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 (Theories to explain Japan)
2. A
Moment of Inspiration.
3. Japan
as a Tribe?
4. Japan
IS a Tribe!
5. The
Role of Ideology
6.
Rationalisations versus Rules
7.
Testing the Theory
8.
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.
Reasons
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 in some of this. For the record, if
nothing else, I wanted to write about
it.
True, I also realized that four years is much less than the
time needed to know and understand Japan. But since that
consideration had not stopped quite a few other foreigners,
many without even Japanese language or hands-on experience,
from writing definitively about Japan I was less hesitant
than maybe I should have been.
---
My experiences would be one thing. But my main topic would
be an attempt to explain the Japanese
personality.
I had been surprised by the emotionalism of the seemingly
impassive Japanese – their propensity for bizarre
nation-wide moods, booms, panics etc., and their highly
subjective reactions to events.
(One of my first surprises was discovering that bike gangs
were terrorizing entire towns. Meanwhile the police in this
allegedly well-controlled nation would do nothing to stop
them.)
Their strong groupist instincts also were curious (the bike
gangs, for example), and the factionalism (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, often illogically
(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.)
(Nor did he do anything later to help me maintain the
account. Sincerity can be simply a ritual at
times.)
In particular I had already sensed the strong differences
between the Japanese and Chinese.
The Chinese were individualists. They told you frankly what
they thought, what they liked and disliked. There was
little Japanese-style ambiguity.
Overall the Chinese seemed much more cerebral than the
Japanese – with a genuine interest in ideas, debate,
and logic, or else in making money, for
example.
They had a strong sense of right and wrong, black and
white, as shown by the intensity of their disputes and
discontents.
The Japanese were more submissive. In argument and debates
they preferred color grey. Consensus, sometimes imposed,
was the goal. Confrontations were to be
avoided.
(An acquaintance had done quite well by setting up an
institute to teach people the Western style of debate. TV
debates were often little more than a polite exchanges of
views.)
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 short, in their basic personality the Chinese seemed
much more like us Westerners than they were like the
Japanese.
The same was true for the Koreans I had come across. They
were like the Chinese, only slightly less
abrasive.
(That many other Westerners working extensively in East
Asia shared those views about Chinese and Koreans gave me
much confidence. A point they often made was the way
Chinese and Koreans shared our sense of
humor.)
Why the differences? And why the extraordinary economic
success in Japan?
I would try to find an answer.
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
To be honest I had another and even more compelling reason
to want to write.
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
‘vertical, i.e hierarchal, society’), and Doi
Takeo who claimed to have discovered the Japanese
propensity for emotional indulgence –
amae.
(In fact the concept of amae,
and the word for it, had been lying around for a very long
time, but no one had thought of using it to explain the
Japanese as a people let alone write a book about
it.)
(But it was so successful that the very title of the book
– amae
no
kozo, or structure of
amae
– has
entered the Japanese language.)
A book published years later by a Tokyo University
professor, Minami Hiroshi, identified well over one hundred
different Nihonjin-ron theories in published
circulation.
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 wanted an explanation.
The problem, however, was in the nature of those
explanations.
One scholar would insist that Japan was a highly
egalitarian society. Another would say it was rigidly
stratified. One would emphasise the emotional factor.
Another would talk about the strict rules of behavior. And
so on.
A favorite explanation said that the Japanese had a unique
attachment to harmony (wa).
Well in that case, I thought, how to explain the brutality
of Japanese soldiers in warfare, or the intensity of
faction fights?
All one could say was that there were times when the
Japanese could be uniquely harmonious. But there were also
times when they could be uniquely
unharmonious.
One Nihonjin-ron that I liked said Japan was a
bokashi
shakai – a society
obscured.
Someone later was aptly to say that you could say anything
you liked about the Japanese and you would probably be
right.
---
(Later I was to find the reason for all this
confusion.)
(As humans, we all share the same basic human qualities,
including the Japanese.)
(We are all, Japanese and non-Japanese, capable of
hierarchy and equality, harmony and disharmony, friendship
and hostility, cooperation and non-cooperation
etc.)
(But we all have a choice of doing these things in one or
other of the two basic dimensions the human personality
– the emotional/instinctive which all of us tend to
use in small groups, versus a more principled/rationalistic
dimension which most of us non-Japanese tend to use in
larger groups.)
(The Japanese, whether in small or large groups, tend to do
these things in the emotional/instinctive
dimension.)
(More on all this later. But the result is that much of
what the Japanese are doing – enterprise management,
diplomacy, education, human relations and so on –
will seem to us to be very different and unusual even
though in fact they are simply trying to do what we do, but
in a different dimension.)
(Meanwhile we are simply trying to do much of what they do,
but in the principled/rationalistic
dimension.)
---
Compounding the confusion was the way each Nihonjin-ron
advocate would set out to focus on a particular quality of
interest to him or her – amae
(indulgence),
for example - and insist that not only was this unique to
Japan but also that it explained everything else about
Japan.
In fact, we are all capable of indulgence, but do not
handle it in quite the emotional way that the Japanese do.
(To his credit, Doi was later to realise this
point.)
We all seek after hierarchy, but do not do seek in the
Japanese way. And so on.
Worse, there was little attempt to explain why these
various qualities existed in the first place. It was as if
we were supposed to accept that they just existed, and that
was that.
Which in turn seemed to underline yet another claimed
Nihonjin-ron quality - phenomenalism: the ability just to
accept things as they were without feeling any great need
to look for reasons.)
---
Encouraging me in my search for ways to understand Japan
was the extraordinary success of a rather shallow book
called ‘The Japanese and The Jews’ written by a
scholar of Japanese classical literature, Yamamoto
Shichihei.
