Hegemony of Homogeneity

An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron

Harumi Befu

• Publisher: Trans Pacific Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781876843052
• eBook ISBN: 9781925608243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Much of the misunderstanding by foreigners about Japan arises out of their acceptance of certain stereotypes about the Japanese. Harumi Befu spearheaded the critique of the stereotypical and the essentialized characterization of the Japanese and their culture, often referred to as Nihonjinron. He now presents his summary statements in this book by reviewing the whole gamut of the Nihonjinron literature, ranging from ecology, rural community structure, personality, language, values and ethos. He shows the roles Nihonjinron plays for the identity formation of the Japanese and as the idealized norm of the society in orienting the public. Elaborating on the way in which Nihonjinron functions as a civil religion, the book outlines how a period of positive self-identity has alternated with a period of negative self-identity since the Meiji period.

1 Japan and the West:
Mutual Misunderstanding

Throughout much of the period after the Second World War, Japan has been a target of criticism from the world, in particular from the Western world, over political and economic issues. Public officials, businesspeople, and the media pundits abroad, especially in the United States, have accused Japan of dumping goods, cutting prices unfairly, making much of the Japanese market inaccessible for foreign investment because of its excessive regulations and labyrinthine distribution system, and not giving foreign businesses such as construction fair access to the Japanese market. At worst, Americans and other foreigners have accused Japan of racism, ethnocentrism, and parochialism for keeping economic benefits to itself.

Japan has responded to these criticisms in good part by accommodating the demands, but also in part by accusing Western countries of not understanding the special situation of Japan arising out of its unique history and culture, be it patterns of communication, manners of business negotiation, industrial organization, or government-business relationship. Japanese culture and American culture are obviously different from each other, and cross-cultural understanding does require effort on each side. But the heat seems to be on the Japanese side, having to excuse itself and explain itself. In this effort, Japan has often resorted to ‘cultural exceptionalism’ as a defensive explanation. Because foreigners accuse Japan, or the Japanese, as a collective entity, the response assumes the same monolithic approach. That is, irrespective of variations within Japan and regardless of differences among the Japanese, Japanese culture is said to have certain uniform characteristics, and the Japanese are supposed to behave and think in a certain monolithic manner. These Japanese responses are drawn from a vast reservoir – well known to most Japanese – of presuppositions and presumptions, propositions and assertions about who the Japanese are and what Japanese culture is like.

Terminology

This reservoir of knowledge on characteristics of Japanese culture, people, society, and history is often glossed as Nihon bunkaron, Nihonjinron, Nihon shakairon, and Nihonron. Literally, these terms refer respectively to propositions about Japanese culture, Japanese people, Japanese society, and Japan itself. However, the terms are used interchangeably rather than to designate distinctive subfields of the genre, and thus a book advertised as a piece in Nihon bunkaron (culture) may deal with society and national character, or a book about the Japanese national character (Nihonjinron) may be advertised as a piece in bunkaron (dealing with culture). Like other popular terms used in everyday conversation, these are vague and nebulous in meaning, given to ambiguity. The whole genre can be regarded as one dealing with Japan’s identity, attempting to establish Japan’s uniqueness and to differentiate Japan from other cultures. In this book we shall use the term Nihonjinron because of its relative prevalence in English parlance, even though in Japanese, Nihon bunkaron is the most popular term.

In Nihonjinron and other terms in this genre, ron translates as ‘theory,’ ‘view,’ ‘interpretation,’ and the like. It does not necessarily, though it might, denote well-researched scholarly theory. For instance, ‘evolutionary theory’ in biology is called shinkaron. None but a small percentage of Nihonjinron propositions can be equated in theoretical sophistication with the theory of evolution. Rather, its more commonsensical usage is notably applicable in this context, where ron should be understood to have a broad and vague meaning referring to generalizations, in this case, about Japan, Japanese culture, Japanese society, and the Japanese people, much as the term ‘theory’ is used in English common parlance.

This ambiguity in the meaning of the term ron can become a convenient ploy for Nihonjinron writers: an impressionistic essay on Japan without any methodological or scientific rigor, for example, can be legitimately admitted as a ron – a piece in Nihonjinron – and then be conveniently understood (or misunderstood, as the case may be) to have scholarly status as a scientific theory. Indeed, there is erudite, scholarly Nihonjinron, carried out by scholars in their ivory towers to identify the essence of Japanese culture or society; but the vast majority of discourse in Nihonjinron is for popular consumption. In this book we focus on the latter type of Nihonjinron because our interest is in examining popular forms of cultural identity – what men and women on the street think about their cultural identity, not what an obscure scholar might write for a small audience of fellow scholars. We shall explore the distinction between these two types of Nihonjinron later.

