Happiness and the Good Life in Japan

Wolfram Manzenreiter, Barbara Holthus, Wolfram Manzenreiter, Barbara Holthus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317352723
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary Japan is in a state of transition, caused by the forces of globalization that are derailing its ailing economy, stalemating the political establishment and generating alternative lifestyles and possibilities of the self. Amongst this nascent change, Japanese society is confronted with new challenges to answer the fundamental question of how to live a good life of meaning, purpose and value. This book, based on extensive fieldwork and original research, considers how specific groups of Japanese people view and strive for the pursuit of happiness. It examines the importance of relationships, family, identity, community and self-fulfilment, amongst other factors. The book demonstrates how the act of balancing social norms and agency is at the root of the growing diversity of experiencing happiness in Japan today.

1 Introduction

Happiness in Japan through the anthropological lens

Wolfram Manzenreiter and Barbara Holthus

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.

(from On Becoming a Person, a collection of essays by Carl Rogers published in 1961: 186)

Japan of the early 21st century may not be seen as a prime example of a happy people. The rapid aging of society, shrinking household incomes and savings, rural depopulation and economic decline in peripheral regions, the dismantling of the welfare state and the widening of the social gap, plus an increasingly nationalist stance of Japan’s foreign policy threatening peace at its borders and its harmonious relationships with neighbors abroad and minorities at home, are painting a rather gloomy picture of a society resisting in vain the centripetal forces of a downward spiral set in motion when the myth of perpetual economic growth came to a rapid halt two decades ago.

These macro-level developments in policy and economy leave their mark on the lives of the Japanese people, the things they worry about and fear, and the things they experience first-hand. Many of these fears and worries are driven by public, mediated discourse, often but not always substantiated by sheer numbers, oftentimes painting bleak pictures of a “worsening” Japan. Topics include the increasing cases of workplace-induced depression, numbers of suicides and death through overwork (karōshi), the mounting fear of solitary death (kodokushi), and people to withdraw from society (hikikomori). These and other psychopathologies ferment the assessment that post-growth Japan does not naturally thrust itself upon the anthropologist as a promising research site to find happiness, even less to study it. Rather, the stories speak of a society hampered by maladaptation at such a great scale that increasing proportions of its members, across all age groups, are threatened by dissatisfaction, deprivation, alienation, depression, fear, and hopelessness. Japan may still be a far cry from what Edgerton (1992) in his contested critique of cultural relativism would have labeled a “sick society” on the brink of decay, but the apparent inadequacy of some of its institutions or the harmfulness of some of its beliefs indeed are threatening the viability of society.

So why not research happiness in even such a society? “If you want to study happiness, then start with misery,” suggests Parkin in response to Csordas’s proposal to distill an anthropological approach to morality out of the study of witchcraft and evil (Csordas 2013). Happiness and misery are usually considered mere opposites on one spectrum of the life satisfaction measurement scale, commonly used in quantitative research on life satisfaction and happiness (and misery) (e.g. Bjørnskov and Tsai 2015). Maybe their mutual relationship is, as in the case of morality and evil, much more complex and layered than the assumption of one-dimensional linearity holds. The anthropology of Japan certainly brought about many scholarly accounts on all kinds of social problems that point out why the Japanese possibly are truly unhappy. Kitanaka (2015), for example, looked at people’s sense of self and how it is related to mental health problems, Horiguchi (2011) researched the quality of life of socially withdrawn youth, against the backdrop of cultural discourses on home leaving and adulthood. Smith (2013) embarked on a study of ritualized forms of grieving that help parents overcome the pain of irreplaceable child loss, and Tsuji (2011) and Long (2012) studied the impact of social isolation in a hyper-aged society on commonly shared ideas of death and dying.

Such a gloomy assessment of the state of happiness in Japan seems mirrored in most, if not all figures from large-scale cross-national happiness surveys (see Holthus and Manzenreiter 2017), and supports the focus of anthropology as discipline (and sociology, for that matter, as well) to be more concerned with social problems in society rather than the positive aspects of life. Yet we argue in this book that an anthropology of the good life has to look past a flattened, one-dimensional understanding of happiness as the antipode of misery, and rather pay justice to the multiplexity of a phenomenon that in its entirety involves sensory affect, cerebral activities, feelings and emotions, cognition, reflection, and value judgment. Furthermore, not only individual-level aspects play into someone’s level of happiness or life satisfaction, but also macro-level elements, social structures and institutions are influencing elements in this complex field. The interaction chain in which all these processes are taking place poses huge challenges to the disciplinary division of labor within academia and the possibilities of ethnographic fieldwork. Most of all, this volume asks for anthropological explorations of the variety of notions and expressions of happiness, which are conceived of so differently in distinct social and cultural contexts that some researchers are prompted to ask if there remain any commonalities (Johnston 2012).