To spike readers’ curiosity Yamamoto had used a
Jewish pseudonym, Isaih Ben-darsan, for the authorship of
his book.
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 and was hiding from publicity. Japan
was so intrigued by all this that some media sent their
reporters all the way to the US to try to track down this
oracle of wisdom.
Needless to say, they were not very successful. But the
book was; it sold in the millions.
Back in those early days the Japanese were fascinated,
obsessed even, by the foreigner’s view of themselves.
If Yamamoto had written under his own name his book would
probably have been ignored.
But like most other Nihonjin-ron, Yamamoto’s
description of Japanese qualities was very
narrow.
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 - HOW they seemed to be
different, and then WHY the differences.
(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 water theory, most
explanations were weird, confused, and often
contradictory.
We were told, for example, that the Japanese were as they
were because they ate rice (as if no one else did), battled
typhoons and volcanoes, had a gentle climate and
environment, spoke a unique language etc.
etc.
One elderly scholar based in an expensive government-funded
outfit called the International Japan Culture Research
Center (set up by the conservative Nakasone establishment
to explain Japan’s unique culture to the rest of us)
was insisting that the Japanese were as they were because
they had inherited the mysterious spirit-loving culture of
their forest-dwelling Jomon ancestors 3,000 years
earlier.
Another theory went even further in the vegetation
direction.
Much of southern Japan, it noted, was covered by a variety
of sub-tropical, darkly-lustrous leaved trees and shrubs
(native camellias and camphor trees for example). This, it
insisted, had created the dark emotionalism of the Japanese
soul!
Even the more respectable theories being put forward by
serious scholars like Nakane Chie 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.
One very popular theory to explain the lack of
individualism in Japan was, and remains, Japan’s
Shintoist polytheism - yaoyorozu no
kami.
Western and Middle Eastern religions have only one God, we
were told. This meant that people could define their
identity individually and directly in relation to that
God.
The 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.
There was only one problem with this theory, however,
namely that the nation with arguably the most polytheistic
of religions – India – had arguably the most
highly individualistic of populations!
Perhaps the most pervasive of the various theories was
the fu-do-ron
- air and land
theory - of Watsuji Tetsuro, often seen as the founder of
Nihonjin-ron.
It says Japan’s ‘monsoon’ climate –
the extreme variation between hot, wet summers and cold,
dry winters - explains the emotionalism and violent mood
changes in the Japanese personality.
Someone should ask these fu-do-ron
advocates if
they know from where the term ‘monsoon’
derives, and whether the people in that country –
India – resemble the Japanese
personality.
Another fu-do-ron
says
Japan’s clearly defined seasonal changes affect the
national personality, as if no other nation had clearly
defined seasonal changes.
(This Japanese determination to believe there is something
unique about their climate even leads them to use the
term Nippon-bare
to describe a
fine sunny day, as if no one else had fine sunny
days.)
Anti-
Nihonjin-ron
Unfortunately, the weaknesses, even absurdity, of
Japan’s many Nihonjin-ron theories has convinced most
Western scholars that the entire topic should be dismissed
as an intellectual aberration.
In the books they write about Japan, often an entire
chapter or at least many paragraphs ritually denouncing
Nihonjin-ron seems obligatory.
Indeed, for some the mere mention of the word Nihonjin-ron
invites spasms of angry denial. One can almost see their
lips curl in ridicule as they spit out the very words
– Nihonjin-ron.
The French, the Albanians, the Indonesians etc. all have
their own very distinctive cultures, the critics tell us.
But none of them claim to be uniquely different from
everyone else.
They do not demand some kind of ‘ron’ or theory
to explain themselves (though I sometimes think the French
come quite close to it).
Nihonjin-ron efforts to explain the Japanese simply pander
to Japan’s inherent racism, they
say.
Worse, it is a revival of the prewar militarist
kokusui
thinking that
said Japan was both unique and specially favored by the
gods.
The Japanese, the anti-Nihonjinron critics insist, are just
like the rest of us but do not want to admit
it.
Attempts to say otherwise are quite
unscientific.*
Easing
the Confusion
One move in helping to clear up the Nihonjin-ron confusion
would be to realize that when we talk about Japan being
unique or unusual we are not talking about its culture
being uniquely different from all
others.
We are talking about its value system being
different.
Culture and values are or should be two very different
things.
True, the term culture in its common use often includes
values. And there are usually aspects of the culture that
are influenced by the values. But strictly the two should
be separated.
(Perhaps one answer would be to use the concept of national
personality, since that covers the value system but also
includes the aspects of the culture related to that value
system.)
For example, Japanese culture has much in common with
Chinese culture – the use of kanji (often with
identical meanings and similar pronunciations), the
Confucian borrowings in the value system, education in the
Chinese classics, and so on. But few familiar with both
peoples will doubt the difference in national
personality.
The challenge is to define that
difference.
---
(Someone should tell the anti-Nihonjin-ron people that the
ultimate in unscientific behavior is closing one’s
mind to anything that contradicts one’s own
subjective thinking.)
(Scholars used to dismiss as evidentially absurd the
continental drift theory that said South America was once
part of Africa.)
(Today, not only do we accept there was a drifting; an
understanding of plate tectonics is crucial to any
understanding of our physical world.)
(In the same way it is not impossible that one day an
understanding of Japan’s peculiarities will be
crucial to understanding our own social
world.)
(One area where Japan is already useful is in helping to
explain the mechanism of the booms and moods which infect
all societies.)
(A personal note: I was a university student of geography
in Oxford when the continental drift theory was first
introduced.)
