Interdependence and Equanimity
Without question, Japan has come to survive and even thrive by way of constant and consistent cooperation. One might think that such traditions as communal baths at night and ark carrying parades in the summer were due to some inherent and long-standing affinity or affection that Japanese people have for each other personally.
But they really are more matters of practicality than love for a civilization of such feudal and agrarian origin. In the past, people simply had to work together to even subsist and that practical necessity has been met with great patience and respect for team work over Japan’s long history. One could do nothing alone and would surely be ostracized for even trying to.
So what does that amount to in modern-day Japan? Though the same level of interconnectedness is no longer such a vital need, the overall mentality remains such that one should be seen to do their best for the sake of all, almost to the extent that none should ever do just enough for themselves alone. There is a way that things are to be done and it is simply the way that everyone is already doing them.
In as much as the overwhelming majority of times that what is done by most is the safest if not best -the most time-tested if not easiest thing to do, Japanese culture has seen itself from the past into the present most handily. It has shielded itself from outside cultural incursions of the greatest and most devastating consequence to its sense of national identity. Though it may not be so clearly articulated, people still have a fairly palpable notion of what it means to be Japanese in contradistinction to other cultures, ethnicities and nationalities.
The above does not merely suggest that everyone aspires to do everything the same way in Japan, but that for everything there is to be done, there are those who may be steadfastly relied upon to demonstrate how a model Japanese national is to do them. The thinking being that if everyone were to focus on what their role is to play, to the veritable exclusion of what is not, society should function like a well-oiled machine. Furthermore, those who perform their roles optimally are swiftly and assiduously imitated in that respect and those who do not are just as expeditiously held in disgrace.
It should be no surprise that millennia of social practice could lead to a culture where the practice itself might supplant all preceding purpose therefore: The streets are clean because one refuses to litter but one’s refusal to litter ceases to be primarily for that reason. Rather is it to show oneself to be an adequate member of a team in which people simply do not litter. One arrives early, but no longer so much to avoid being late as to live up to the collective standard of being early. One no longer sits on one’s feet to the point of agony because it takes up the least amount of a limited floor space, but because it implies reverence and respect for membership in a group that has traditionally sat on their feet. In short, what were once best standards and practices suffer the jeopardy of becoming but a means of identifying so as to not be excluded.
This enters into the education and entertainment arenas as well. Where the effort put into study or rehearsal are often more emphatically celebrated than the result. Which may even go to the extreme that too easy a success or too talented a performance is underappreciated or ridiculed. Though there is an astonishingly low tolerance for error, there may be even less for the enviable and unabashed nature of performative excellence. To try and to fail is at least as laudable as any triumph. Great confidence may be deemed a sign of foolhardiness. Even if not especially if that confidence is well-placed.
Hence, the contemporary boom and more recent bust of gargantuan industries capitalizing on a well-nigh universal desire in Japan to appear to be ambitious about acquiring and mastering other languages while steadfastly relying on a minority of linguists to do the real heavy-lifting in actuality. As sophisticated as it is commonly considered to be to be versed in English, for example, most English words in most magazines, novels and textbooks (including those meant to teach English) are translated into Japanese so that no one ever really has to… And quite possibly because few very truly want to. These and many other examples implicate what is here referred to as ‘The Great Wall of Japan’. A wall that has not only protected the people of Japan from external pressures but, as we shall explore, may very well become a stultifying and even stifling barrier to be trapped within in the absence of internal ones.
Wow! That was a long one! Try the following quiz, if you dare….
Click here
for private English coaching based on this blog post.