This is the first edited volume of anthropological studies and qualitative social science research on happiness and well-being in Japan. To our knowledge, it is also the first volume that looks at notions of the good life within a single society. Yet this is by far not the first attempt to demonstrate the potential of anthropology and ethnographical research for a comprehensive understanding of a mood or state of mind that is familiar to human beings all over the world. Still, despite its ubiquity and the recent proliferation of happiness studies particularly in the fields of psychology and happiness economics, we must state that for the time being we know more that we do not know about happiness than we have come to know through the existing literature so far. In fact, we think that the dominant positivist approach in happiness research, paired with conceptual ambiguities and its prolific abuse for political and commercial purposes, are responsible for the irritations caused by academic attempts at coming to terms with a central element of human life, usually dearly valued, often actively aspired to, and notoriously difficult to grasp.

An understanding of happiness at “face value” encompasses the capacity to recognize a happy face and differentiate it from an unhappy one, no matter when or where one encounters it, with the ontological constitution of being human. The underlying rationale of such a grave and generalizing statement goes back to Charles Darwin’s musing about The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872, reprinted in 1998), in which he suggested that emotions and their facial expressions were universal across all human and even nonhuman primates. A century later empirical research provided the somewhat surprising proof that humans indeed are cross-culturally capable of recognizing six universal emotions at levels well beyond chance, with happiness being one of them, next to anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise (Matsumoto 2006). Most recently, imaging techniques of brain activities and theories of evolutionary biology provided the neurological backbone to Darwin’s reasoning about emotional expressions and hominid social evolution. Having gone through the “Decade of the Brain” and the Human Genome Project, we are now told to accept that “the brain is social” and socio-ecologically adaptive as these qualities enable minds and brains to read intentions of others and share feelings inside others’ minds and brains (Young 2012: 402). Due to inroads into epigenetics and the “neuromolecular, plastic and social brain” (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013: 24), the divide between nature and nurture has nowadays become materially more real than ever (Singh 2012: 110).

Such findings do not neglect the significance of cultural codebooks needed to read more subtle nuances, nor do they disregard the great variety of cultural display rules that emerged among cultural groups in adaptation to their natural environment and habituated needs. Nor are they in conflict with insight from medical anthropology on “local biologies” (Lock 2001) acknowledging the diverging embodied consequences of social experience (e.g. in menopause, hysteria, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD). However, what neurosciences and biogenetics have come to tell social scientists about the interlocking of society and biology must rest uncomfortably with the dominant ontology of social constructivism and the anthropological reason that all cultural variation is discontinuous. Thus a simplistic divide between nature and nurture, which had been the bread and butter of much of 20th-century social anthropology (which occasionally meta-reflected on the division as cultural construct in itself), has been effectively dismissed. The potential consequences of findings from the laboratory delivered a good incentive for social sciences “to become more open to biological suggestions, just at a time when biology is becoming more social” (Meloni 2014: 594). Being aware of the evidential dawn of neobiological reductionism, Lock (2014) calls for anthropologists to pay heightened attention to this development. Instead of simplistically writing against the pervasive cultural effects of neuroscientific knowledge (Martin 2014), and certainly rather than forging an uncritical alliance with neurosciences, anthropologists should – in line of these new findings – re-theorize their concepts of embodiment. Whatever the outcome, “the spectre of the brain” (Fitzgerald and Callard 2015) has already stirred up the intellectual division of labor and the practical logic upon which the boundaries between natural and social sciences are based. Suffice it to plead for the same kind of sustained and critical attention to interpretative social sciences within neurobiology or empirical (quantitative) takes on happiness.

The popularity of happiness

The broadening interest in happiness as a topic of scholarly inquiry is revealed by an unprecedented amount of academic studies, government-sponsored surveys and popular publications on the subject in Japan as elsewhere (Coulmas 2009; Holthus et al. 2015). Not unrelated to that, happiness has also become a policy goal. The Bhutanese Gross National Happiness project presumably became the worldwide best-known political attempt at balancing economic development with its people’s sense of happiness. Similar initiatives of paying attention to quality of life issues beyond economic riches also surfaced in the UK (Layard 2005), France, Canada, Germany, and Japan. In 2010, the Japanese government proclaimed a new economic growth strategy in harmony with a sustainable environment, the fulfillment of social needs, and people’s happiness. Yet after the triple disaster of March 2011, when a magnitude nine earthquake caused a giant tsunami, the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and destroyed or radioactively contaminated large areas along Japan’s northeastern coasts, the ruling party changed from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and expressive political interest in surveying and promoting people’s happiness vanished.