(Even though it explained things the critics could not
– the symmetrical chains of volcanoes and ocean
canyons across the earth’s surface, for example - it
was dismissed with contempt by serious
scholars.)
(The experience taught me to welcome anything which
challenges conventional wisdoms.)
---
The anti-Nihonjinron critics are not just unscientific.
They can also be devious.
For having blasted Nihonjin-ron, they usually end up trying
to produce their own theories to explain
Japan.
In other words, their Nihonjin-ron is right and everyone
else is wrong –without, in many cases, their even
bothering to try to tell us why they alone are correct.
Even one of the more respected of the US Japanologists,
Chalmers Johnson, in his book ‘Japan – Who
Governs’ manages to criticize Nihonjin-ron but then
gives us an entire chapter on Omote/Ura
– the
outside face versus the inner reality – and an
important aspect of the value
system.
(He and his followers were dubbed 'revisionists' because
they were using the fact of Japan's large export surpluses
to challenge the idea that Japan was a normal society
seeking a normal place in the world.)
(For them Japan’s large export surpluses were a
mercantilist plot.)
(Unfortunately, while they were strong in plot theories,
they were weak in economics. They had yet to realise that
any fast growing economy, like China today, is bound to
rely on exports to fuel its economic progress since
domestic demand is always slow to catch
up.)
(One of their most fervent plot theorists was a Dutchman
who had managed to spend 25 years in Japan without learning
the language and who, after making the usual harsh
condemnations of Nihonjin-ron, then went on to say that
they - the Japanese - were controlled by some mysterious
‘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 other society, those values influenced
the Japanese.)
(If anything it is the lack of a “system” in
the sense of not having a guiding national ideology that
distinguishes Japan from most other culturally advanced
societies.)
(Too much is left to haphazard circumstance, or the mood of
the moment.)
(Said would-be Japanologist went on to claim that this
‘system’ was so pervasive and controlling that
the government even had special schools to which Japanese
children who had spent time abroad allegedly had to be sent
in order to re-indoctrinate them back into the
‘system’ after they
returned.)
(True, there are, and were, special schools to help the
children coming back to Japan to catch up in their studies
and rediscover the culture, but they certainly were not
compulsory. In fact they were very hard to get into, as I
discovered when I tried to get entry for my own children
after they had spent some time abroad.)
(Variations on the ‘system’ concept color many
other Western explanations of Japan.)
---
Nonsense and bias seemed to be regular fare in that
intellectually undeveloped field called Japanology. Very
few of the people writing so authoritatively about Japan
knew Japan or spoke Japanese well.
But the world, knowing even less about Japan, often
accepted what they have to say.
Even some Japanese, it seemed, could be bamboozled into
accepting the views of these people, so eager were they to
have themselves explained.
If and when I wrote my book I would put an end to all this
charlatanism, I told myself.
But first I had to get my own ideas into
shape.
2. A
Moment of Inspiration.
I remember the day it happened.
I had just settled into my Canberra house with its large
garden and was 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.
I agreed. But I had already decided that writing a book
simply to say the Japanese were this or that was
meaningless.
There were already too many books of that variety
anyway.
One had to explain not just HOW the Japanese were as they,
but also WHY they were as they were.
And when it came to the WHY of it all I had to admit I was
flummoxed. None of the Nihonjin-ron theories to date had
made sense.
---
Lying on the lawn, thinking about it all, it suddenly
occurred to me.
To date everyone had assumed that since the Japanese seemed
strange something had happened to make them as they were.
People were spending a lot of time trying to find that
something.
But why not put everything
in reverse?
Instead of looking for something that had happened to make
the Japanese as they were why not look for something that
had made the rest of us as we
were.
There seemed to be very little unusual in Japan’s
background – history, geography, climate etc. –
that would push their national personality into strange
directions.
True, there had been the
three hundred or so years of sakoku
(closed nation
isolation). But that seemed hardly adequate as a distorting
factor.
But thinking about it I realized there was one thing that
had happened to the rest of us and which did NOT happen to
Japan, namely a history of war, conflict and competition
with other peoples.
Could this possibly be the reason why Japan might have
developed in a direction that seemed so unusually
different?
3. Japan
is a Tribe?
Once again some reverse logic was
needed.
Till that time the Nihonjin-ron advocates, myself included,
had spent much time poking around the seemingly exotic
aspects of the Japanese personality looking for hints to
explain Japan.
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, human instincts, even if in Japan
they had been refined and codified to a level where at
times they seemed unnatural.
Indeed, they were qualities that could be found in any
small-group or primary group society - the tribe, village
or family for example.
In that case, we did not need elaborate theories to explain
the Japanese.
They had begun existence like the rest of us, as a tribal,
clan, village, familial society.
Thanks to relative isolation from foreign conflicts and
occupation, including that sakoku
period, they
had just stayed that way, with refinements tacked on as
they progressed.
What we needed to explain, I began to realize, was how and
why we non-Japanese had got to be the way we
were.
We assumed that the way we were – individualistic,
rationalistic, argumentative, with a liking for logic,
debate, and principles - was the norm, that these things
were crucial to social progress, and that anyone different
had to be explained. But it could all be in
reverse?
To come back to my own personal hangups, if we Westerners
were so logical, for example, from where had we got the
twisted thinking that led to our wars and
confrontations?
Where had we got our class and caste systems? Why did we
have such problems holding our societies
together?
Meanwhile, and as others had noted, there was so much about
Japan – the honesty and politeness, natural
cooperation in the group – that seemed normal, very
normal.
Maybe there was a lot to be said for being tribally
Japanese, even if at times the Japanese too had had their
aberrations – their conscienceless brutality and lack
of remorse in their war against China for
example.
