BETWEEN FOUR WORLDS : CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA.

BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS : DIPLOMAT, ECONOMIST, JOURNALIST AND JAPANOLOGIST.

BETWEEN FOUR LANGUAGES: ENGLISH, CHINESE, RUSSIAN AND JAPANESE
Chapter 11(a)

WRITING A BOOK ABOUT JAPAN

1. Nihonjin-ron

2. A Moment of Inspiration

3. ‘Tribal’ Japan, Why?

4. Starting to Write
Invited to Write

The idea of writing a book about Japan had not been mine.

It had been put to me by a ski friend, Muramatsu Masumi (or MM as his friends called him), back in 1974 while I was still working as a correspondent in Japan,

MM was a skilled interpreter who had set up a very successful interpreting and translation company called Simul.

He had then expanded into book publishing. (Simul would later go bankrupt, mainly because of the over-expansion into book publishing).

Initially the book-publishing division had concentrated on translations of well-known Western books, including books from Australia, where MM had some good and sentimental connections. But gradually it began to commission books in its own right.

One day MM suggested that since I had been in Japan so long ( all of four years) and had had so many ‘interesting experiences,’ maybe I would like to write a book about my impressions.

The ever-friendly and gregarious MM clearly liked the idea of getting one of his mates to write a book, best- seller or not.

I said yes, and not just to keep him happy. I had wanted to write a book about Japan anyway, for several reasons.

What to Write?

One reason was that a lot had happened in the four years I had been in Japan – the Red Army, the Tanaka Kakuei affair, the opening to China, the oil shock, economic ups and downs, anti-Japan riots in Bangkok and Jakarta…

I had been involved with some of those events. For the record, if nothing else, I wanted to write about them.

But the main topic would be an attempt to explain the Japanese.

I had been surprised by the emotionalism of the seemingly stoic Japanese – their propensity to strange moods, booms, panics etc., and their haphazard reaction to events.

(One of my first surprises was discovering that bike gangs were terrorizing entire towns, and the police in this allegedly well-controlled nation would do nothing.)

Their strong groupist instincts also interested me (the bike gangs, for example), and the power of Japan’s factions (Tokyo University’s earthquake prediction center had been paralysed for years by some obscure clash between two rival academic factions) .

Human relations seemed to dominate all, to the point of illogicality (I once had a bank officer stand outside my office door for a week begging me to open an account with his bank. He gave me no reasons to use his bank. His just wanted to impress me with his sincerity.).

In particular, I had already sensed the strong differences between the Japanese and Chinese.

The Chinese were individualists. Unless under political pressure, they told you frankly what they liked and disliked, without any Japanese-style ambiguity.

They liked to argue and debate. They were a cerebral people, with a strong interest either in ideas, or in making money.

For the more emotional Japanese, group identity and human relationships often seemed more important. The concept of open argument and debate seemed so remote to the Japanese that someone had opened an institute to teach them how and why to debate.

The weakness of ideology in Japan was another point, especially in comparison with the ideology-fixated Chinese I had met during the Cultural Revolution.

In terms of basic personality the Chinese seemed much more like us Westerners than they were like the Japanese.

As for the Japanese, they seemed like no one else .

Why the differences? And why the extraordinary economic success in Japan, and not in China?

I would try to find an answer.

That, plus my various experiences in Japan and China, would be grist for a good book, I thought.

I told MM that even though I was about to go back to Australia I would try to let him have his book as soon as I could. MM seemed satisfied.

1. Nihonjin-ron

But there was another and even more compelling reason for wanting to write something.

The early 1970’s had seen a spate of best-selling books by Japanese scholars seeking to explain the Japanese to themselves and the rest of the world.

Collectively, their various theories were known as Nihonjin-ron – theories to explain the Japanese people.

Prominent authors had included the sociologist, Nakane Chie (with a book analyzing the peculiarities of Japan’s groupist and ‘vertical society’), and Doi Takeo who claimed to have discovered the Japanese propensity for emotional indulgence – amae.

A book published later by a Tokyo University professor identified well over one hundred different published theories in circulation to describe or explain what made the Japanese as they were.

Western scholars have liked to dismiss all this self-interest as national narcissism. But it clearly went much deeper than that.

The Japanese rightly sensed they were different from other peoples and sought an explanation. Their only problem was finding ways to find and explain that difference.

One scholar would insist that Japanese a highly egalitarian society. Another would say it was rigidly stratified. One would emphasise the emotional factor. Another would talk about the rigid rules of behavior. And so on.

A favorite was that the Japanese had a unique love for harmony (wa). Well in that case how to explain the brutality of Japanese soldiers in warfare, or the intensity of faction fights?