Nevertheless, the world continues to witness the publication of ever more happiness indices and country rankings, like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index (since 2013) or the World Happiness Report (since 2012) (Helliwell et al. 2012). Rooted in a positivist understanding of happiness research, their underlying notions of happiness as something that can be gauged, measured and quantified is expressed by the aggregation of numerous indicators, both objective and subjective. We do not intend to dismiss easily the value of quantitative research on happiness. There is ample evidence that people all over the world are able to identify events and conditions that are augmenting or impairing their state of well-being. People have a fairly stable sense of their state of being and they are able to indicate to what degree their sense of happiness is fluctuating and how particular experiences of momentary happiness are related to a more enduring sense of overall well-being. Psychologists are still grappling with the possible impact of personality and genetics on the individual’s propensity to be happy (Lauriola and Iani 2015). However, in numerous surveys and experiments they have provided evidence of culture-specific differences in the understanding of happiness. Markus and Kitayama (1991) therefore stated that happiness is a “collaborative project” in all societies, since it is always defined in collaboration with others, yet the ways of collaboration differ across societies. For example, positive social relationships matter in all societies, but feelings of autonomy are only of importance in so-called individualist societies (Oishi et al. 1999). Particularly in Western societies of Europe and North America, people are rather construing their sense of happiness in relation to the self, self-esteem and other internal references, whereas collectivist societies in Asia tend to use norms and the social appraisal of others as their frame of reference (Suh 2000). It should be mentioned that these and other psychologists are well aware of intra-cultural variation, culture-specific response patterns according to the survey setting and the misleading generalization of “individualist” vs. “collectivist,” or by the same token, “West” vs. “East.” Therefore they ask for in-depth single-country studies and ethnographical work, in particular to generate more reliable and valid measures for specific cultures (Selin and Davey 2012).

In the case of happiness economists with their overall concern with national averages and rankings, gauging the availability of economic means, infrastructural, material and other resources against a society’s collective appreciation of their significance is certainly a new and refreshing approach for their discipline as well. Yet we are deeply concerned with research programs that take the meaning of happiness for granted or conflate different levels of emotional and cognitive experiences under the generic terms of happiness and well-being. The burgeoning boom in popular happiness publications in Japan (Coulmas 2009) and elsewhere in the West itself is indicative of a “happiness industry” (Davies 2015), feeding on the widespread belief that living a good life needs attention and attending; that there are ways to happiness that can and should be deliberately explored, and that it is ultimately each and everyone’s responsibility to strive for a happy, fulfilled life. The proliferation of self-help guidebooks and lifestyle manuals hence demarcates another milestone in the expansiveness of “experiential capitalism” (Rifkin 2000: 149) spreading into so far uncharted territories and turning previously non-commercialized spheres into marketable commodities. For all these reasons, many contributions to the debate on happiness must be critically judged for their possible role in the exploration of emotions as a new resource to be bought and sold. The sometimes troubling alliance that has developed between political authorities, behavioral psychologists and economists speaks of a disturbing vision of biosocial engineering and the legitimization of neoliberal attacks on social welfare state principles.

Anthropology’s strained relationship with happiness

Anthropologists, as assembled in this volume, challenge the essentialist claims of a universally shared sense of happiness and the uniformity of emotional life. An anthropological conception of happiness as inherently and conceptually cultural is in our eyes capable of coming forward with a more holistic understanding than psychological or economist approaches can. Until quite recently, complaints that anthropologists have explicitly shunned engaging with the concepts of happiness and well-being were common (Thin 2005; Jiménez 2008; Mathews and Izquierdo 2009; Miles-Watson 2011; Walker and Kavedzija 2015). While this is no longer entirely the case, it is worthwhile to recollect and summarize the main reasons behind the silence of anthropology.

Social anthropologists since the discipline’s inception have been concerned with the in-depth exploration of life worlds other than the one in which they have been raised. For the common goal of understanding the diversity of how people organize their common needs in society and live their lives in a meaningful way, they ventured to tribal societies in out-of-the-way places or immersed themselves in the everyday lives of minorities and subcultures geographically closer to home, but still at a culturally distinctive distance. The commitment of the discipline to give voice, or at least visibility, to the “suffering subject” (Robbins 2013), the extraordinary and marginalized, is a laudable achievement in itself. However, this focus on deficits, deprivation, suffering, and ill-being is a flaw of disciplines such as anthropology – and sociology as well. Thin (2012: 8) calls this a “deficit orientation obsessed with social problems.” The inclination to research social pathologies has also been noted by Butler and Flores (2007). Reflecting on 3,000 papers read at the 2006 conference of the American Anthropological Association, they commented on the marked absence of ethnographies and theories on happiness and well-being, with not a single panel tackling the theme, in contrast to the long history of anthropological inquiry into violence, conflict and suffering. Hence the discipline has seen the evolution of subdivisions on the anthropology of disaster, death, and discrimination, to name but a few, that shed light on the cultural meaning and conditioning of fairly universally shared emotional experiences such as suffering, grievance, bereavement, and mourning.

This ambivalence toward happiness and the ultimate neglect of an experience so important to human lives is furthermore related to the history of the discipline in its constitutional attempts to differentiate culture from the fields of nature. The anthropological tradition of prioritizing m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Series Editor’s preface
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction: Happiness in Japan through the anthropological lens
• PART I: Family, intimacy and friendship
• PART II: Self and community
• PART III: Conclusions
• Index