But then again, maybe that too could have been tribal.
Tribes also are not known to have any restraining morality
when they are in conflict with rival
tribes.
The
Nakane Chie Input
To be honest, even before returning to Canberra the concept
of Japan as a ‘tribal’ society had been in my
mind for some time, ever since listening to a 1973 talk by
Nakane Chie to foreign correspondents in
Tokyo.
Nakane was the Tokyo University sociologist who 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.
Lacking this, Japan had come to place less emphasis on the
kind of over-riding principles we Westerners saw as
important.
I was shocked. Surely, I asked, and on the record, 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.
Now, two years later, I was beginning to realize she had
been saying something important.
4. Japan
IS a Tribe!
For a while I tried to grapple with the implications of my
new emerging concept of a Japan as a nation which had
simply retained values of its original tribal-village
society.
It seemed so contrary to the conventional wisdom of the
day, which saw Japan as having a highly developed economy
– one about to overtake the West - and a refined,
sophisticated culture, over-refined if anything and
certainly far from tribal backwardness.
But the more I thought about it the more I realized it
could make sense. After all, why cannot a
‘tribal’ culture also be refined to meet the
demands of progress?
---
Soon I began to realise that a lot of other
‘tribal’ pointers existed to explain
Japan.
For example: Taboos and rituals are a mark of any tribal
society. For a culturally advanced society, Japan
remains remarkably prone to various taboos –
instinctive and unexplained bans on discussing certain
sensitive topics.
Rituals, rights of passage etc. too are important, as in
Japan.
A tribe by definition is groupist. So too was Japan, to the
point where shudan-shugi
(groupism) was
a term in constant use.
True, other societies also had groups – trade unions,
religions, political parties, castes, classes etc. But as
discussed later, the basis of those groups –
attribute - is different from what we see in Japan where
groups are much more locational (enterprises, schools,
etc.)
(Attribute is a Nakane term. Significantly, she noted how
it is important for group formation, also in China and
India. What she did not mention, however, is that it is the
non-Japanese way of rationalising - i.e. providing a
principle - as the basis of group
formation.)
Tribal peoples claim to be able to relate to each other
instinctively. So too did the Japanese, with the
then-popular talk about instinctive communication and
decision-making (ishin
denshin) being one of the many
ways in which Japanese management was supposed to differ
from that in the West where communication was more
verbal.
Tribes have instinctive hierarchies. Their rules of
behavior are traditional and unexplained. So too in
Japan.
Indeed, the more I thought about it the more almost
everything seen as unusual about Japan, including even the
art and literature with its emphasis on the subtle and
unexplained, seemed to fit a pattern where people did not
require logic and principles – as in the tribe
also.
Here, thanks to the simple use of reverse logic, I was
finally getting close to my holy grail of explaining
Japan.
All I had to do now was explain how the rest of us had got
to be as we were!
5. The
Role of Ideology
Connecting
the Dots
As already mentioned, to date we have all assumed
that the pressure to progress would force any society to
abandon its original, primitive tribal-village values and
move to what I would call more principled or rationalistic
values – reasoned systems of science, law, economy,
technology, debate, government etc.
But Japan had progressed quite well without making that
move.
True, in order to progress it had needed the
‘by-products’ of these more reasoned or
principled values. But it had been able to import them for
much of its history – the systems of government, law,
economy and technology borrowed first from Korea and China
and then from the West.
But that still did not explain why we non-Japanese,
including the advanced continental Asian peoples, were able
to create these ‘by-products’.
How could a history of wars, conflicts etc. with foreigners
lead us non-Japanese to achieve what we
had?
Here the crucial clue for me was the curious weakness of
ideology in Japan – ideology in the strict sense of
being a set of beliefs and rules claiming objective and
therefore universalistic validity.
This weakness is something quite unique among all the
culturally advanced peoples. It cries out for
explanation.
(Maybe it would have had more attention if our Nihonjin-ron
and anti-Nihonjin-ron scholars had not been rushing off in
other directions.)
Japan
– The Non-Ideological Society.
True, the Japanese have imported, studied and used various
religious and political ideologies – Buddhism,
Confucianism, democracy, communism, socialism etc –
at different stages of their history.
They also have two native ideologies – Bushido and
Shinto.
But ideological attachments in the sense of firm beliefs in
the principles of one or other of those various
ideologies – either religious and political -
are very weak.
The average Japanese is born into a society with some
vaguely Confucianist values, will attend a secularist
(though sometimes nominally Christian) school or
university, has a choice of a Shinto or Christian wedding
(many choose both), works in a capitalistic Westernised
society, and is buried under Buddhist
rites.
As for Japan’s allegedly native-born Shinto, it does
little more than tell us that sprits existed in the plants
and the rocks. By definition almost, it is an animistic
‘tribal’ religion.
True, native-born Bushido has more content. But essentially
it is no more than a collection of rules of behavior and
attitudes inherited from feudal times. It has no doctrines
or priests. It relies almost entirely on exhortations
written in the feudal past.
---
But the key element in all this for me at the time was the
lack of ideological dogmatism – there is nothing in
Japan to say that if one believes one’s ideology is
correct then one cannot accept the beliefs and trappings of
a rival ideology.
In surveys most Japanese would say they believed in both
Shinto and Buddhism. Shinto and Buddhist shrines and
temples would sometimes exist side by side in the same
location.
The contrast with Korea was remarkable. There, not only did
the Confucian and Buddhist believers clearly separate
themselves from each other.
Meanwhile Christianity, arguably one of the more dogmatic
and strictly observant religions, claimed support from
almost a quarter of the population.