There were times when the Japanese could be remarkably harmonious. There were times when they could be remarkably unharmonious.

Worse, there was little attempt to explain why these various qualities existed in the first place. It was largely taken for granted that they were just there, and that was that.

(This curious lack of curiosity to explain origins was a good example of Japanese phenomenalism – yet another Japanese quality that needs to be explained.)

In particular I had been impressed by the extraordinary success of a rather shallow book called The Japanese and The Jews written by a classical scholar, Yamamoto Shichihei.

To spike the curiosity of his readers Yamamoto had used a Jewish pseudonym, Isaih Ben- darsan for the authorship of his book. As a result, the book had sold in the millions.

He had pretended that Isaih was a Kobe-born Jew who had left Japan some years earlier to teach at an obscure mid-west US university. Japan was so intrigued by all this that some media sent their reporters all the way to the US to track down this oracle of wisdom.

Back in those early days the Japanese were fascinated, obsessed even, by the foreigner’s view of themselves.

But like most other Nihonjin-ron, Yamamoto’s description of Japanese qualities was very narrow. (Most would pick up on one particular quality and insist that this explained all the other qualities, or else simply ignore the other qualities.)

And his effort to explain differences was even more bizarre than most. It was something along the lines of Japan having a lot of water and Israel having little.

Surely there was a market out there for a better book on the subject of the Japanese, I thought. And this time it would be written by a genuine foreigner - me.

In particular, it would try more systematically to cover all aspects of the Japanese - not just HOW they seemed to be different but also WHY.

(Maybe I too would sell in the millions?)

WHY the Differences

True, Japanese writers did not entirely ignore the WHY problem. But like Yamamoto’s theory, many explanations were weird.

The theories were also confused, and often contradictory.

For example - the Japanese were as they were because they ate rice, battled typhoons and volcanoes, had a gentle climate, had a severe climate, spoke a unique language, were the lost tribe of Israel, had distant connections with Tamil culture, etc.etc.

On prominent scholar was, and is still, insisting that the Japanese had inherited the mysterious spirit-living culture of their forest-dwelling Jomon ancestors 3,000 years ago.

Another even managed to trace it all back to vegetation. Much of southern Japan, he noted, was covered by a variety of sub-tropical, darkly-lustrous leaved trees and shrubs (native camellias and camphor trees for example). This, he insisted, had created the dark emotionalism of the Japanese soul!

Even the more respectable theories seemed fairly weak – that Japan’s groupism was the result of rice growing collectivity, that living in confined valleys explained the narrowness of much Japanese thinking, that racial homogeneity explained the propensity for collectivist thinking, and so on.

A very popular theory to explain the lack of individualism was, and remains, Japan’s alleged polytheism.

Western and Middle Eastern religions have only one God. This meant, the theory said, that people there could define their identity individually in relation to that God.

Japanese were said to have been denied that opportunity because of their confusion of gods. So they had ended up seeing identity in the collective.

To anyone born and raised in the West, the idea that our individualism has anything to do with God seems absurd.

We see individualism is a key part of our value system. We are educated into it from childhood. We do not need to be pushed there by religion.

But the Japanese were determined to cling to this religion theory. Even the argument that many of us more individualistic Westerners had little interest in religion, or that the highly individualistic Indians had a highly polytheistic religion, made little impact.

Anti- Nihonjin-ron

Unfortunately, the very proliferation, and weaknesses, of most Japanese Nihonjin-ron theories has convinced many Western scholars that the entire topic should be out of bounds.

Indeed, for some scholars the mere mention of the word Nihonjin-ron invites spasms of denial and ridicule.

The idea that one nation might be fundamentally different from other nations is absurd, they insist.

The French, the Albanians, the Indonesians etc, are all different from other peoples, they say. But they do not claim to be uniquely different from other peoples.

They do not demand some kind of ‘ron’ or theory to explain themselves.

Nihonjin-ron efforts to explain the Japanese simply pander to Japan’s inherent racism, they say.

Worse, it is a revival of prewar militarist kokusui thinking – Japan both unique and specially favored by the gods.

The Japanese, the anti-Nihonjinron people insist, are just like the rest of us but do not want to admit it.

(The willingness of so many alleged Japan watchers to dismiss any theory that goes against their ingrained beliefs, conventional wisdom and political correctness is sad.)

(It once was absurd to suggest that South America was once part of Africa. Plate tectonics theorists were ridiculed for going against the conventional wisdom.)

( I know, because I was there, studying geology back in the 1950’s.)

