MYTHS ABOUT MODERN JAPAN by Andrew Marshall _________________________________________________________________ "Control your gestures. Keep your hands at your side. The Japanese find big arm movements threatening. Never appear distracted. Remember that although you come from an MTV video culture, they do not. They are Japanese." This nugget of advice comes from Michael Crichton's bestseller Rising Sun, a book which owed much of its success to its masterly summary of almost every perceived notion about the Japanese. Through Crichton's eyes, America's Pacific neighbors are an inscrutable lot whose elastic morals, high-tech prowess, and limitless supplies of cash made them unbeatable corporate killers. This might describe some Japanese--as it might some Americans--but how well does it match reality? Ever since Commodore Perry's "Black Ships" blasted the nation out of isolation in the nineteenth century, myths about Japan have always been more powerful than the reality. Part of the reason for this was that Japan was so remarkably different from the West and indeed from other Asian countries. The stereotype of the backward, a-technological, fatalistic Orient did not fit well with a country that took to industrialization so rapidly and successfully. Explanations had to be found, and so the theorizing began, both domestically and overseas. Different starting points yielded different answers, and usually happens in such cases, simple answers were deemed the best, even if they could not possibly account for the complex phenomena to be explained. Insights were blown out of proportion. Thus myths, distortions, and misconceptions held sway in the popular mind and continue to do so to this day, despite the flood of information that modern technology makes available. This is partly because many people benefit from it staying this way. The gap between fable and fact not only can turn a book into a bestseller, it also sells movies, justifies trade policies, and pays the bar tabs for countless journalists who have made it their specialty to explain Japan and its people. Sometimes it also helps the Japanese themselves, many of whom are eager to propagate myths about themselves to bolster notions of national uniqueness or simply to bamboozle outsiders. To get a clearer perspective on some of these myths, misconceptions, and distortions, we asked a number of people from a wide variety of fields to comment on those that they found to be most prevalent in their own area of expertise. The selection of interviewees was necessarily limited because of space considerations; for the same reason we asked them to keep their comments short, which meant that they could not develop sophisticated arguments to make their points. All of the respondents are well acquainted with Japan: most of them are long-term residents and one is a Japanese comedian who enjoys considerable success both in Japan and overseas in a field that is notoriously difficult to do well across cultures. You may find that you do not agree with all of the things that the respondents have to say, and, indeed, it is not by any means certain that all the respondents would agree on every point amongst themselves. But by offering up such a spectrum of perspectives--controversial ones in some cases--it is hoped that the responses will serve to stimulate thought about the validity of some of the stereotypes, positive and negative, that you might encounter in your own contacts with Japan and the Japanese. _________________________________________________________________ PETER TASKER A top investment analyst and the author of two books in English and three in Japanese, Tasker has lived in Japan since 1978. While he is the author of the non-fiction book, The End of the Japanese Golden Era, Tasker's tongue-in-cheek jab at 1992's Rising Sun may reflect the fact that his own suspense novel, Silent Thunder, was released the same year. ON THE FINANCIAL MARKETS The myth about the financial markets is that the authorities control them. It used to be thought, going back five or six years, that the stock market would always go up because it was supported by the Ministry of Finance (MOF). Since then, of course, the market has collapsed. This has created another version of the myth: that the authorities caused it to collapse. They wanted to restructure the economy and squash the real estate speculators. But they don't have much control over what goes on. They couldn't control the market going up in the eighties and couldn't control it on the way down. The authorities do play around with the regulations and interfere a lot. For example, they're always interfering with the regulations of the futures market, and use guidance to stop major Japanese institutions selling at inopportune moments. Outside observers always mistake interference for far-sightedness, for some sort of grand strategy. All this can create a false sense of security. For example, it has always been said that the authorities will not allow a Japanese bank to go bust. So far, of course, no bank has, even though some of the smaller ones are in a shape that would be technically non-viable elsewhere. This creates the impression that everything is under control when it's not. There are a collection of other classic myths that have generally been exploded now--what the Japanese call the shinwa. For example, the myth that land prices always go up. Or that you have something called lifetime employment. The number of people that actually stay in the same company from graduation to retirement is very, very small. Lifetime employment is a kind of dual myth: the Japanese made it for themselves and sold it to foreigners, but it never really reflected the reality--70 percent of people don't even work for big companies, and lifetime employment isn't assured in the big companies, anyway. ON JAPAN AS NO. 1 Chalmers Johnson, the so-called godfather of the revisionists, once said that the Cold War is over and Japan won. It really doesn't look like that now. The myth was that with the perceived collapse of American industrial supremacy, Japan would take over from America as the world's superpower. This was kind of believed three or four years ago. ON RISING SUN The myth from that movie is that it's the done thing to eat sushi off a woman's naked body . . . when everyone knows it should be sashimi! _________________________________________________________________ AGNES CHAN Chan, a native of Hong Kong, first achieved fame in Japan as a teenage singer and television personality. She then left for Toronto and several years of graduate study, of which her recent book Okasan no kosodate shinrigaku (A Psychology of Childrearing for Mothers) is one fruit. She still appears regularly on Japanese television and spawned the "Agnes Debate" in 1988 by bringing her children with her to the studio. ON POLITENESS People think the Japanese are polite because they bow a lot and have a lot of kimari monku--sentences that they say before they eat, after they eat, when they meet, when they say goodbye. As long as you say all these things--itadakimasu, arigato, gozaimasu, sayonara--then you're considered polite. Most of the time people don't think when they are using these phrases; they're just going through the motions. It's like aerobics: you remember the movements and do them unthinkingly. ON ANTI-ASIAN FEELINGS Many of my Asian friends believe Japanese discriminate against other Asian countries. That's not necessarily true. Young people here have a lot of interest in Asia, and many friends there, too. ON WEALTH It's widely thought that all Japanese are very rich. True, when they go abroad with their yen power, they can buy many things. In their own country, they have a lot of spare money. I know many people who have to try hard to make ends meet, especially young couples with one or two children. ON JAPAN AS HIGH-TECH Many of my friends also think the Japanese are very technical. Most Japanese don't have a PC, never mind an e-mail address. Japanese offices aren't as automated as American offices. And here you don't need a PC to be a university student; if you don't have a PC in an American university, you're out. _________________________________________________________________ BILL TOTTEN Dr. Totten is president of Tokyo-based software company Ashisuto and author of the controversial bestseller, Nihon wa warukunai (Don't Blame Japan). He has lived in Japan for a quarter century and has a reputation for touching off firestorms with blistering attacks on the accepted wisdom regarding the trade deficit between Japan and the U.S. ON THE U.S.-JAPAN TRADE DEFICIT It's all a lie by the U.S. government. They invent this $6 billion trade deficit by counting only what American companies choose to make in the United States and then sell in Japan, versus what the Japanese choose to make in Japan and sell in the United States. They ignore all products that Americans make in Japan or Japanese make in the United States, ignore all products made in third countries. It's like counting just the first three innings of a baseball game. Coca Cola, Budweiser, Reebok, Nike, Caterpillar, Xerox, Kodak--almost every American company makes most of the stuff they sell in Japan outside the United States. American companies make outside the United States 86 percent of what they sell outside the country. Richard Nixon said a few years back that if you repeat the same lie often enough people will believe it. One of the issues between the U.S. and Japan is auto trade--America wants Japan to buy more automobiles. General Motors makes in Europe 69 percent of the automobiles it sells in Japan. If the Japanese cave in and buy more automobiles they'll only create more jobs in Europe! There are lots of people who are saying this. But Mickey Kantor, Bill Clinton, and some other people--who are whores--say the opposite thing over and over and over. Why do I use this word "whore"? Because they're taking money from American companies who, instead of investing and building businesses here, find it easier to give political contributions to American politicians in return for special favors. come from California. The U.S. government made a big issue about making Japanese buy more American rice. California is a desert! It has to bring water in from other states. And yet they sell water to the farmers at one-eighth the price city people pay to grow water-intensive rice in the deserts of California. It costs $1.60 to make the rice they sell for a dollar. American citizens like myself subsidize this loss. Then the U.S. government comes over here and gets the Japanese to buy it--so we have to pay for their goddamn breakfast! _________________________________________________________________ TAMAYO OTSUKI Tamayo is a comedienne, actress, and rap recording star with fans on both sides of the Pacific. ON HUMOR One myth I hear in the United States is that the Japanese have no sense of humor. This is very wrong. All Japanese have a sense of humor, it's just that they all, unfortunately, have exactly the same one. Seriously, I have noticed differences in humor between Japan and the United States, especially with respect to sarcasm, or poking fun at people. I noticed this when I came back to Japan after a long absence and did a performance that contained some routines from my U.S. show--routines where I was making fun of Americans and Japanese. Deathly silence--not even a giggle. This was strange, I thought. Being from Osaka, where the popular manzai comedy duos of the eighties originated, I had seen ridicule and sarcasm in performances many times. So, onstage, I turned myself into two characters, and one became the butt of all the jokes. The audience loved it. With almost the exact same lines, I got an entirely different response. This may be an effect of the Japanese group mentality (something you wouldn't call a myth). If you're the group--there with everyone else in the auditorium, for example--anything goes; people will let down their guard. When talking about someone outside the group, though, people are always careful about the face they show; people are a lot more cautious. This gives the impression to outsiders that Japanese are not very fun or creative. But that is terribly wrong, too. The Japanese are extremely creative--look at the success they have had in deciding which ideas to take in. _________________________________________________________________ DAVID KAPLAN Kaplan is co-author of Yakuza, the definitive book in English on organized crime in Japan ON THE CRIME-FREE SOCIETY The basis of this myth is that, in the