Quest for Identity

One reason that makes the question ‘Who are we, the Japanese?’ particularly germane is that most Japanese are themselves very much interested in their national identity and have articulated their interest in a variety of ways, notably in published media, so much so that Nihonjinron may be called a minor national pastime.

Search for one’s identity is not unusual. The question ‘Who are we?’ haunts all of us at one time or another. It is a particularly pressing issue in a rapidly changing and complex society where one’s identity cannot be simply taken for granted: as society changes, the former definition of self-identity no longer suffices and a new one must be created. Also, the availability of so many alternative lifestyles and values to choose from creates a crisis in identity formation in the postmodern world.

The search for identity may be an individual matter, as when a young woman tries to be independent in a society fraught with male chauvinism or an orphaned man tries to locate himself in a kinship nexus. Or this search may be of a broader, cultural nature. ‘Who are the Jews?’ or ‘What constitutes American-ness?’ for example, are recurring questions that generations of Jews or Americans have tried to answer. In this book, the topic is the identity of the Japanese.

Although a more detailed examination is reserved for later chapters, it should be mentioned at least in passing here that Nihonjinron writings share a singular objective: to demonstrate unique qualities of Japanese culture, Japanese society, and the Japanese people. What defines the genre of Nihonjinron is the fact that its assertions and generalizations have to do with the nature of Japanese culture in general, society in general, or national character in general. As such, little or no attention is given in writings of this genre to internal variation, whether along the line of region, class, gender, rural or urban settings, or any other criterion. Consequently, broad generalizations of an essentialized Japan abound in this genre.

This book is about Nihonjinron in its various guises. It examines the sources of information propagated in this genre, the producers and the consumers, contents of this discourse, validity of the propositions in this discourse, its basic premises, the ‘religious’ ramifications of Nihonjinron, the popularity of this discourse in relation to the demise of symbols of Japan’s national identity, and finally the changing nature of this discourse in Japan’s modern history.

Let me make it absolutely clear at the beginning. I am not trying to defend any Nihonjinron proposition, some of which, such as belief in the importance of ‘blood’ for learning the Japanese language, are indeed outlandish. Nor is it the purpose of this book to make judgments about Nihonjinron writings, as critics like Roy Andrew Miller (1982) and Peter Dale (1986) have done, for example. My purpose, rather, is to analyze Nihonjinron as a cultural phenomenon as critically and objectively as I can, in short, to engage in the anthropology of Nihonjinron.

Because our concern is how the Japanese themselves create their own identity, how they maintain it, what assertions of uniqueness they espouse, and how they feel about such assertions, we are interested in examining the Nihonjinron literature produced by Japanese. That is, we are not primarily interested in foreigners’ discourse on the Japanese identity, although many a foreigner has written on the topic. Many indeed have cashed in on this lucrative publishing field through publication of Japanese translations of their works. Once translated, these foreigners’ works can be read by any Japanese, and thus such works become part of the genre to be examined here. This situation will be elaborated in Chapter Three, on the literature of Nihonjinron.

Enumeration of Traits

In Chapter Two, we will discuss the all-encompassing nature of Nihonjinron. We shall see how wide-ranging its arguments are, some claiming identity of the Japanese through history, some from environment, still others from rural community structure, language, psyche, philosophy, esthetics, and literature. Almost every type of natural and cultural phenomenon is fair game here. We will then review the nature of the literature on Nihonjinron. Books are hardly the only source of information. Other media – magazines and newspapers and also electronic media like radio and television – are common sources, as well.

Nihonjinron consists of a set of characteristics that supposedly separate the Japanese from other national or ethnic groups. Cultural characterization for Nihonjinron – or for any ethnic group for that matter – is necessarily selective. Selectivity is essential to reduce the unwieldy complexity of reality to a manageable summation. One of the crucial questions is what to select and what to leave out.

Selectivity involves conscious decision and is affected by a number of factors external to Nihonjinron itself. For example, what traits are selected is a function of what cultures Japan is contrasted with and what cultural traits the Japanese wish to emphasize in contrast to cultures being compared with Japan. For example, a widely circulated ‘unique’ Japanese trait is the supposed group orientation of the Japanese, which is discussed so often in the Nihonjinron literature precisely because it conveniently contrasts with the individualism of the West.

