Diversity and Change

The preceding brief account of Japan's historical heritage reveals a story of considerable diversity and constant change. It’s sufficient to correct some of the ‘facile (обманчивый) stereotypes with which the rest of the world tends to explain the Japanese and write them off (списывать со счёта). Perhaps their isolation and extreme sense of distinctiveness have left the Japanese par­ticularly open to such stereotyping.

Some have seen the Japanese as complete ‘esthetes (эстет) —the descendants of the delicate and sensitive courtiers and ladies of The Tale of Genji, or of medieval Zen artists. Others have seen them as merely the modern version of the arrogant, punctilious (педантичный, скрупулёзный, щепетильный до мелочей), rule-bound samurai of Tokugawa times. A common view among Japan's East Asian neighbors is that they are basically militarists, as shown by the long dominance of feudal military leadership and the brutal conquests by the Japanese army in modern times. A more recent stereotype, contrasting with militarism in content but paralleling it in the emphasis on single-minded fa’naticism, is of the Japanese as "economic animals," incomparably efficient in their organization and absolutely ruthless (безжалостный) in their willingness to sacrifice all else to their own economic gain.

Our brief run-through of Japanese history should show that the Japanese have changed over time as much as any other people, and considerably more than most. They have been extremely responsive to changing external conditions. Contemporary Japanese are no more bound by the patterns of feudal warriors or prewar militarists.

Our historical account, highly simplified though it is, should also have revealed that Japan does not have a simple, uniform society, but an extremely complex one. Though a homogeneous people culturally, the roughly 122 million Japanese display great variations in attitudes and ways of life according to age group and their diverse roles in society. A teenager and an octoge’narian (человек в возрасте от 80 до 89 лет), a day laborer and a corporation executive, a bank clerk and an artist show about as much diversity in attitudes as would their counterparts in any Western country. Almost anything that might be said about the Japanese in general would not be true of many and might be flatly contradicted by some.

But despite this complexity and the rapid changes that have swept Japan, foreign observers have commonly sought to find some one trait or tightly knit group of traits that would explain everything in Japan as it is today and was in the past. Japanese, too, in their self-consciousness have endlessly sought to do the same. Perhaps it is the feeling both share—that Japan is somehow unique—that encourages this search for some one simple explanation for this uniqueness.

In the past, Japanese frequently cited the unbroken line of emperors since antiquity as explaining everything about Japan, though our historical sketch has shown how little that had to do with most developments. Some scholars have singled out the samurai ethics of the Tokugawa period, seen through the militarism of the 1930s, as the key to modern Japan, and others have emphasized the hierarchical groupings in a so-called vertical society or the sense of dependence in human relations as the central elements in Japanese society. Such one-dimensional interpre­tations do offer some keen insights, but they are basically distorting for such a complex and fast-changing society as that of contemporary Japan.

The speed of change makes sharp analysis particularly difficult. The firm generalization of one decade may start to break down in the next and be almost gone by the one after. The salient features of Japanese life in the 1930s seemed quite different from those in the 1920s and even more different from those of the 1950s and 1980s. Japanese who have received their total education since the end of World War II appear to be almost a new breed when compared with their prewar parents, who continually complain that the younger generation has lost the old virtues. The speed of change shows some signs of slowing at last, but what the Japanese will be like in the future no one can tell. If one thinks about how much has changed in American life and attitudes decade by decade since Civil War days, one can realize how much Japanese too have changed during the same period, for they have been living through greater and more sudden shifts in their foreign relations and far more traumatic transitions at home.

A final problem in analyzing Japanese society is the uncertain ground from which we view it. Any study like this one is inescapably comparative, for one can make no statement about things in Japan being either great or small without having in mind some standard by which they are being judged. But what is that measuring stick? No two Americans have exactly the same attitudes or standards, and if we include other Westerners the diversity becomes still greater. And norms keep changing in America as elsewhere in the world. Whereas Westerners were scandalized by Japanese openness about exposing the human body in the nineteenth century, today they might consider the Japanese in some ways slightly prudish in such matters. Over time the picture of war-mongering Japanese and peace-loving Americans of the 1930s has been transferred into almost a mirror image.

Modern technology also tends to produce considerable convergence between Japan and the West. Without doubt, basic trends in Japan are flowing for the most part in the same direction as in the United States and Western Europe.

Still, when all is said and done, the Japanese do remain a very distinctive people with norms in some fields quite different from those that prevail in the West. Significantly, some of these norms have behind them long historical antecedents and therefore may be all the more likely to persist into the future.

One thing, however, is certain. Japanese society is too complex and too rapidly changing to fit into any tight, neat model. Certain traits obviously mesh (сцепляться) more closely than others, though they all hang together in a relatively smoothly operated whole.