JAPANESE CULTURE

Class assignments and handouts

Reasons to Study Japanese Culture—Problems for “Western” Students

1.   Japan is an important competitor in the world system with particularly close ties to the United States.

Modern Japan is a model for understanding economic development in Korea & China over the coming century.

Japan’s tradition and levels of social-cultural integration parallel Western Europe.  The 1^st Shogun came into power at essentially the same time James 1^st of England united British/Scottish realms.

The distance and internal control maintained until 1850s positioned Japan to avoid the worst kinds of colonial impacts suffered in Korea, China, India, and Southeast Asia.  The negative aspect of this isolation was that transformation of the culture in the late 19^th century was very rapid.  Though Japan actually became an international power by the early 20^th century, it was still treated as a very secondary nation to European nations or the United States.

Japan was the only Asian country to achieve industrial prominence in the 1^st half of 20^th century, and remains the most attuned to Western, especially American culture in Asia.

2.   Japan is a geo-strategic ally for the U.S. in the political diversity of the postmodern world. 

Even though Japan offers a xenophobic and exclusionist contrast to the U.S. notion of the “melting pot,” Our financial and political connections to Japan remain the strongest in Asia in part because Japan possesses less of a “colonial” heritage, and in part because its political future is largely tied to economic and political commitments beyond Asia.

Indeed, Japan offers a social model for both the developed and developing world in the context of radical capitalist expansion.

Japan’s growing cultural impact on the US and world culture is tremendous, especially in the areas of the arts and technology.

The impediments of language—especially difficulty of learning the writing system—have helped keep Japan secure from a total domination by American cultural and political interests.

The recent situation in Iraq has Japanese military operating outside Japan for the first time in over 50 years.  This change signals a need for us to fully understand Japan’s history and our place within that history.

Issues Relating to the Importance of Japanese Language for Westerners

Following are some key points about Japanese language that you should consider closely, and use in your observations of behavior in the several films we will be watching as part of this class.  You should develop a section of your course notes on language and communication behaviors, and try to synthesize your observations as the course progresses.

 1.     Of the well-over 125 million speakers of Japanese in the world today, the vast majority live in Japan.  Over 95% of speakers outside Japan are of Japanese birth.  Thus, there are very few fluent Japanese speakers of non-Japanese origin.

 2.     Until relatively recently, practically the only strong speakers of Japanese in the English-speaking world were children of diplomats or missionaries, or more-recently, former military officers associated with the post-WWII occupation.  Many of the specialists in Japanese culture over the late 20^th century had these backgrounds.

3.     Standardization of written Japanese in the late 20^th century has made it increasingly difficult for outsiders to work with historical documents from WWII back into the early modern period.

 4.     Japanese writing is very complex.  Some 70% of Japanese words are based on Chinese loan words introduced over 10 centuries ago.  These are represented with pictographic characters called kanji.  Original Japanese words, including the syntactic particles, are represented with a syllabary script call hiragana, while foreign words are represented with another syllabary called katakana.

 5.     Verbal expression may seem relatively “minimalist” to outsiders.  Although there are “particles” that indicate parts of speech (used especially in writing), they are not always used in spoken Japanese. 

 6.     Phrase structures in Japanese are radically different from Indo-European forms, making the language very difficult to quickly master (see example over). 

 7.     Japanese language, in both its written and spoken forms, is highly gendered.  Male and female speech involves different kinds of stress and pronunciation. Poetic writing may imply male or female elements through alternating between kanji and hiragana.

8.     Non-verbal elements of language are very important in Japanese.  Gestural forms are more subtle than in Western languages.  Postural cues, “proxemics,” timing of communications, tactile communications, facial expressions, and eye-contact patterns are also highly developed and quite different from Western patterns.

Some Themal Comparisons of Japan and the United States

Morris Opler's theory of themes suggests that cultures manifest a relatively small set of premises (themes, similar to Talcott-Parsons' "value attitudes") that guide behavior or may even be explicitly cited to explain behavior.  In any cultural situation, more than one theme may be operative, and the individual or group weighting of these factors determines behavioral outcomes.  Thus, through the analysis of diverse behaviors we may also deduce themes for a culture. 

Opler and others also suggested that lists of themes might be useful for the comparison of the premises of different cultures.  The following list provides some explicit comparisons of Japanese themes with premises operative in the United States.  The lists are not exhaustive, but they will provide a basis for analysis and comparison as we encounter material throughout the course.