In Japan the few who had embraced Christianity (less than
one percent) could hardly be called devout. Many were
willing to observe Buddhist or Shinto rites
also.
---
Ideology also seemed to play little real role in Japanese
politics. Factional imperatives were usually far more
important.
Rightwing and leftwing parties would happily cooperate, if
convenient.
(I once had the chance to ask publicly the very
progressive-minded and former senior politician, Nonaka
Hiromu, how the Liberal Democratic Party in which he played
a prominent role could combine people like himself with
others clearly rightwing and
nationalistic.)
(He replied that anything was possible if it allowed the
party to hold power, which it had already done for over
fifty years.)
Even the socialists and communists were doctrinally weak.
How else could one explain their strange determination to
claw each other out of existence despite having very
similar leftwing ideologies?
In election after election it was clear that if they
cooperated they could easily win many seats, especially
under Japan’s former multi-seat electorate system
where a mere twenty percent of the vote was often enough to
guarantee a seat.
But no. They preferred to crash together to defeat rather
than cooperate for victory.
Japan`s politics seemed to oscillate between close
cooperation at times, and intense rivalry at other times,
regardless of ideological conviction. The human or
practical exigencies of the moment were more
important.*
*(An event that made a very strong impression at the time
came after some bitterly fought upper house elections in
the early seventies.)
(TV post-election coverage
showed members of the rival parties and factions all having
an onsen
bath together,
laughing over defeats and congratulating each other over
victories.)
Ideology.
Is it Normal?
Like myself at that Nakane Chie lecture, most assume that
ideologies with their strong guiding principles are part
and parcel of any culturally advanced society, and that the
lack of them is abnormal.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that
my own experience said otherwise.
My first contact with ideology had been with the strict
Irish Catholicism of my youth then strong in Australia. I
could hardly regard that experience as
normal.
Then there was the ideological bombardment I had suffered
in Moscow, followed by the nonsense of China’s
Cultural Revolution.
Finally I had had to suffer our fanatical Western anti-
communism over Vietnam and elsewhere.
Only in Japan with its then relative lack of dogmatic
ideology had I began to feel
normality.
So it was not difficult for me to begin to realise that
something abnormal may have existed to make us non-Japanese
want to attach so rigidly to our doctrinaire religious and
political ideologies.
In short, instead of looking for something that had pushed
Japan in its non- ideological direction, we should be
looking for factors that had pushed us non-Japanese in the
ideological direction.
Wars,
Conflicts and Ideology
From there it was only a
short step for me to go back to the foreign war, conflict
and competition connection.
These things force peoples to unify in the face of the
rival foreigner. People need to develop reasons and
rationales for who and what they are relative to those
foreigners.
Ideologies, whether borrowed or self-created, provide those
reasons and rationales.
Even more importantly, they provide the basis for
establishing the strong governments and centralized
bureaucracies needed for people to unify and organize
themselves in the face of enemies and competitors.
The ideologies may be borrowed from others and adapted. Or
they may be no more than a codified and then dogmatized
version of the mores and myths, superstitions and customs
of the original tribal-village-clan
society.
Either way they can be crucial to national survival. They
help greatly to explain why our side is superior, the other
side is inferior, and why our side deserves to win
out.
---
Religious ideologies are especially useful for these
purposes.
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 one’s side is a powerful
weapon.
Nor is it just God. Having democracy, communism or any
other ideology claiming truth and wisdom on our side can be
can be crucial to our efforts to resist, subjugate or
otherwise deal with foreigners.
Even Japan during its brief militaristic era of the
thirties felt the need for an ideology to justify its
efforts to subjugate other Asian peoples. Rushed and
immature efforts to create a nationalist ideology based on
Emperor worship were one result.
Another was the attempt to create a State Shintoism
claiming universalistic truth and the right to suppress
rival religions. Not surprisingly, the efforts to push that
immature ideology down the throats of subjected Asian
peoples were not very successful.
And yet another was the famous wartime Nippon Times
editorial claiming that if the Asians could see the pure
while of a Japanese daikon
(turnip) and
savor the smell of miso
(bean curd)
soup they would realize the superiority of Japanese
culture!
(Hangovers of this naïve approach continue today in more
nationalistic circles.)
Ideological
Byproducts
Ideologies claiming
universal validity can change societies, including the very
basis of our identities.
We begin life by seeing ourselves simply as members of the
family, village, clan or tribe around
us.
But ideology allows us to expand that original small-group
identity into a much larger group identity - to the region
or nation, for example. We see ourselves as members of a
group claiming a shared ideological
identity.
The result is nationalism - the nation-tribe held together
with some ideology claiming some kind of
validity.
It can be stronger than the instinctive nation-tribe
identity of the Japanese.
---
For a while in the seventies Japan used to have a Japan
Inc. reputation - a nation that bound closely together to
pursue the national interest. In fact, that only happens
when the nation-tribe feels under threat from outside, as
it did during the trade debates of that
era.
Indeed, the lack of a binding national ideology leads to
the very interesting shoeki
rather
than kokueki
problem -
putting the interests of one ministry ahead of the national
interest. Priority instinctively goes to the tribe that is
closest to one.
Kokueki (national interest) can be surprisingly unimportant
at times.
(Some, puzzled by the lack of binding ideology in Japan,
used to argue that ‘Japanism’ – pride in
Japanese culture – played that
role.)
The final and more advanced stage comes when identity can
focus entirely on the abstract ideas of the ideology,
religious or political - Islam, Communism - and ignore the
fact that we belong to some crude
nation-tribe.
Ironically, we nation-tribe Westerners like to look down on
those who seek this more advanced stage, not realising that
it is we who are still backward. We have yet to unify on
the basis of shared values, though the Europeans are
trying.
