the insulting topsy-turvy construct. Japan had commanded world respect by winning its war with Russia. This was reflected in admitting difference and refusing to consign blame. However, by focusing our attention solely on these extremes (New and Old), this model left out what was in between, which is most of Japan.
It also taught us to look only for stereotypes. Through these it could then suggest that Japan was a hybrid—interesting perhaps and certainly good at winning wars but not sensible, solid-all-the-way-through, like, say, England or the United States. That there is something dodgy about hybrids is a common Western assumption, be it mixed blood or mixed cultures. They seem to threaten our invented boundaries and hence our definition of ourselves.
One is familiar with this way of thinking, particularly in regards to Asia. It is our aged friend, Orientalism. Edward Said has noted that this construction insists that in order for the West to see itself as rational, humane, superior, it is necessary to create an East that is irrational, undeveloped, inferior. If this cannot be made to entirely apply (as it cannot in the case of Japan), then this part of the East is seen in terms of being upside down, reversed, bifurcated, or shaped in other forms of opposition.
To define by difference rather than similarity is common to us all. For us to become truly human in our own eyes we must have an alien against whom to measure ourselves. A late and notorious attempt to define self through the creation of just such an alien species was that of the then–French prime minister, Edith Cresson, who in 1991, comparing the Japanese to ants, went on to say that “we cannot live like that . . . we want to live like human beings, as we have always lived.”
The Japanese are thus not human beings. This indeed is one of the burdens of these various paradigms, though one not usually stated with such clarity. More subtly the proposition of Japan as a land of contrasts provides the same context—though in truth we are all lands of contrast in that none of us maintain the solid-all-the-way-through existence we think we want.
The simplicity of this paradigm and its consequent popularity soon, however, exposed its limited nature. Things were not as simple as a collage-like juxtaposition of old and new suggested. Something else was occurring. A new model had to account for this.
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Hence the fairly recent concept of continuity within change, an organic model: Japan as a place where the new and old could live equitably together; under all the modern veneer lives on this ageless core. Its appearance cannot be dated but it sounds post–WWII. Japan’s talent at winning wars had been exhibited and found wanting. One could explain away the binary model (peaceful/warlike) by situating them in temporal sequence—something the same but different.
This became for a time the standard model, let us say from 1945 until the fall of the Theory of Japan’s Uniqueness at the end of the century. It was often wheeled out, inspected, and approved. Also, it was a favorite of that group of writers now somewhat unkindly called the Chrysanthemum Club. It offered an organic recipe that made differences somehow more “natural,” a suggestion found in many volumes. One of the qualities of paradigms is that they reassure—until they reveal themselves as inadequate.
By now—let us generalize and say circa 1975—so many models had accumulated that a name for them became necessary. This the Japanese willingly provided—Nihonjin-ron, studies of the uniqueness of being Japanese. Americans wrote them, Englishmen wrote them, everyone wrote them, including of course the Japanese themselves, who had, after all, just as much interest in defining themselves through boundaries as did everyone else.
Some of these were very strange. Japan was somehow feminine, while the West somehow masculine; the Japanese had different brains, or longer intestines; the Westerner is an inventor, the Japanese merely an adapter. One still hears this latter. As Ian Littlewood says, “In our models of culture exchange, the West figures as virile originator, Japan as wily imitator.” As though such “imitation” is not general, as though this is not the way that ideas move around the world, as though it is not otherwise known as progress.
Some authors excluded almost as much as they included. Geoffrey Gorer is said to have believed that the most important and most consistent element in being Japanese was an early emphasis upon sphincter control and that this “drastic toilet training” solely lay at the bottom of the value system of Japan. Thus, he gathered, there is no concept of right and wrong, only the concept of doing the right thing at the right time.
Others followed. One (Weston La Barre) found the Japanese “the most compulsive people in the world’s ethnological museum.” Another (H. M. Spitzer) discovered that Japanese culture as a whole indicates the symptoms of obsessive/compulsive neurosis. Still another (James Clark Moloney) thought that Japanese society was “a potential incubator of paranoid schizophrenia.”
Of these and other examples scholar Hiroshi Wagatsuma has cautioned that “Most of what has been and still often is discussed as Japanese psychology or mentality, and frequently as ‘national character,’ is largely the product of impressionist description, stereotyping, or methodologically inadequate approaches.”
But foreigners were not alone in these attempts. They received support from the Japanese themselves who by this time had a Nihonjin-ron industry of their own up and running. Here there are myriad examples to choose among. As indication, I will merely mention the most translated, Dr. Takeo Doi, who explained much through such single-engine models as his study of amaeru (confident expectation of favor) as the skeleton key to Japanese culture.
There is in all of these attempts a tendency to see similar group behavior as expression of common personality structure. But such similar behavior patterns are often the result of mere conformity to social norms. If one tries to attribute group behavior to any supposed “national character,” one falls into psychological reductionism. Which is indeed just what the various Nihojin-ron do.
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Perhaps consequently, there is the need to continually update the necessary model, the permanent desire for a new and improved product. Out of the welter of the Nihonjin-ron there emerged, sure enough, a fresh model.
This was purely structural in nature, the country seen as controlled through its own agreed-upon polarities. There was uchi and omote (back and front, inside vs. outside); there was ninjo and giri (one’s own feelings vs. obligations owed to society); there was honne and tatemae (the real motive hiding between the stated reason). And there were many other, all of them moving parts in this latest definition. One of the features of this model was that it used Japanese terms to define the Japanese and was hence perceived as being somehow more “fair.”
Being structural, it fit in with its times academically (we are now in the 1970s–early 1980s) and with its quasi-scientific phraseology it was seen as intellectually respectable. That it offered the mere skeleton of a society rather than a reflection of that society itself—all bones, no muscles or skin—bothered, for a time, no one.
Eventually, however, as the Nihonjin-ron were beginning to lose their adherents, particularly those who were more able to compare real Japanese to the increasingly diagrammatic models held up to them, there rose the need for a newer, more complete model. Back to the drawing board.
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Interpretations of Japan will yet continue as the country evolves, but with the erosion of the traditional accelerating at such a rate there will eventually be little to mark the “difference” that Japan is traditionally thought to have exhibited, since the country itself will be little different.
It is problematic that any country can ever be truly “defined” by any other, since it remains true that any difference is assumed as a difference from whoever is doing the defining. I have myself in my fifty years learned that if Japan were to rid itself of
