Difference & Modernity

John Clammer, Clammer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780710305077
• eBook ISBN: 9781136163548
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1995. The question of 'postmodernity' that has swept Western academic and intellectual circles raises critical comparative questions. Do societies that have not experienced the same historical development as the West pass inevitably through modernity into postmodernity, or can they skip such stages altogether? Japan, the only non-Western society to develop independently a fully-fledged capitalist-industrialist economy, poses such fundamental questions to social theory. Is Japan in fact 'unique' and as such is it a society which escapes the net of conventional sociological abstractions? The book questions how special Japanese society really is, the limitations of Western social theory in grasping the fullness of this dynamic and a complex Asian society, and inquires as to how Japan in turn may speak to social theory and deepen and broaden the principles on which social theory attempts to explore and categorize the social and cultural worlds.

1 Introduction: Theorizing Japanese Society

This essay is not a work of empirical sociology: it is a study in social theory. Its intention is to examine the relevance of some major aspects and assumptions of contemporary social and cultural theory to one society that has a very different history and conception of its self-identity from the western ones in which the modem social sciences have almost exclusively arisen. The case study here is Japan, arguably the biggest challenge to the preoccupations and epistemology of much conventional sociological and cultural thinking. For in Japan we have the only major case of a non-western country that has undertaken an indigenous industrialization programme that has brought it to the front ranks of the modem ‘developed’ capitalist societies, yet has done so on the basis of a very different history, social organization, set of cultural premises and ecological conditions, than its rivals.

The question of how this success (if so it be) has come about has provoked a variety of answers often including the ingredients of a particular confluence of historical, geographical and sociological factors such as Tokugawa isolationism, neo-Confucianism, location in temperate North-East Asia, lack of raw materials creating the necessity for diligence and harmonious work relationships, losing a war against the Americans and then, when finding oneself conveniently committed to a peace constitution, having the economically enormously beneficial Korean and Vietnam Wars breaking out almost on one’s doorstep. Lying behind such specific explanations is a deeper methodological issue. Explanations of the internal workings of Japanese society and its achievement of modernity tend to fall into two main categories: political economy (including institutional factors) ones, or culturalist ones. Into the first category fall the arguments of analysists such as Chalmers Johnson (1987) and Karl Van Wolferen (1989), both of whom explicitly exclude consideration of culture as part of their framework, preferring instead to dwell primarily on sociological (for example, education backgrounds of top bureaucrats) and systemic (for example, the links between bureaucracy and big business) factors. Into the second category falls the now immense literature often collectively described as the Nihonjinron (‘Theories of the Japanese’) which tends to exclude analysis of structural (economic, political or sociological) factors in favour of explanations based on ideas of cultural uniqueness. This literature includes both innumerable Japanese examples (for overviews in English, see Mouer and Sugimoto 1986 and Dale 1989) and ones in European languages – the best known these being Ruth Benedict’s celebrated The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1989).

One of these paradigms explicitly excludes culture; the other sees little else. Stated thus, it is obvious that both are partial. But this very partiality raised a number of fundamental questions for social theorists, whether eastern or western, including those of the relationships between cultural analysis and political-economic analysis, of the universality of western theory as opposed to the particularity of Japanese theory, of appropriate methodologies for grasping the sociological distinctiveness of individual societies without forcing on them ethnocentric and ahistorical demands for uniformity and of the relationship between ideology and practice, between a society’s conception of itself and the actual behaviour of its members. The empirical study of Japanese society throws up these questions in a particular acute way. Here we have a society of large scale that has been conspicuously successful in creating an industrial, technological and consumerist society, but which seems to defy many of the existing attempts to theorize it. Is it really capitalist or democratic? Or is it even modern? Perhaps it is really tribal or feudal sociologically while able somehow (or because of this) to manage technology in a uniquely efficient way? Is it a society of ‘groups; organized in a vertical way that manages to deny the necessity of classes (Nakane 1973)? At whatever point one begins to approach the analysis of Japanese society it poses questions of this nature – ones that can certainly be asked in terms of existing and essentially western social theory, but which are very difficult to answer using the vocabulary and epistemology that the available range of theoretical options makes available to us.

This can be seen in many of the now current formulations in western sociology of what we considered to be the central problems of social analysis, such as the issue of the relationship between ‘action’ and ‘structure’ (Giddens 1983). But this formulation, to take just this one example, does not exhaust the range of theoretical possibilities. On the contrary, it could be interpreted as a distinctively western dichotomized way of viewing reality. Giddens’s fundamental problem seems to be that of, to use an alternative terminology, the relationship of ‘self’ to ‘society’. Which of course assumed things about the, actually highly controversial, nature of these two categories. Where for example understandings of selfhood and of the qualities of the social actor diverge from the assumptions of mainstream sociology, as they indeed do in Japan, the whole question of the relationship and of whether there is even a ‘problem’ at all will change, possibly radically.

