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Authors: David Pilling
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homogeneous, group-oriented society has become a fetish. At its worst, it has slipped into a dangerous assertion of racial superiority. It was, after all, a sense of Japan’s uniquely divine origins and its emperor-centred system – a mythology largely manufactured in the late nineteenth century – that stoked its poisonous sense of manifest destiny in the 1930s and 40s.
It is not only the Japanese who have laboured the country’s supposed uniqueness.
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
, written in1946 by Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist, painted a picture of the Japanese as ‘the most alien enemy the United States has ever fought in an all-out struggle’. Explaining why it was incumbent to study Japan’s culture so closely, she wrote: ‘In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking.’ The underlying assumption of the book – of a people with codes of behaviour entirely distinct from those of westerners – made it respectable to see Japan as a nation apart. After the war, the success of
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
helped breathe life into an entire genre of writing called
Nihonjinron,
or ‘treatise on what makes Japan separate’. The form had its origins as far back as the seventeenth century but reached an apogee in more modern times. In 1977, Joji Mori, a poet and English teacher, wrote a treatise on Japan’s group-oriented society called
The Shell-less Egg
. 7 The book postulated that Europeans and Americans were like eggs with their own shell, self-contained individuals. The Japanese, by contrast, were shell-less – sticky rather than hard, amorphous rather than rigid. They did not, the book argued, conceive of themselves as individual human beings unless defined in relation to family, village, workplace, superiors and inferiors, insiders and outsiders. By the 1980s, when some Japanese became convinced their nation’s unique characteristics would propel it past America to become the world’s economic superpower, whole sections of bookshops were devoted to these self-absorbed tracts.
Nihonjinron
builds on the phoney concept of a racially homogenous society. One only has to look at the faces on a Tokyo or Osaka subway to realize that the Japanese originated from many different parts of Asia. Nevertheless, the idea of a pure Japanese essence persists. This would have it that the Japanese are cooperative, sedentary rice farmers, not garrulous, mobile hunter-gatherers; that they have a unique sensitivity to nature; that they communicate without language through a sort of social telepathy; that they use instinct and ‘heart’ rather than cold logic, and that they have a rarefied artistic awareness. Much emphasis is placed on the advantages of a harmonious society. Taiichi Ono, considered the father of the ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing method that revolutionized Japanese productivity after the war, cheerily told a documentary filmmaker, ‘With a racially homogenousworkforce, it’s much easier to discuss things. In fact, it is perfectly natural for us to have a unanimous agreement in whatever we undertake.’ 8
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I moved to Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, talk of Japan’s uniquely admirable qualities had faded somewhat along with the vigour of its economy. ‘When I hear people talking about
ishin-denshin
, I wonder what they have in their heads,’ Noritoshi Furuichi, an academic, told me, referring to a belief in a unique Japanese ability to communicate non-verbally. ‘The interesting thing about
Nihonjinron
is the extent to which the Japanese want to believe it.’
Indeed the idea of
Nihonjinron
had not died completely. In 2005, Masahiko Fujiwara, an essayist and mathematics professor at Tokyo’s Ochanomizu University, published a slim volume called
Dignity of the Nation
. In it, Fujiwara did not argue, as had been common in the 1980s, that
It is not only the Japanese who have laboured the country’s supposed uniqueness.
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
, written in1946 by Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist, painted a picture of the Japanese as ‘the most alien enemy the United States has ever fought in an all-out struggle’. Explaining why it was incumbent to study Japan’s culture so closely, she wrote: ‘In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking.’ The underlying assumption of the book – of a people with codes of behaviour entirely distinct from those of westerners – made it respectable to see Japan as a nation apart. After the war, the success of
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
helped breathe life into an entire genre of writing called
Nihonjinron,
or ‘treatise on what makes Japan separate’. The form had its origins as far back as the seventeenth century but reached an apogee in more modern times. In 1977, Joji Mori, a poet and English teacher, wrote a treatise on Japan’s group-oriented society called
The Shell-less Egg
. 7 The book postulated that Europeans and Americans were like eggs with their own shell, self-contained individuals. The Japanese, by contrast, were shell-less – sticky rather than hard, amorphous rather than rigid. They did not, the book argued, conceive of themselves as individual human beings unless defined in relation to family, village, workplace, superiors and inferiors, insiders and outsiders. By the 1980s, when some Japanese became convinced their nation’s unique characteristics would propel it past America to become the world’s economic superpower, whole sections of bookshops were devoted to these self-absorbed tracts.
Nihonjinron
builds on the phoney concept of a racially homogenous society. One only has to look at the faces on a Tokyo or Osaka subway to realize that the Japanese originated from many different parts of Asia. Nevertheless, the idea of a pure Japanese essence persists. This would have it that the Japanese are cooperative, sedentary rice farmers, not garrulous, mobile hunter-gatherers; that they have a unique sensitivity to nature; that they communicate without language through a sort of social telepathy; that they use instinct and ‘heart’ rather than cold logic, and that they have a rarefied artistic awareness. Much emphasis is placed on the advantages of a harmonious society. Taiichi Ono, considered the father of the ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing method that revolutionized Japanese productivity after the war, cheerily told a documentary filmmaker, ‘With a racially homogenousworkforce, it’s much easier to discuss things. In fact, it is perfectly natural for us to have a unanimous agreement in whatever we undertake.’ 8
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I moved to Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, talk of Japan’s uniquely admirable qualities had faded somewhat along with the vigour of its economy. ‘When I hear people talking about
ishin-denshin
, I wonder what they have in their heads,’ Noritoshi Furuichi, an academic, told me, referring to a belief in a unique Japanese ability to communicate non-verbally. ‘The interesting thing about
Nihonjinron
is the extent to which the Japanese want to believe it.’
Indeed the idea of
Nihonjinron
had not died completely. In 2005, Masahiko Fujiwara, an essayist and mathematics professor at Tokyo’s Ochanomizu University, published a slim volume called
Dignity of the Nation
. In it, Fujiwara did not argue, as had been common in the 1980s, that
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