(Today, plate tectonics are crucial to any understanding of our physical world .)

(It is not impossible that one day understanding Japan will be crucial to our understanding of our own social world.)

(One move in that direction would be to realize that when we talk about France, Albania etc being different we are talking mainly about cultural systems being different.)

(When we talk about Japan being different we are talking about value systems being different.)

(Culture and values are two very different things.)

(For example, Japanese culture has much in common with Chinese culture. But values are very different.)

But this is not the only problem with the anti-Nihonjinron critics.

They are also devious.

For having blasted Nihonjin-ron, they usually end up trying to produce their own theories to explain Japanese peculiarities.

In other words, their Nihonjin-ron is right and all others are wrong.

One of the worst was a Dutchman who had managed to spend 25 years in Japan without learning Japanese and who, after making the usual harsh condemnations of Nihonjin-ron, then went on to say they (the Japanese) were controlled by some mysterious ‘system.’

This ‘system’ was so pervasive and controlling that the government even had special schools to which Japanese children who had spent time abroad had to be sent in order to re-indoctrinate them back into the ‘system.’

To anyone who knew Japan, talk of some nebulous ‘system’ was pure nonsense, unless one was simply saying that the Japanese had their own value system, and that, as in any society, values controlled behavior.

(As for the alleged compulsory special schooling, that was pure fantasy. There are, and were, special schools to help the children coming back to Japan to catch up in their studies, but they certainly were not compulsory. In fact they were very hard to get into.)

But this sort of nonsense was simply par for the course in that bitchy and intellectually undeveloped field called Japanology.

If and when I wrote my book I would clear up all this charlatanism, I told myself.

But first I had to get my own ideas into shape.

2. A Moment of Inspiration

I remember well the day it happened.

I had just settled into my Canberra house with its large garden backing on to the Japanese embassy, waiting for my family to arrive from Japan.

Patti Warn of the ALP had dropped in to discuss some policy question worrying the Labor faithful.

We were out in the back-garden drinking wine in the autumn sun.

I had told her earlier about my hopes to write a book about Japan, and she was pressing me on it.

Japan was a big topic in Australia, she said. There was a market for a book that explained Japan and the Japanese. I should get started quickly, she urged.

I agreed. But I had already decided that writing a book simply to say the Japanese were this or that was meaningless.

One had to explain not just HOW they were different, but also WHY they were different.

Lying on the lawn, thinking about it all that sunny afternoon, it suddenly occurred to me.

Why not just put everything in reverse?

Let me explain.

Reverse Logic

To date the Nihonjin-ron advocates, including myself, had all assumed that if the Japanese seemed different from other peoples, then something must have happened to them to make them that way.

We had tried hard to find that something, and without much success.

But if the Japanese were emotional, groupist, non-ideological, non-rationalistic, indulgent (amae), mood-driven etc then why did they have to be explained?

These were all basic, natural aspects of the human personality. Indeed, they were qualities that could be found in any small-group society - the tribe, village or family for example.

In that case, why did we need to explain how and why the Japanese got to be the way they were? They had just stayed he way they had always been.

What we needed to explain was how and why we non-Japanese got to be the way we were.

Japan together with its taboos, groupism, etc was just an expanded, sophisticated version of its original ‘tribal’-village society.

The Nakane Chie Input

To be honest, the concept of Japan as a ‘tribal’ society had already been buzzing around in my mind for some time, ever since listening to a 1973 talk by Nakane Chie to foreign correspondents in Tokyo.

Nakane had earlier made waves in a Newsweek interview about Japan’s trade disputes. In it she had said ‘we Japanese have no principles.’

The foreign correspondents had invited her to come and explain the ‘no principles’ statement.

At first, she tried to back-track somewhat.

What she really meant, she said, was that Japan lacked the firm guiding religious and other principles found in other culturally advanced societies, including Asian societies like India and China.

Unlike Japan, the Indians and the Chinese had ideologies like Hinduism or Confucianism to guide them.

Japan had to rely on ad hoc responses to situations and feelings, she implied.

I was shocked. Surely, I asked, a society without guiding principles was no more than a tribe.

Nakane replied ambiguously saying that even tribes had their merits as societies and left it at that.

3. ‘Tribal’ Japan?, Why?

For a while I had to grapple with the concept of Japan as a nation which had simply retained values of its original tribal-village society.

It seemed so contrary to the conventional wisdom about Japan.

But the more I thought about it the more it made sense. A lot of things slotted in.

For example: Japan was and remains remarkable for its various taboos – instinctive and unexplained bans on discussing certain sensitive topics or using certain sensitive words.