The theoretical challenge then becomes one of the formulation of problems in such a way that they arise arguably out of the soil of the society to which they apply. What is involved here is necessary the analysis of comparative epistemologies, since the simple comparison of institutions begs all the fundamental questions including that of whether institutions of the same formal type (say bureaucracy) actually carry the same meanings or behave in the same ways in different social settings. Several arguments will be advanced in the chapters that follow, based on the root assumptions that it can indeed be demonstrated that Japanese society does indeed challenge in major ways many of the perspectives of western social theory, and that the theorizing of Japanese society, while it can draw on the vocabulary of these western traditions, requires some significant shifts in the ways in which sociological concepts are formulated and applied. These arguments, some explicit and some implicit in what follows, include the one that social theory and cultural theory need to be brought together in order to make any sense out of Japanese society, that central concepts of western social theory, such as class, have to be treated very critically when they are applied to Japan and that certain ideas which are almost entirely peripheral to mainstream social theory (such as nature, emotions, body and aesthetics) are in fact central to the understanding of Japanese society (Clammer 1991).

Clearly involved with these are some notions which have recently emerged into a fairly central place in contemporary theory, such as the idea of self and its relationship to modes of social organization. But also others which western sociologists appear to be much less comfortable with, such as the idea of hierarchy understood in a positive light and the idea that large scale societies, not only small intentional ones, can be organized around a utopian quest. The object then is not simply a critique of the universalist pretentions of much mainstream social theory, but also an attempt to revive the possibility of genuinely comparative sociology, to dissolve the distinctions between social and cultural analysis and to greatly broaden the range of issues which can indeed be seen as a legitimate part of social theory.

This project is necessary for social theory at large, for without the comparative perspective what offers itself as universal is in fact parochial, rooted in one form of social experience, one history and in one set of assumptions about what is sociologically possible. It is also very necessary in the field of contemporary Japanese sociological studies, much of which is either trapped in an endless debate about ‘harmony’ versus ‘conflict’ in modelling the society or which has in many cases become the pursuit of the trivial and the marginal, leaving many of the really central issues quite untouched.

It is in this connection that the question of the modernity, or even postmodernity of Japanese society becomes relevant. There are arguments that Japan is the postmodern society in the contemporary world, and, given the lack of ‘metanarratives’ that is alleged to characterize Japan, has always in some sense been one. Or to put it differently, that there are profound continuities between feudal and contemporary Japan that are in some sense postmodern in character and which account not only for the nature of existing Japanese society, and especially its popular culture, but also for the success of Japan in passing in a single generation from the largely agrarian, semi-feudal and militaristic society of pre-1945, to the industrialized, urbanized and technologically advanced capitalist giant of today, without massive social and cultural disruptions. On the other hand, there is also the argument associated with the dean of Japanese political theorists, Maruyama Masao, that the essential character of Japanese society is precisely that it has not yet achieved modernity, let alone postmodernity (Maruyama 1985).

This debate will provide a focal point for what follows, not least because it throws up the question of the understanding of the concept of modernity, and its derivative, postmodernity, in the different historical and socio-cultural contexts that have shaped the Japanese experience. The significance of the necessity for this comparative approach is clear from a reading of another text by Giddens (1991), in which any attempt to discuss what Giddens calls ‘specific contexts’, ‘exceptions’ and ‘counter-trends’ (1992:2) is specifically excluded. The result is a deeply ethnocentric attempt to explore the ramifications of the impact of late modernity on everyday life and personal experience, on the assumption that the effects of modernity are universal and are similarly experienced wherever they are encountered.

A central thesis of this study is to show that this is not so: there are many exceptions and variant cases, and my argument here will be that Japan is one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent, of these. The links between modernity and social life differ for both historical reasons and because of the ways in which the ‘objective’ features of modernity (for example technology) are actually managed in differing cultural manners. The self, the preoccupation with which Giddens sees as an essential part of modernity’s ‘reflexivity’, cannot itself be taken for granted as a uniform category across cultures and I will argue here that Japanese concepts of the self are indeed very different from those which have evolved elsewhere, and especially in the modern west and its satellites. ‘Modernity is a risk culture’ says Giddens (1991:3), yet a very good way of interpreting Japanese society would be in terms of its being, while undoubtedly a ‘late modem’ one, also one that has evolved distinctive sociological and psychological patterns designed exactly to minimize risk.

