The Land od the Rising Yen

in illness, pensioned off and
buried, never fired.
    Respect for authority and
self-effacement becomes second nature. The Japanese are so disciplined that
even inmates of lunatic asylums — who may have been driven into the
institutions by voluntarily submitting to too much discipline — can be ordered
about and disciplined by words alone. A patient may imagine that he is the
Emperor but he will do as he is told. The Japanese, being human, can be as mad
as the rest of us; but violent patients are extremely rare. In other countries
this almost blind respect for authority would be subservience; in Japan it is regarded as a virtue. It is the virtue of loyalty, first given then, in later
life, received. It is also adjustment; coming to terms with the world and with
your place in it. This is how the Japanese individual sees it; Japan as a society also insists on this loyalty and obedience. Other countries may deify
change; Japan wants — above all — stability.

THE HORROR OF RESPONSIBILITY
     
    A short while ago, I read a lament by an American
journalist about the slow disappearance of single items from the American
market — mostly supermarket. You can’t get a tomato any more: you must buy
three tomatoes wrapped in cellophane; you can’t get an ear of corn, you must
buy a package of three. You can’t get even a can of beer (he says), only a
‘six-pack’ carton of beer. The advertisers call it an ‘easy-to-carry six-pack’,
suggesting that it is all for your convenience because it is so much easier to
carry six than one.
    The Japanese have acquired many ideas
from the Americans; the Americans might have taken this one from the Japanese.
The Japanese — like American tomatoes — prefer to go in groups of three.
    Japan is a country of groups. It is an overcrowded
island and groups form naturally, of necessity. Privacy as we know it is
unattainable. You cannot have a room to yourself. And if — miraculously — you
get one the whole family can still hear you move about behind the thin walls,
they will hear every step you take, every sneeze, moan and sigh. Japanese life
has extinguished not only privacy but also the desire for privacy. Privacy is
equated with loneliness and loneliness is the utmost horror.
    The individual has slowly merged into
groups like the American tomato, and is wrapped around by protective
cellophane. To push yourself as an individual is invidious; to be ambitious for
your group (firm, regiment, university, fellow-students, country) is
creditable. For an individual it is still difficult to rise but groups can rise
and fall. Businessmen — merchants — used to belong to one of the lowest castes,
now they form one of the highest; the prestige of the military — the heirs of
the samurai — is not what it used to be. The group-mentality is as
universal in Japan as the cult of the individual is in Britain. Their national sport is the noisy crowd-game of judo: two people in combat but
also locked in an embrace; the lonely long-distance runner is not their man.
    We Westerners jump to the conclusion
that this group-mentality produces, or is produced by, an avoidance of
responsibility. We are very nearly right. There is a horror of individual
responsibility in Japan, engendering complicated and subtle techniques for
avoiding it. It is no good rushing to the almighty President of a company even
with the most valid complaint and asking him to order his underlings about. He
will not do it. He may take the final decision in all cases, but only after a
consensus has been reached. Not simply after listening to various views, but
after reaching a genuine and general consensus. (The most important man, the
key-man in many Japanese organizations is often a young man who knows the
ropes, who knows how to get the necessary approvals in the right order and
manner.) Japanese life — social, political, business — may be an oligarchy but
it tends to become a meritocracy and a democracy. Gentle or not so gentle
persuasion may be backed by authority, pressure, forceful arguments; yet it
still remains persuasion and not a high-handed order one has to obey.
One has the feeling that one is obeying one’s own order to some extent, that
one shares in the responsibility. The President will never tell his directors —
or the board, the salesmen and clerks — that it has been decided to open a new
plant in Yokohama. He will ask the others what they think of opening a new
plant in Yokohama. As the suggestion