We more primitive Anglosaxons still cling to
nation-tribalism.
*( Anyone who doubts the strong human instinctive desire
for attachments to sustain identity should study soccer
team fanaticisms.)
(Those teams are constantly changing ownership, coaches,
players, locations, even costumes, mainly for financial
reasons.)
(They bear almost relationship to the regions they
originally were supposed to represent.)
(Even so they can attract and hold fans in their tens of
thousands.)
(Many of our ideological attachments are just as emotional
and irrational as those fan-football
attachments.)
(One Japanese observer called Japan's group instinct the
'longing for belonging' - an apt phrase that applies to us
all.
6.
Rationalisations Versus Rules
When we attach to ideologies we begin to need explanations
for our values.
Most of our basic values are instinctive in origin - love,
anger, hatred etc are shared by all human
beings.
But as we begin to attach to ideology we begin to want to
explain, to rationalise, those
values.
For example, friendship and cooperation are values crucial
and instinctive to the survival of any group,
‘tribal’ or otherwise. But we non-Japanese will
try to find a reason for those values - God says
‘love they neighbor as thyself,’ for
example.
The simple and obvious need for hygiene becomes
rationalized as ‘cleanliness is close to
Godliness.’
(In a non-ideological society such as Japan’s it
remains simple commonsense, or traditional commonsense,
that you will cooperate with neighbors and be
tidy.)
Another example: In every society there is an obvious and
instinctive need for hierarchy. In Japan it remains
instinctive, based largely, though not entirely, on sex and
seniority.
(The curious fascination the Japanese have for the way the
monkey groups organize themselves in Japan’s zoos is
one result).
Non-Japanese usually try to find a principle to justify
hierarchical order – alleged merit, for example,
religious integrity, skill, etc. It is hard to imagine them
going to the local zoo for hints.
In fact, either approach is valid, even if both are very
different.
When we see the Japanese approach we assume they are a very
hierarchical society. When they see our approach, for
example professors not mixing with students, they think we
are being unnecessarily
hierarchical.
---
A problem that puzzled me at the time was the concept of
‘shame.’
I had become aware of it from that famous book by Ruth
Benedict “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”,
long the textbook for those of us studying
Japan.
It had led to the concept of Japan as a
‘haji
shakai’- shame
society.
(Before coming to study Japan Benedict had long studied the
tribal societies in the South Pacific where no doubt she
had seen the same emphasis on
shame.)
At first I had doubted her claims. I assumed that by
definition shame could only operate as a restraining force
if other people saw one’s bad behavior - within the
family or friends, for example, or even among
crowds.
So how could a shame-based morality explain the many
examples of good behavior in Japan when others were not
watching – handing in lost property, for example, or
the much-quoted example of a pedestrian observing traffic
lights on a deserted road in the rain late at
night?
For a time I was even
tempted to think there really was some indoctrinating
‘system’ forcing people to behave in this
unusual manner.
Only later did I realize that this too was part of the
‘shame society’ syndrome.
If people see their identity within a society in familial
i.e. ‘tribal’ terms they will
naturally and instinctively want to obey the rules of that
society just as we all naturally and instinctively want to
obey the rules of our families or
friends.
Failure to do so threatens
our sense of membership, and that is something we do not
want to lose. No man can stand alone, as the saying
goes..
In this situation people do not need to have laws or other
kinds of principles to make them behave. Rules, obeyed
naturally and instinctively, without questioning or asking
why, are enough.
Relevant here, I guessed, was the strong emphasis in the
Japanese education system and elsewhere on not
causing meiwaku
(inconvenience) to
others.
The ‘haji
shakai’ was more complex and
interesting than I had realized.
(In fact we all share some
of this haji
shakai morality when we abstain
naturally from littering public places - though in
Singapore, significantly, they feel they also need fines to
persuade people to behave.)
(And talking of traffic lights, the nonchalance with which
the Chinese used to ignore traffic lights even when police
were watching was remarkable.)
(The Chinese lie at the other end of the shame spectrum it
seems.)
True, the willingness of the Japanese to dump really evil
garbage along deserted roadsides suggests Japan’s
shame morality becomes much weaker when people feel they
are outside the bounds of the society.
The same applies to the behavior of some Japanese tourists
abroad – ‘discard shame when you go on a
journey’ as the Japanese saying puts
it.
And needless to say it
applies strongly to the behavior of Japanese soldiers in
their recent wars.
---
Guilt is the principled, rationalistic alternative to
shame. Bad behavior is punished or criticized not because
it flouts the instinctive rules of the society, but because
it flouts the principles of God, law or some other
ideology.
So if I steal from someone I will go to hell, or jail, or
have my hand chopped off.
Japan is remarkable in that, within the limits of Japanese
society at least, it has been able to take the shame
approach that we all use naturally and instinctively in
small-groups, and somehow make it apply not just to family,
friends etc but to the entire nation-group
even when they are not
watching.
To a surprising extent it does not have to create
principles to tell people why they have to behave properly.
The reasons do not have to explained or
rationalized.
---
This non-rationalisation process is true for the many other
traditional Japanese values - giri, gimu,
ninjo, and so on – that
have long fascinated students of Japan, including
Benedict.
In essence Japan has simply taken the instinctive values
one can find in any simple small group society and refined
or codified them (partly through Bushido) so they can
apply, firstly to the feudal society and then to the
advanced nation-state society we see
today.
But even at nation-state level there is no attempt to
explain why they should be used or observed (which is why
conservatives today, alarmed by the breakdown in values
among the young, are trying so hard to revive respect for
the feudal Bushido ethic*).