To argue thus would indeed be to admit that modernist societies are normally or potentially risky in Giddens’s sense that ‘The future is continually drawn into the present by means of the reflexive organization of knowledge environments’ (1991:3), but also to argue, which Giddens does not, that different societies have developed entirely different mechanisms for dealing with this, and which certainly need not take the form (or only the form) of the ‘pure relationships’ (relationships for their own sake) which Giddens sees as the response in the west. The establishment of ‘trust’ (one of Giddens’s favourite terms) is related both to socialization (and in particular to ‘skinship’ or close physical proximity in carrying, bathing and sleeping behaviour) and to social forms designed, at least in their ideal typical manifestations, to embed the individual in a social nexus such that concepts of self (and of the ‘individual’) are inherently bound up with a collective identity always bigger than that of the individual.

Self-identity may still be ‘reflexive’ (indeed it could be argued that Japanese culture is an intensely reflexive one, much more so in certain respects than, say, British culture), but it is also dialectical or dialogic in a primary way: what some Japanese sociologists have characterized as a ‘relational society’ based on a pervasive personalism. Life-style choices, while they exist in Japan as they do in the west, exist within a much greater ‘closure’ of social life, as opposed to Giddens’s ‘openness’. Risks are thus greatly moderated, but at a cost: much less individual autonomy, and much less discourse about ‘authenticity’ or ‘self-actualization’ (not surprisingly perhaps in a culture in which the term ‘individualist’ has strong negative connotations). But arguably there is also correspondingly less alienation and less existential anxiety, at least as these terms have been conventionally understood, although of course there may be forms characteristic of Japan which tend to escape identification because they are not so immediately identifiable.

In short then, the organization of experience, even when the institutional (e.g. nation-state) and technological form of late modernity are apparent, very substantially. Giddens, for example, in defining his term the ‘sequestration of experience’ which refers to connected processes of concealment which set apart the routines of everyday life from madness, criminality, sickness, death, sexuality and nature, groups phenomena which appear very differently in the Japanese context. For example criminality and the operation of the law take a distinctive form in Japan – which incidentally has a very low crime rate – since the criminal justice system is designed primarily to promote repentance, rehabilitation and ‘spiritual reflection’ on the part of the convicted, rather than to punish as such. Likewise the connection of the elements that Giddens identifies with one another does not only take one pattern: sexuality and death for instance are related in intriguing ways in Japanese culture (for a literary example see Kawabata 1989) and are often linked by the culturally very significant category of suicide (Pinguet 1993).

But perhaps most important here is the fact that nature is emphatically not ‘sequestered’ in Japan from the rest of social life, but is related to it, even integrated into it, in a complex range of ways, many of which give Japanese culture many of its most distinctive features. The emphasis, not on ‘groups’ as such, but on the role of the social nexus rather than the individual and the self-conscious linking of society and nature may help in explaining not only why Giddens’s category of ‘pure relationships’ is weak in Japan, even or especially in the context of marriage (Edwards 1989) where, yet, it is interesting to note that Japanese divorce rates are comparatively very low, and also that recourse to therapy, allegedly a characteristic of the reflexivity of the self in late modernity, is also of a very low frequency. In turn other concepts, such as those of power, powerless and empowerment, all of which are rarely spontaneously used in Japanese discourse, need parallel reconsideration, not only as abstract concepts, but in relation to their embeddedness in particular contexts (for example in Japan in relation to the pervasive gift-economy).

Our subsequent discussion then will inevitably have to take place in this comparative perspective, without which a dialogue between Japanese society and western cultural and social theory obviously cannot very fruitfully take place. The discussion also requires an openmindedness towards the possibility that new categories of analysis need to be created, for example by bringing nature into social theory, by recognizing that the aesthetic component in Japanese culture carries over not only into social organization, but also into fields like ethics, which in turn effect social ideas and practices, by perhaps seeing the Japanese social project as a huge anti-alienation device and as such as a profoundly utopian one. Ideas which seem to lie outside of social theory, or which have been excluded from it (the principle of interdependence, the desire for harmony, the centrality of emotion rather than reason, the aestheticization of life, the search for wisdom in nature and the acceptance of the body) prove to be central, and their implications wide ranging. For instance behaviour which is seen as being in keeping with nature and which aims at the realization of beauty, is regarded as producing its own morality, which springs from within, from natural inclinations, not from imposed, external, precepts. A person in this ideal state acts benevolently from inclination. This theory, which while not equating the beautiful and the good, asserts that morality is natural when it springs from the right kind of consciousness. Where such ideas exist, as they do in Japan, it is easy to see that they will have profound and systematic social consequences by creating patterns of behaviour quite at variance with systems where external norms are stressed. And interestingly such ideas, highly traditional as they are, converge with some of the most ‘progressive’ social movements in the west, such as the deep ecology movement, with which there are many parallels (e.g. Fox 1990, especially pp. 218–24).

