COMMENTARY
Japan's clashing cultural forces could produce dynamic new individualism
By Tom Plate
Predictions of its demise are decidedly premature, but there is no question Japan is in serious trouble.
Advertiser library photo • Feb. 28, 2002
While it has received much outside advice, especially from concerned allies such as the United States, nothing seems to work.
Commuters flock to a Tokyo railway station. A new culture could emerge from competition between the group-focused older generations and younger people who are agitating for transcendent social change.
Though recent economic indicators suggest signs of life after the decade-long stumble, the Japanese will be the first to tell you their problems persist. The only question now: Is Japan a once-great nation in irreversible decline or a revitalizing nation in the ferment of powerful change?
The conventional view of Japan — and by far the most common — is that it is a tight society bound by social collectivism, lifetime employment and abject deference to authority. Based on that, there would seem to be little hope. Japan would be a done deal, its fate sealed in its past, a fine but undrinkable wine matured far past its prime.
That might well be the case if Japan's problems were solely economic. But what if the issue is seething social revolution rather than economic decline?
That is exactly right, says professor David Matsumoto, a San Francisco State University social psychologist whose book, "The New Japan," may be the most important recent contribution to thinking about Japan — a storied culture that grew to become the modern world's second-largest economy.
Japan is a Grand Canyon of tense values-competition among those older generations steeped in tradition and those younger ones agitating for transcendent social change. "The view of a tranquil, homogenous Japanese culture can no longer be supported," says Matsumoto. "Japan is evolving into a society with a different culture."
Today's social frisson is far more significant than the usual generation-gap tension. It's more like the ominous grating of tectonic plates before a massive earthquake. On one side is the iron core of social collectivism, representing the past, and on the other a massive emerging individualism. Can any society — especially one with a relatively small population — accommodate such clashing and diametrically different cultural forces?
The answer to that, suggests the professor, may well determine Japan's future. Its salvation will be driven not by economic reforms so much as by a social revolution spiraling toward a more dynamic collectivism. This would permit more personal space for the individual — but without shredding the subtle cultural tissues that wrap the Japanese into a common identity. Rather than becoming more Americanized, the Japanese would combine the best of the West with the best of the East to forge a new social synthesis: an "individualized collectivism."
This won't come easily — it can be achieved only if it's powered by a retooled educational system that eschews Japan's legendary rote-and-note approach and instead rewards creativity, with all its messiness. It will also require a new social contract between management and labor, the latter increasingly split into different cultures. Leadership must come from the country's legendary multinational corporations, which so well understand the global marketplace and the urgent need to reinvent the culture in order to compete.
For if either of these two Japans is ignored — the individualized or the collectivized — Japan would face a social meltdown or even revolution. And then the two Japans would be ripe for a demagogue.
Anyone in Asia rooting for this nation to fall on its face and roll over into a grave is cutting off his proverbial nose to spite his face. A stake in the heart of Japan would be a stake in the heart of Asia, too.
Technically, Japan may not be too big to fail, but the entire region is neither secure nor solid enough to survive such a titanic collapse.
Asia must demonstrate exceptional patience as the new Japan emerges from the cocoon of the old. The ancient, static, predictable Japan is about to become a phenomenon of the past. Because of the fierce competing social forces it must reconcile, it will become, once again, Asia's most difficult culture to comprehend. But trying hard to understand Japan, rather than merely criticizing and condemning it, is exactly what Asia needs to do — if it knows what's good for it.
Tom Plate , whose column is published regularly in The Advertiser, is a professor at UCLA.
