session and having a grand time, informally joking and laughing as good friends. One of them wrote in his diary that in Japan, the two parties vying for political power at the national level would be trying to kill one another, with swords, yet here they were friends. This seems perfectly natural to us, and to modern Japanese people, but it was an mind-blowing revelation to them. Even today, political rivals and business rivals in Japan seldom communicate. In the U.S. we have thousands of trade associations, trade shows, standards organizations and community organizations in which competitors get together, socialize and agree in various ways. No other society has as many community-oriented cooperative mechanisms as we do. The notion that everyone is bound to the law and that you should not feel free to kill your political rivals was alien, and when you think about it, that really is conformist -- in a good way. Japanese rulers still did not understand U.S. morality 70 years later, which is why they terribly misjudged U.S. diplomatic efforts to avoid war, seeing it as weakness and vacillation. Of course there were plenty of Japanese visitors who learned to appreciate U.S. customs and morality, and adapted it themselves. But unfortunately many of the official visitors who wrote diaries and later framed laws and negotiated war and peace did not. - Jed
