Japan

In today's DDW’s Complete Generalisations About Other Cultures, we tackle a people who always say please and thank you, but cannot say no. Japanese are as complicated as they are endearing, traditional with a strong sense of self, yet endlessly inventive and high-tech. Only in The Land of the Rising Sun can you embark on a sandal-clad shuffle to the bathroom along creaky, wooden floorboards, admiring cherry-blossom painted silk walls – to then encounter a toilet with more buttons, modes and options than a Jaguar X-Type.

One need only turn on the news in recent weeks to admire both the staunch pride and endless humility of the Japanese – a social attitude difficult to understand for the average westerner. Take the words of Yuji Arai, the Tokyo Fire Department Chief, while addressing firemen entrusted with hosing down the damaged Fukushima reactor: “The reputation of Japan and the lives of many people rest on your actions.” The priorities of the nation can hardly be listed more accurately.*

Japan has always been torn between its own unique culture and foreign influence. From roughly 500-700, the ruling Japanese clans adopted Chinese practices as a means of increasing their status, including writing, architecture, a Confucian constitution and, most importantly, Buddhism – a religion that was used to unify the populace. While Japanese artistic culture evolved to its peak, lavish courtiers lost track of the growing power of their professional warriors – the Samurai.

As time passed, the Japanese obsession with food

became one with the warrior code.

From then on, Japan was a feudal state under the control of the Shogun, who spent the next few centuries fighting off Mongols and knocking off family members. When the Europeans landed in the 16th Century, Christian missionaries brought trade and the word of god. The Tokugawa Shogunate decided to keep the guns and the tempura**, and kill the Christians instead. Japan was then effectively isolated from the rest of the world until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

A rapid cycle of modernisation followed, again Japan demonstrated the ways of the enemy by invading Korea in 1903 and sinking the Russian fleet in 1905 – until then no European power had imagined an Asian nation capable of such a thing, as propaganda of the time suggests. The expansionist, Emperor-worshipping state that we know and love from Hollywood soon evolved – admitting defeat only after the nuclear destruction of two densely populated cities.

Such is the price of Japanese honour; a price they are willing to pay. This quiet dignity is the nation’s most notable characteristic and often clashes with the values of the new generation. A contemporary Japanese account of Portuguese traders in the 1540s rings true today: “They show their feelings without any self-control.” Watching the reaction of recent earthquake victims highlights this mantra and reminds the rest of us how the unassuming nature and generous hospitality of Japanese keeps their society together in the face of crisis.

* To be fair, the west likes to list things in order of importance too. Take George W. Bush in his State of the Union address in 2002: “In every region, free markets and free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives.”


** From the Latin, tempora, meaning ‘times’. Used by Portuguese missionaries to refer to Lent. In effect, fried fish time!