postwar years, while crime rates in the rest of the industrial world skyrocketed, those in Japan actually went down. Japan's rate of violent crime is indeed low, bu the country boasts one of the world's most sophisticated and most cash-laden set of organized crime syndicates. As one criminologist told me, "What frightens Japanese cops the most is disorganized crime"--meaning, Western-style street crime. Crime in Japan, like everything else, is neatly organized into 100,000 mobsters bringing in well over $13 billion dollars a year. While the United States could stand to learn something from Japan about control of violent crime, when it comes to structural corruption and organized crime, Japan could stand to learn a great deal from the rest of the world. Look at the scandals from the last few years. There is such a long history of collusion between organized crime and the ruling powers here. For an American equivalent, you really have to go back to the days of Tamany Hall in New York--the bad old days of city corruption, where gangsters, labor bosses and political brokers all get rolled into one well-greased ball. That's the kind of corruption we have in Japan, but it's massive. This isn't one corrupt city machine in the 1920s and 1930s. You're talking about the world's second largest economy in the nineties, where billion-dollar deals are run-of-the-mill. Look at how the mob cashed in during the bubble economy. The nation's largest financial institutions--from banks to brokers to credit unions--gave organized crime access to billions of dollars. Imagine how Americans would react if the Bank of America, Citibank, and Merrill Lynch gave billions of dollars to the Gambino family to invest in how it saw fit? _________________________________________________________________ GEORGE FIELDS Educated in Japanese public schools and in Australia, Fields founded ASI, a very successful marketing research firm in Japan, and is visiting professor at Wharton business school in Philadelphia. His English-language books include From Bonsai to Levis and Destruction of Japanese Common Sense, but Fields has also written extensively in Japanese on cultural differences. ON THE JAPANESE CONSUMER There's so much nonsense written about the Japanese consumer that I'm not sure where to start. There is a myth that Japanese are more interested in quality and service and not price, and therefore will always pay more, because they think cheap things aren't good. There's also this myth that Japanese believe anything not made by Japanese hands is no good. A few years back it was assumed that Japanese wouldn't buy anything from catalogs because they like shopping and there were so many stores around. They had no other choice! Japan is like an airline that offers only first class and business class, and not the choice of economy class. But now they're being given the choice of economy class, they're taking it. The most prominent myth is that all Japanese think alike. But in my job I know there are different consumer groups. Take the shampoo market--nobody has more than 5 percent market share. JAPANESE INSULARITY Japanese certainly know more about America than Americans know about Japan. Their knowledge of the outside world is quite high and, by and large, their media has much better coverage of international news. In this sense, the Japanese are not insular--they have an enormous curiosity about the outside world. _________________________________________________________________ IAN BURUMA Buruma is a leading commentator on Asia whose books touch on topics ranging from Japanese popular culture (Behind the Mask) to a comparison of responses to the legacy of World War II (The Wages of Guilt) in Germany and Japan. Like Tasker, he feels that the archetype of the Japanese male as salaryman has been overplayed abroad. He also questions how successful the Japanese are in sending unspoken messages to each other, although a host of observers both inside and outside the culture have claimed the opposite. ON JAPANESE WOMEN It's always been something of a myth that Japanese women are submissive. Many people, including Japanese, say that women have always had to play this role: they would walk behind the husband, but would take care of the household budget and dominate their husbands by mothering them. They forget that in the Edo period (1603-1867), in agricultural life women did have a public role: to work alongside the men. I remember reading 10 years ago a statistic that showed that for the first time more women initiated divorce than men. That's a very significant statistic. It shows a shift in the economic position of women, who could only initiate divorce because they were sure they could make a living on their own. Today, if anything, men are more submissive. They have to conform to public life, to authority, whereas women can express themselves more freely. ON JAPANESE MEN Another great fallacy is that Japan is a country of conformist salarymen and company people. There are more people in Japan working outside companies than in any Western European country. People own their own business or shop, or are artisans of one kind or another. In fact, the corporate man is not in the majority here, so the idea tha men are all boring conformists is not true. But I do think that salaryman life breeds conformity and restrains people from expressing their own opinions. Women are less bound to that. ON NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION This is one great myth that Japanese propagate about themselves: that they can understand each other instinctively without having to express it in words. If that's true, how does it explain that most Japanese drama and much fiction is based on misunderstanding of each other's feelings? Half the Kabuki plays are about people not stating their feelings or others not picking up on them. POLITICAL ANIMALS The myth is that the Japanese are not interested in politics. They were happy with a one-party state, that this was a Confucian tradition and so on. We can see now that things are beginning to change. The papers are full of politics. Political books are bestsellers. People are passionately engaged. _________________________________________________________________ All rights reserved, (c) copyright 1995, Intersect Japan.