It is just taken for granted that one should obey them if
one wants to retain one’s membership in the society
around oneself.
Failure to observe their rules can lead to
mura
hachibu – being excluded
from the group.
(In traditional Australian aborigine society it is called
‘pointing the bone.’ When the tribal witch
doctor points a bone at the miscreant he/she is expected to
just go off and die. In Japan, they rely on the mood -
the kuuki
– to
tell you when have behaved badly and it is time for you to
disappear from the public eye.)
(Later I was to discover its power of kuuki
when some
rather unpleasant rightwing people decided that my
criticisms of their policy to North Korea meant I should
suffer mura-hachibu
exclusion
– more on that later.)
*(One problem is that values which rely on rules or simply
the mood of the society - the kuuki,
or atmosphere - can be very vulnerable. As in real
life, when the atmosphere disappears, you are left with a
vacuum, which is where many of Japan's youth are
today.)
---
True, some Japanese values are also taken from Confucianism
– chu
–
loyalty to one’s lord, or ko,
filial piety, for example. But that owes much to the
feudalistic origins of Confucianism coinciding with and
reinforcing Japan’s feudal values.
Confucian values differ importantly from Bushido values,
however, in that over many, many years and conflicts they
have been argued out to the point where they are no longer
unexplained rules. They have become principles claiming
universality and logicality. People adhere to them on that
basis.
---
To summarise, the Japanese value system is essentially an
unrationalised version of the natural, instinctive values
found in any primary group
society.
The rest of us use the principles of our ideologies
(including Confucianism) to rationalize the values we
inherited from our original society, or even to create new
values.
Which approach is better or more effective can be
argued.
Shame is not very effective when it comes to having to
apologise for former war atrocities; the foreigners who
have been abused can easily be placed outside the range of
one’s group consciousness and responsibility. Even
within the society it can have flaws. On the other hand,
shame seems to be more effective than guilt when it comes
to keeping people xxhonest and well-behaved in the in
day-to-day affairs with fellow
citizens.
(Indeed, the honesty of the ordinary Japanese in personal
affairs, with magazines kept on open street-front display,
or shop-keepers chasing you down the street to give you
change you forgot to collect, is quite
remarkable.)
(It should normally be a topic of intense interest and
study – and would be if those anti-Nihonjinron people
had not already told us that it was the result of some
demonic ‘system’ imposing good behavior, or
worse that was wrong to even think there was something
unusual about Japan even as they themselves walked by those
bookstores with material on open
display.)
---
The same is true for the lack of individualism in
Japan.
Many of the anti-Nihonjinron people like to think that
Japan’s lack of individualism is inculcated from
birth, as part of some demonic or nebulous
‘system’ that is supposed to control
Japan.
In fact if anything it is the
reverse.
Japanese basic education simply builds on the natural
grouping instinct that all children have. As someone once
said, teachers act like surrogate
parents.
Indeed, primary school education is often praised for the
seamless way it acts to socialize children, though it is
true that at a later stage the education system should be
doing much more to encourage independent
thinking.
It is our non-Japanese, mainly Western, education systems
that go out of their way, rightly or wrongly, from the
beginning to encourage people to act and think for
themselves.
We become more ‘individualistic’ as a result,
though in fact much of what has happened is that we become
less dependent on group relationships for identity, and
more dependent on our ideologies or other attributes for
identity.
We like to think that we enjoy the principle of individual
freedom. But in reality we remain just as much slaves to
the ideologies that support our societies as the Japanese
are bound by their group
relations.
They suffer mura-hachibu
if they seem
to flout the rules and mood of the group. Our societies can
be just as ruthless in excluding people who seem to go
against ideological fads and doctrines of the
day.
Deep down we all remain ‘tribal.’ What differs
is the way we show our
‘tribalism.’
Scientific
Progress
But for all its negatives, the emphasis on ideology could
explain the scientific and other forms of progress we had
seen in the West and the continental Asian
societies.
Normally attachment to rigid ideologies, religious
ideologies especially, would seem to be contrary to
scientific and other progress.
But if ideologies force us to argue and justify behavior,
we are already on the way to using reasons and principles
to explain the world around us.
And even if those reasons and principles are heavily
dogmatic to begin with, we have at least managed to move
away from the simple, unexplained rules, traditions, taboos
and situational attitudes of the original tribal, village
society.
We have learned to argue the arguable and explore the
unexplored.
(Japan’s weakness in this area was once heavily
criticized by the famous physicist and Nobel Prize winner,
Yukawa Hideki, in that classic but little remembered 1964
volume ‘The Japanese
Mind’).
Gradually we learn to refine those arguments and
explorations. When we do that we are already on the path to
developing logical and scientific
thinking.
For example, religion once led us to wonder about the earth
in relation to the sun. To begin with we simply
rationalised the instincts of our senses and insisted
dogmatically that the sun went around the
earth.
But this in turn encouraged some others to think about it
all more deeply, and to put forward the more reasoned view
that said the earth went around the
sun.
And so the science of astronomy was born. But would it have
been born but for that original dogmatic belief the Bible
had told us the sun moved around the
earth?
Indeed, the end result of this kind of questioning
against dogmatic unscientific principles could well be the
advanced scientific thinking that leads us to deny those
very ideologies.
(However the ability of some leading scientific thinkers to
embrace dogmatic ideologies never ceases to surprise
).
(The search for absolutes can move intelligent people in
both directions, and often in the totally wrong direction,
as I had already discovered during my anti-Vietnam war
days.)
Older
Civilisations
This in turn, I also realized, could explain the past
superior scientific, philosophical and mathematical
achievements of the older civilizations - the continental
Asian societies of China, India and the Middle
East.
