Japan searches for its own identity

By Ignas Kleden

JAKARTA (JP): Most of the success of Japanese development is usually attributed to the fondness, ability and discipline of the Japanese people to imitate everything they consider good for their country and themselves. Without much pretense of creativity, they take the good things from outside, assimilate them and produce a better product than the original.

What is so outstanding is not the special talents of the Japanese, but the unrelenting willingness and determination to learn. In a Sisyphean manner in which one rolls a big stone uphill knowing that it will surely roll downhill again, they keep on doing it over and over again without ever giving up.

Being deeply enmeshed in Chinese characters means, for the Japanese, being deeply enmeshed in Chinese cosmology, as every kanji-character does not merely signify a sound, but rather describes the world. Nevertheless, Japan turned out not to be another China.

The same thing can be said of its Western-oriented policy since the Meiji Restoration. A striking development in Japan's Western outlook is that it successfully absorbed most western science and technology, classical art and music, literature, and even jurisprudence and philosophy without being taken over by western Christianity.

Despite much active missionary effort since the end of the 16th century, the number of Catholics in Japan for example is no more than 400,000, or 0.31 percent of the 127 million population.

There are various theories which try to account for the failure of Christian missionaries in Japan. One is political; it says that the Tokugawa shogunate feared the potential power of belief in an alien Lord, even though it was only in heaven. The intolerance of the Tokugawa police state toward other competing political rivals was well-known.

The second theory is more cultural. Prof. Tamotsu Aoki from the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at Tokyo University once told me during a discussion that as far as their spiritual needs are concerned, the Japanese have been self- sufficient since before the advent of Western influences. The three local religions which have been present for centuries have satisfactorily served the religious needs of the Japanese.

Shintoism, according to Prof. Aoki, teaches the Japanese how to live. Buddhism teaches them how to die and Confucianism provides them with the art of behaving. So why take on board another world religion which might teach the same thing?

When Japan turned from Europe to the United States after World War II, it did so earnestly, welcoming the victors who had just devastated their country with atom bombs. The American soldiers who landed were astonished how the people, who just a few months previously had been the frightening and mysterious enemy, extended their hands to accept them. America-Japan societies have mushroomed ever since, and the name "America" became a synonym for hope and future.

The exposure to America and American culture, however, does not make Japan more American than before. Just as the Japanese did not assimilate Christianity from Europe after the Meiji Restoration, they now do not use American English as their language. They use Japanese with a lot of English words, having first given them a Japanese form.

What they were looking for in the States was, and still is, the strategy of American industry and business, which they promptly took over and gave it the Japanese collective spirit.

Prof. Hamashita, the Director of the Center for Oriental Studies at Tokyo University, and possibly the most influential practicing Japanese historian, has, over the last ten years, striven forcefully against the mainstream of Japan's understanding of the nature of the Meiji Restoration.

Before Hamashita's study the Meiji Restoration was usually understood as Japan's national effort to catch up with the West. However, according to Japanese and Chinese historical sources, Hamashita demonstrated convincingly that the Meiji Restoration was a national effort by Japan to emancipate itself from the deep-seated cultural domination of China. Catching up with the West was merely a strategy to divert the traditional cultural attention away from China.

In the same vein, it might be further argued, the reorientation toward the United States was a national effort by Japan to emancipate itself from the cultural domination of Europe, while Japan's current gravitation toward Southeast and South Asian countries, demonstrates a new effort to define its position as a country belonging to Asia.

"Does the new interest in Southeast Asian countries mean a new effort by Japan to emancipate itself from the hegemony of the United States?" I asked people at the Asia Center/Japan Foundation in Tokyo. "No!" they said, "it is rather an effort to create a new balance in Japan's international relations in the face of recent global developments".

Evidently, one important phenomenon amid the sweeping globalization is the tendency of neighboring countries to establish their own regional groupings. Japan now has to redefine its geopolitical position, not merely as "Japan and Asia" but rather as "Japan in Asia". No wonder, the so-called Asian values question has become a subject of heated debate and wide curiosity in the country. Are there some values which can be seen and treated as culturally common to Asian countries?