To most outsiders this was a most curious and regrettable phenomenon. But were not taboos the mark of a tribal society?

Even so, I still had to explain WHY this had happened.

Then I realized I should think in reverse once again.

To date we have all assumed that the pressure to progress had forced our societies to abandon their original ‘tribal’ values and attitudes and move to what I call more principled or rationalistic values.

But the Japanese had progressed quite well without making that move.

This meant that we had to look for causal factors other than mere progress to explain ourselves .

Why had we non-Japanese come to embrace individualism, rationalistic argument and debate etc – all the qualities that made us different from the Japanese?

And by ‘us’ I was not just referring to us Westerners.

The Chinese and Indians, for example, were just as different from the Japanese as we were.

They too needed to be explained.

Finding Causal Factors – War, Conflict and Competition?

First move was to list up possible causal factors, common to all us non-Japanese - Chinese and Indians included – but which did not apply to Japan.

As I went through the list, I realised that there was only one that the rest of us shared but which had largely bypassed the Japanese.

This was a history of frequent war, conflict, contact, occupation or cultural domination by foreigners.

Japan had had some of these things during its history. But not with anything like the intensity and frequency found in most of the rest of the culturally advanced world.

Ideology as Causal?

But why would wars, conflicts etc. with foreigners have made us non-Japanese different from the Japanese?

As I went through the list of qualities that we non-Japanese had, but which the Japanese did not have, I came back increasingly to the question of ideology.

The Japanese had their religious and political ideologies.

But many were imported, and ideological attachments – both religious and political - were very weak.

The average Japanese is born into a vaguely Confucianist society, has a choice of a Shinto or Christian wedding (many choose both), and is buried under Buddhist rites.

The one uniquely Japanese religion – Shinto – is little more than a refined animism. By definition almost, it is a ‘tribal’ religion.

Japanese politics had already degenerated largely into competition between rival factions having clear leaders but no clear ideology.

Strong, binding ideologies with argued principles and doctrines such as we take for granted in the culturally-advanced non-Japanese world virtually did not exist in Japan. Why?

Nakane had also indirectly fingered the ideological factor as a key difference between the Indians/Chinese and the Japanese.

But could its existence or otherwise be the result of foreign wars, conflicts etc.?

Ideology. Is it Normal?

Some, including myself at the time, back in 1973, would argue that ideologies with their strong guiding principles were the norm in any society, and that the lack of them was abnormal.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my own experience said otherwise.

My experience with the strict Catholicism of my youth, then with the ideological bombardment I had suffered in Moscow, then with the nonsense of China’s Cultural Revolution, then with the cruelties and distortions caused by our fanatical Western anti- communism in Vietnam and elsewhere nd finally with the half-baked nationalist ideologies found in Japan -- all these things had already told me there was something very abnormal about our non- Japanese need to attach to some of our more rigidly doctrinaire religious and political ideologies.

So instead of looking for something that had pushed Japan in its non- ideological direction, it was easy for me to accept that we should be looking for factors that had pushed us non-Japanese in the ideological direction.

Wars and Ideology

From there it was not hard to find the foreign war, conflict etc. connection.

Wars, conflicts and competition with foreigners force peoples to unify in the face of the foreigner. They need to develop reasons why they are as they are and why they should resist the foreigner.

In short, they need ideologies.

Strong ideologies with dogmatic principles and doctrines are very useful for these purposes. They help greatly to explain why our side is superior and the other side is inferior.

Without that prop to our pride we would quickly disintegrate.

Religious ideologies are especially useful in this context.

In the Krakow museum - the town where the former pope spent much of his early life - they hang a tapestry commemorating a Polish victory over the Turks in some ancient battle.

A luminous God stands behind the Polish forces massed at the bank of a wide river. The defeated Turks are furiously trying to escape in canoes.

And at the back of each canoe, paddling even harder than the Turks, is none other than the Devil himself!

Having God on our side is a powerful weapon.

But it is not just God. Having democracy, communism or any other ideology claiming truth and wisdom on our side can be used to make us feel good and united in our efforts to resist, subjugate or otherwise compete with foreigners.

Even Japan during its brief militaristic era felt the need to have a ideology. The rushed and immature efforts to create a nationalist ideology based on Emperor worship were the inevitable result.

Ideological By-products

Ideologies are significant in themselves. But their by-products are even more important.

Ideologies provide the basis for creating the strong governments and bureaucracies needed to unify the nation in the face of the foreign enemy.

Without these things, government remains dispersed - a network of units concerned mainly with their own immediate needs and personal connections, as in Japan.