They had come under pressure to develop ideologies long
before us Westerners, us northern Europeans
especially.
This had then encouraged the spirit of enquiry that allowed
them to realize their various achievements, both political
and scientific, well before us Westerners (with the
exception of the southern Europeans of course whose early
progress relied on much the same factors as those causing
Middle Eastern Islamic progress).
They had developed strong central governments, bureaucratic
and legal systems. In many areas of science and math they
were remarkably advanced.
True, they had since gone into decline (or so it seemed at
the time of my book project, though later I was to discover
the basis of their current rapid
progress).
But one could not deny their past
achievement.
7.
Testing the Theory
As scientists tell us, the test of any theory is to see if
it produces the same results when the factors underlying
the theory are subjected to the same
conditions.
Crucial to my theory had been the idea that people left in
island isolation would produce a society like
Japan’s, provided they could import outside
ideologies.
(Ability to import ideologies is crucial. Otherwise
societies simply remain in their original tribal condition.
True, they can also try to create their own ideologies but
this requires time and usually outside
pressure.)
Japan had been in the ideal situation in this respect. It
was just the right distance from the Asian mainland to be
able import mature Asian ideologies, without (unlike Korea)
coming to be dominated by those
ideologies.
And it was furthest removed from our less mature and
therefore highly aggressive Western ideologies to avoid
being dominated and colonized from that direction
too.
(Colonisation chops off the natural development of the
original tribal/village/clam values into feudal values and
then nation/group values.)
In this sense Japan truly was ‘unique’ –
a term for which I was later to use and be held very much
into account for.
Indonesia was one example of a nation being able for much
of its history to develop under something like those
conditions.
Many of its values were similar to Japan’s –
cooperation, consensus etc. (and including also the
propensity for cruelty and violent mood changes at
times).
Before colonization, in Bali especially, there had been an
advanced feudal society very similar to Japan’s
Tokugawa society.
Which leaves open the tantalizing possibility that if
Indonesia had not been colonized could it have developed
like Japan? Bali, the last area of Indonesia to be
colonized, provides part of the
answer.
The Philippines, lacking for much of its history the chance
to develop its own advanced feudal society, could only go
part of the way along the Indonesian route. Even so, many
of its barrio (expanded village) values have similarities
with Japan’s giri,
ninjo etc. .
But today, both Indonesia and the Philippines continue to
suffer the problem that Japan was so fortunate to avoid
– the colonization that imposes conflicting
rationalistic values from above and which kills the natural
maturation of village and feudal values.
But that is the subject of a later
chapter.
North
Europe is Tribal?
A major break-through which came much later in my thinking
was realising that there also were many similarities
between Japan and Britain (and the rest of north Europe to
some extent), and that this also was the result of relative
isolation from the civilization mainstream to the
south.
(At first I mistakenly had tried to explain north European
rationalism, and therefore scientific and industrial
progress, as the result of intense conflict and competition
between peoples in a crowded
area.)
This favorable location had encouraged the growth of
advanced feudal societies and values similar to that of
Japan (chivalry being the equivalent of bushido, and so
on).
This in turn was to give me the clues to realize that the
factors behind the industrialisation of Japan and north
Europe had been more similar than many realised, even if at
the time Japan seemed to be doing
better.
They included natural cooperation and trust, attention to
detail, a liking for making things, a dislike for excessive
intellectuality and bureaucracy.
(The trust factor was later to be picked up by US scholar,
Lawrence Harrision, and then hi-jacked by the rather
opportunistic Francis Fukuyama. More on that
later.)
But Japan had taken all this even further than the north
Europeans had, right through to the present
day.
Japan was the tribe that had become a nation, and a very
successful nation at that. The rest of us, to a greater or
lesser extent, had had to rely on more rationalistic
factors.
8.
Beginning to Write
‘Japan – the tribe-nation’, 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 an improvement on most
Nihonjin-ron.
And it would certainly be lot better than the mythical
Isaih ben Darsan’s ‘Japanese and the
Jews’, I told myself.
---
The words did not come easily. I was trying to explain not
just Japan but also how the rest of us thought and acted,
and why.
I was trying to write the history of the human race –
a project for which I was, and remain, less than greatly
qualified.
And I was trying to cover everything from economics and
enterprise management to politics, history and foreign
policy.
I also had to do a crash course in sociology if I was
to handle some of the concepts I was trying to bandy
around.
Fortunately I had no problem getting the number of
words needed for a book – too many in
fact.
Many of them went to describing the events I had reported
on while in Japan before 1975 – the Tanaka Kakuei
affair, the Red Army revolt etc* in the hope that they
would help 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 - Tokyo’s
extraordinary behavior in negotiating its territorial
dispute with Moscow - had to be excluded from the final
draft, at MM’s insistence.)
(MM 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 more than enough
chances to get my material into print.)
---
For convenience, I had described Japan as a
‘ningen kankei
shakai’ – a human
relations society. Our non-Japanese societies I described
as genri gensoku
shakai (principled
societies).
After publication, the Japanese appraisers were to like
that wording, and it stuck. They did not seem to mind being
called non-principled.
It was only later that I came to use terms like
rationalistic, instinctive, particularistic etc, as I
explain later.
But for the moment my main aim had been simply to explain
how and why ‘tribal’ Japan was so different,
and could teach us much about our less ‘tribal’
societies.
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 – the strong
workplace identity and cooperation, a skill and liking for
making things (monozukuri),
attention to detail – all factors that I later
realized also helped underlie the progress in the north
European culture societies.
But that is another story, albeit a very large
story.
---
Gradually a rough draft emerged.
A loyal secretary in my Canberra government office 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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