All societies represent ‘negotiated order’ in which social reality is constantly defined and redefined by the actions, perceptions and interelationships of its members. One does not have to be a symbolic interactionist to recognize this, but it is worth noting that while in general western social theory has only offered a partial and begrudging acceptance to the symbolic interactionist approach (Joas 1988), it is difficult to envisage a sociological approach to Japanese society that did not involve a large element of this form of analysis. This is reflected in the prominence of and constant reproduction of certain standard themes in the sociology of Japan, such as obligation, status preoccupations, gift-relations and the concern with wrapping and presentation – of artifacts and of the self – as well as in other social processes such as engendering and artistic production which have not yet received so much attention. But negotiated reality itself has to be placed squarely in the context of a society where the historical continuity of certain aspects of social structure such as emphasis on hierarchy, is very marked.

It is this that creates a dialectic between the demands of reciprocity at the personal level and the equally insistent demand for stability in social relations in general. Or put in a slightly different way, a central requirement of Japanese social organization is to maintain the intimacy of face-to-face relationships (in the workplace, school, neighbourhood and family) while extending that reciprocity from purely personal interaction to the constitution of the society as a whole. Reciprocity at the microlevel and reciprocity at the macrolevel ideally not so much reflect each other as represent expressions at different levels of the same fundamental principle. The result is a ‘relational’ view of society of an interesting kind and which has the characteristic of avoiding dualisms: contrasts and conflicts (and binary oppositions in general) between individual/society, society/nature, sociology/psychology, reason/emotion, aesthetics/ethics, body/soul, do not occur to anything like the degree that they do in the Cartesian cultures of the west.

Central here is the question of rationality. Japanese society is not in some Weberian sense, a ‘rationalistic’ one: there is plenty of reason, applied to technical problems, and plenty of practical reason in the sense of the efficient management of everyday life. But even the most rationalistic of institutions, such as bureaucracy, have developed a different and much more flexible and personalistic culture than, they typically have done elsewhere, while still remaining efficient in a technical or managerial sense. Any reader of the vast literature on Japanese style management will be very aware of this. And significantly Japan has produced little in the way of indigenous sociology, abstract theology, philosophy or philosophical logic or of systematic psychology of the kinds very characteristic of western intellectual life. This lack of rationalization is balanced by an emphasis (reflected very strongly for example in Japanese literature) on the primacy of emotion in Japanese philosophical anthropology and a corresponding aesthetization of life.

The notion of the ‘decentring of the subject; so popular in structuralist and poststructuralist thought consequently has a peculiar meaning when read from a Japanese point of view, because the subject has always been decentred in Japanese culture at one level (Buddhist ideas of non-ego, sociological ideas of the relational or contextualized self), while being (actually or ideally) also part of a ‘non-anonymous totality’, as contrasted with Giddens’s ‘anonymous totality’ (Giddens 1988: 205): non-anonymous in the sense of their being a large group of people with whom one shares what is perceived to be a common descent, common language, common culture and a single ethnic identity (however mythical his idea might be in practice). Japanese social theory consequently presents itself as unashamedly ‘humanistic’ in contrast to the philosophical anti-humanism of much contemporary European cultural theory. In part the reason for this lies (paradoxically for in the west nature is non, if not anti, human) in the situating of man in nature, since man as part of nature is centred there not in the mind or in a ‘text’, and in part in the emphasis on the emotional or non-rational dimensions of the make-up of human beings. When the issue becomes ‘I feel’ rather than ‘I think’ the whole intellectual foundations of Cartesianism, and with it its intellectual successors such as structuralism, are undermined in a radical way.

To undertake a reading of Foucault, Barthes or Lacan from this point of view is a stimulating exercise. While Lacan’s view that the ‘other’ is necessary for the constitution of the ‘I’ is unexceptional from a symbolic interac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A note on Names and Romanization
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Theorizing Japanese Society
• 2. From Modernity to Postmodernity?
• 3. High Culture/Mass Culture and the Experience of Late Modernity
• 4. Modernity and Lifestyle in the Japanese City
• 5. Natural Being/Social Being
• 6. Modernity and the Self
• 7. Hierarchy, ‘Group’ and Individual
• 8. Social Theory and the Particularities of Asian Modernity
• Bibliography
• Index