Features chosen to characterize a group must differentiate that group from others, although the differentiation may be only implicit. When Japanese writers mention amae (social and psychic dependency on others) or kotodama (spiritual quality of the Japanese language) without explicit comparison, they are calling attention to features of Japanese personality or culture that one would presumably not find in other cultures. The assumption is that full meanings of these terms are to be found only in Japanese culture and language. Because only ethnic Japanese speak the language, Nihonjinron protagonists can rest assured that these concepts are uniquely Japanese. In other cases Nihonjinron traits are picked on the basis of explicit contrast. For example, the rice diet of the Japanese may be contrasted with the meat diet of Europeans (Sabata 1979). Similar contrasts are legion and will be taken up in more detail in Chapters Two and Three.

Interests at Stake

With whom should Japan be compared and contrasted in deriving its differentiated characterization? This comparison is not random in Nihonjinron. It is dictated by Japan’s national interest, positive or negative. Economic competition or military rivalry, for example, may be the basis. No purpose is served in distinguishing one’s group from groups that have no relationship and nothing to share. Thus in modern times, Nihonjinron writers have most frequently compared Japan with Western civilization or one or another Western country, particularly the United States, because Japan’s political and economic fate is so heavily entangled in its relationship with the United States.

This is not to say that comparisons with non-Western countries are absent. A few books do compare Japan with China or Korea, but the West is overwhelmingly the principal ‘Other’ for Nihonjinron writers. I have looked far and wide and found no writing in this genre comparing Japan with African countries. Africa, of course, has never mattered much to Japan politically or economically, except only recently and only insignificantly in terms of trade and aid. Economically, technologically, socially, and in any other way, Japan sees little to gain or lose from Africa, and hence has no interest in involving Africa in its effort to create its identity.

It is thus that Nihonjinron is by and large built on comparing and contrasting Japan with the West. If some accident in history had made Japan’s contrastive referent not the West but the Islamic world or India, Nihonjinron would probably concern itself with Japan’s monogamous marriage system, which contrasts with Islamic polygamy, or with India’s caste system or Hindu spiritualism. Out of such comparisons, Nihonjinron writers would no doubt have woven ‘unique’ patterns of Japanese culture, where Japan would be characterized as a ‘uniquely monogamous’ society, one lacking a caste system and emphasizing social mobility, or one that is highly materialistic rather than spiritual. It is only because Japan and the West happen to share a similar kinship system (including monogamy), share a materialistic orientation, and lack a caste system that these phenomena are not at issue in the modern Nihonjinron.

Popularity

How popular is Nihonjinron? Because of the fuzziness of the concept, a reliable bibliography would be difficult to compile. Fringes of the field are especially difficult to delineate, though its central core is easy to identify. A partially annotated bibliography in this genre was compiled by Nomura Research Institute (Nomura Sōgō Kenkyūjo 1978), but it suffers both from being outdated and not clearly defining the field. It omits many important titles and misses many borderline works. Furthermore, it lists only book-length monographs and omits magazine and newspaper articles.

Be that as it may, it was an attempt to encompass the field, and the only more-or-less comprehensive one, at least up to the date of its publication, that I know of. For the period the bibliography covers (1946 to 1978), it lists 698 titles, and the titles increase in number at a geometric rate from year to year, especially since about 1970. If a similar compilation since 1978 were added to the list, the total would no doubt far exceed a thousand. If articles from periodicals were added, the number would easily multiply by a factor of two or three. Many of the monographs listed have become instant best-sellers or perennial favorites, for example, the Japanese versions of Nakane Chie’s Japanese Society (1970) and Doi Takeo’s Anatomy of Dependence (1973), Watsuji’s The Climate (1961), Suzuki Daisetz’s Zen and the Japanese Culture (1959), and Isaiah BenDasan’s The Japanese and the Jews (1972).¹

Scholarly and Popular Nihonjinron

Nihonjinron literature comes in a continuum from the most erudite to the most banal. This fact needs some elaboration. At one end of this continuum are highly scholarly works that attempt to characterize Japanese culture. These technical works are often expensive because of their limited print run and sheer size – often four to five hundred pages – so they do not appeal to the general public. One would not find them in ordinary bookstores. Thus the effects of more erudi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Japan and the West: Mutual Misunderstanding
• 2 The Nature of the Beast
• 3 The Literature
• 4 Premises, Models, and Ideologies
• 5 Symbolic Vacuum
• 6 Civil Religion
• 7 Geopolitics, Geoeconomics
• Notes
• References
• Index