Some Japanese scholars such as Takashi Shiraishi from Kyoto University do not consider the Asian values debate a serious matter, and at times see it as almost ridiculous. Asian values are nothing but the wishful-thinking of some cultural essentialists, they argue. But if this is the case, can one speak of "Japaneseness" or the cultural commonalities of regional groupings such as ASEAN?

In a discussion during a symposium on Southeast Asia in Kyoto in October last year, a senior technocrat from Thailand said commonalities, whatever they are supposed to be, must not necessarily be sought in the past. One has to take into consideration that Southeast Asian countries are now thinking of themselves as a political and economic entity, using a language which can be regarded as common to the whole of ASEAN.

This means that if one cannot find the commonalities in the past this should not prevent a drive to unity because common economic interests in the future, common political problems and even common cultural beliefs can revitalize nation's individuality on the one hand, while forge closer links on the other.

In other words, the problem of national identity becomes increasingly problematic, even for such a stable society like Japan. From an economic point of view it is stable because it is supposed to be a classless society, in which 80 percent of the population makes up the middle class, whereas only 10 percent can be regarded as upper class, and another 10 percent as lower class.

However, the question regarding Japaneseness seems to linger everywhere, not only among Japanese intellectuals, but also among the critical younger generation. Of course to outsiders Japaneseness appears to be something quite obvious. It is introduced to the outside world as nihonjin-ron. Its aim is to simplify the complex Japanese cultural traits in order to differentiate them from standardized western cultural patterns.

Among the many characteristics usually regarded as being the constituent parts of nihonjin-ron, I would like to mention three. The first is the taciturnity of the Japanese people as opposed to any pompous verbosity.

This underlying philosophy is that nonverbal communication is more reliable than the exchange of words, and that what goes unspoken might be more true and more important than that which is being said explicitly.

Secondly, the Japanese people are regarded as emphasizers of intra-group solidarity as opposed to class solidarity, and orient themselves toward hierarchism rather than toward individual achievement. This means, in Japanese business companies, one is supposed to think first of the growth and progress of the whole company and then of one's own situation as a small part of it. It is the company which should grow and become stronger and not the individual.

Thirdly, the Japanese people are usually seen as racially homogeneous in contrast to the multiracial heterogeneity prevalent in many other countries.

A British-trained sociologist from the Department of Sociology at Tokyo University, Dr. Kosaku Yoshino, once pointed out in a discussion that nihonjin-ron is in fact the result of cultural reductionism, which is disseminated all over the world through business manuals written mostly in English.

It is meant to give a simplified picture of Japanese culture to foreign businesspeople after one or two days reading. The writing of these manuals is obviously intended to support business purposes, by means of explaining the basic cultural traits of Japanese society in a popular and simplified manner. The business manuals have, over time however, assumed the role of cross-cultural manuals.

The impact of these manuals turned out to be greater than ever imagined. They bring out a cultural representation to help foreigners understand Japanese culture more easily. Thereafter the expectations of outsiders which emerge in their speedy perusal of those manuals impinges back upon the Japanese themselves, who are confronted with something not always compatible with their self-understanding.

However, the dissemination of nihonjin-ron goes on regardless of whether the Japanese like it or not. At the present juncture it is necessitated by the expansion of Japanese business, whereby the interaction with non-Japanese foreigners becomes increasingly inevitable.

The question posed by Dr. Kosaku Yoshino is: are the advocates of nihonjin-ron to be regarded as nationalists or internationalists? Are the business manuals or cross-cultural manuals to serve the purpose of business expansion or are they becoming an autonomous industry, the so-called cross-cultural industry, where the packages of simplified and fixed-made parts of cultural quintessence are offered to those who are fascinated by the exotic culture of Japanese society?

After the discussion, a Japanese participant asked me whether there is something comparable to Japanese nihonjin-ron in Indonesia. I was dumbfounded. An essentialist approach to cultural affairs is contrary to my academic perspective and very dubious in my personal consideration. I would have mentioned something like gotong-royong (mutual help), harmony or Indonesian finesse, but unfortunately I could not force myself to speak about them.

The writer was an Indonesian participant at the Asia Leadership Fellow Program at the International House of Japan, Tokyo, from October to November 1996.