The strong legal systems need to hold the society together and to backup that strong government and bureaucracy are another byproduct of these moves.

Instead of the shame found in any collectivist society to control behavior, we turn to the more objective and principled policy of guilt.

Then as the collectivist pressures of our original village, and then feudal, societies weaken we become free to be more individualistic.

And so on.

In short, we cease to be ‘tribal.’ We cease to be ‘Japanese.’

Scientific Progress

But could ideology explain the scientific and other progress we had seen in the West?

Attachment to rigid ideologies, religious ideologies especially, would normally seem to be contrary to scientific and other progress.

But thinking about it I began to realize there could be a connection.

Ideologies, even if dogmatic, do at least require us to argue and justify behavior. We have to put forward reasons and principles to explain what we believe in.

And even if those reasons and principles are heavily dogmatic to begin with, we have at least managed to move away from the simple rules, traditions, taboos and situational ethics of the original tribal, village society.

Gradually we learn to refine those reasons and principles. We begin to rely less on ideology as a backup and more on logical reasoning.

This in turn helps us to move to scientific thinking.

The end result could well be the advanced scientific thinking that leads us to deny the dogmas of those original ideologies (though the ability of some top scientific thinkers to embrace dogmatic ideologies – my father’s attitude to religion was a good example – never ceases to surprise ).

In short, attachment to rigid ideologies and the move to scientific progress could be much more closely related than most realized.

Older Civilizations

This in turn could explain the past scientific, philosophical and mathematical achievements of the older civilizations - the Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern societies, for example.

They had come under pressure to develop ideologies even earlier than us Westerners, us northern Europeans especially.

This had then given rise to the spirit of enquiry that allowed their various achievements.

True, they had since gone into decline (or so it seemed at the time of my book project). But one could not deny their past achievement.

These were also societies which had developed strong central government, bureaucractic and legal systems.

(However, I still had to explain why the heavily ‘ideologised’ older civilizations had not progressed as well as us less ‘ideologised’ Westerners, not to mention the ‘non-ideologised’ Japanese.)

(It would quite a few more years later before I could resolve that riddle.)

Japan: The Tribe-Nation

True, Japan had clearly not remained at the crude, backward level of the genuinely tribal or village society.

Its value system had been refined and codified over the years to allow the creation of the feudal nation based on bushido.

Importing systems of bureaucracy, law, and economy, initially from China and then from the West also helped.

That had allowed further progress.

The final stage was the import of science and technology, banking and higher education from the West.

But in essence the basic value system of the Japanese had remained as it always had been.

Japan was the tribe that had become a nation, and a very successful nation at that.

This, I decided, would be the basic theme of my book.

I would flesh it out with the various experiences I had had while working in Japan.

The final product would be a lot better that the Japanese and the Jews.

3. Starting to Write

Having worked out my basic theme, I could begin to write.

The words did not come easily. I was trying to write something explaining not just Japan but also how the rest of us thought and acted, and why.

I had to do a crash course in sociology if I was to handle the concepts I was trying to bandy around.

I had no problem getting the number of words needed for a book. Many of them went to describing the events I had reported on while in Japan before 1975*.

These in turn were used to prove my basic thesis – the ‘tribal’ emotionality and groupism of Japanese society.

*(Unfortunately, the one event which really did help to prove the emotionality and lack of principle in Japan’s foreign policies, namely Tokyo’s extraordinary behavior in negotiating its territorial dispute with Moscow, had to be excluded at MM’s insistence.)

(I suspect he did not want to upset the Foreign Ministry bureaucrats from whom he got much of his interpreting work.)

(But a few years later I would have chances to get my material into print. The bureaucrats were predictably annoyed.)

For convenience, I had described Japan as a ‘nigen kankei shakai’ – a human relations society. Our non-Japanese societies I described as genri gensoku shakai (principled societies).

The critics were to seem to like that wording. I had clearly struck a vein in their own thinking

Explaining the Economy?

One area where the book is weak is my attempt to explain Japan’s economic success.

My original guess was that it had something to do with the ‘informationalisation’ of Japanese society - its wealth of publications, gossip etc.,

This in turn I saw as due to the lack of individualistic barriers.

But since then I have come to realise that this is a quite minor factor. There are quite a few other ‘tribal’ factors at work to explain Japan’s economic progress –strong workplace identity, a skill and liking for making things (monozukuri), attention to detail.

But that is another story, albeit a very large story.

Gradually a rough draft emerged.

A loyal PMC secretary helped with the many manuscript re-types.

And so, with the heap of pages that would change my life, and very much for the better, I set off for Tokyo.

It was April, 1976.

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