Thammasat University students interested in Japan, East Asian studies, sociology, anthropology, ethics, philosophy, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 26 November Zoom webinar on Individualism in Japanese Life.
The event, on Monday, 18 November 2024 at 11am Bangkok time, is presented by Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo, Japan.
Its website explains:
We have been repeatedly told that Japan is a “collectivist” or “group-oriented” society, in contradistinction to the United States and other Western countries, which are said to be “individualist.” The argument strikes me as wrong, at best. After briefly rebutting the received view, I trace the genealogy of the mistaken idea and explain its cogency.
Program
Lecturer
John LIE (Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley)
Commentator
NAGAYOSHI Kikuko (Associate Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo)
Moderator
Anna WOZNY (Postdoctoral Fellow, Tokyo College)
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of individualism in Japan.
The TU Library also owns published research by Professor Lie.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FbECP9B_QOGJvpWyYrGInw#/registration
For questions or further information, please write to:
tokyo.college.event@tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Here is an excerpt from Professor Lie’s book, Japan, the Sustainable Society: The Artisanal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits which is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) system.
In commentaries on Japan, it is almost an article of faith that Japan is different from other countries and that, among its many differences, its holistic and collectivist nature stands out; that is, Japan is said to valorize group orientation at the expense of the individual. In keeping with the old proverb that tells of how the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, it is believed that in Japan it is unwise to enact social deviance or express an individual opinion. In addition, the power of conformity and group orientation is said to discourage the exercise of personal autonomy and expressive individualism in Japanese life.
Thus Japan is seen as a country where Enlightenment ideals, including the ideal of the autonomous individual, remain insufficiently rooted and underdeveloped, whether because of traditional Japanese influences or because of the lack of Westernization. And there is some truth in the conventional wisdom regarding the absence of Western-style individualism in Japan. Surveys repeatedly show that the most valued principle of living in contemporary Japan is tanin ni meiwaku wo kakenai (not bothering others).
Japanese ideals do not involve such abstract principles as truth or beauty, God or the sovereign individual, but tend instead to be amorphous, ostensibly neither abstract nor principled.
Or, to take the high road of intellectual history, Japanese reflections on the nature of the self have repeatedly found that the modern, or Western, idea of the individual or the ego either does not exist in Japan or cannot be assimilated into Japanese life. In fact, the typical narrative of modern Japanese literature or philosophy tends to focus on the formation of kindaiteki jiga (the modern ego) as the basic problematic.
Almost all the flaws in modern Japanese life—including militarism and imperialism, the autocratic emperor system, and antidemocratic forces and sentiment—have been traced to failed attempts to transplant the Western notion of the modern ego into the arid Japanese soil. This modernist, ethnocentric narrative is tendentious, however.
On the one hand, it is far from clear that the modern ego has flourished even in the modern West. In the United States, the brilliant findings of post–World War II social psychology, beyond recalling unfortunate historical events (and the modern twentieth century is replete with instances of unreflective xenophobia, even genocide), have shown precisely the absence of cognitive autonomy in supposedly individualist Americans of intelligence and conscience. In research such as Solomon E. Asch’s experiments on conformity and Stanley Milgram’s study of obedience to authority, the majority of subjects failed miserably to act on their individual judgment or conscience.
On the other hand, it is not as if modern Japanese history were devoid of people acting on the basis of individual conscience, even in the face of the majority’s disapproval, a majority that includes family members, friends, teachers, and colleagues. Apart from concrete cases of everyday heroism, such individuals have also been lionized in novels and movies, manga and anime. […] Be that as it may, lessons of individual conscience do permeate temporary Japanese life. […]
In other words, this is a norm that verges on being an ordinary virtue, a form of socialized individualism—recognizing the existence of others and exhibiting a minimal level of care for them as people like oneself. It is not just this particular norm but also the exercise of this ordinary virtue that makes the libraries and lounges of Tokyo so much quieter than those of almost any other metropolitan center in the world.
Alas, this particular manifestation of ordinary virtue appeared to be in steady decline in the early 2020s. In no sense does contemporary Tokyo fit the classic definition of a community. One can identify in Tokyo neither a commonality of will nor any widespread social and cultural likeness and homogeneity. Rather, contemporary Tokyo is a sprawling, dense, impersonal entity where civil indifference reigns. How, then, does the city function? It functions in part through the mechanisms of large bureaucracies—for example, the trains and buses that run on time. But the city also works in part because of socialized individualism, that is, the social norms and ordinary virtues by which individuals subscribe to the values of humility and modesty and curb excessive egocentric behavior.
It is not that contemporary Japanese people dislike pursuing their individual interests and desires, or that their close relatives and neighbors impose strictures on their behavior. Rather, they have adopted what can be described as, for lack of a better phrase, a broadly sociological understanding of the place of individuals and their expressions.
Contemporary Japanese people understand the existence of others. They understand social relations and networks, and even abstract concepts like society and the globalized world—the ABCs of scientific sociology. As a result, any propensity for excessive and expressive individualism operates within that largely shared context of social forces. Socialized norms and ordinary virtues outline the broad contours of a space in which people, by force of necessity, live with others while maintaining a level of propriety and politeness usually possible only in smaller cities and towns.
All this politeness notwithstanding, there is no shortage of hate speech in contemporary Japan, as we have seen, but it is limited to cyberspace, where it flourishes behind the screen of anonymity. The domain of face-to-face interaction continues to be governed by civil inattention and ritualized politeness. At the same time, just as privacy is a cherished ideal in Japan (and this accounts for the fact that almost all blog posts and other online commentary are pseudonymous), so is the right of free speech.
Indeed, I spoke with many left-leaning intellectuals who said that for the sake of this basic human right, hate speech should be protected rather than curbed. Thus, even though Japanese ideals tend not to be based on abstract principles, such principles do play a role in Japanese life and are often invoked to justify the taking of one stand or another. And there is more to say about socialized individualism. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)