History, Social Structure and Individualism: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Japan

Schooler, Carmi, International Journal of Comparative Sociology

This paper explores how history and social structure affect individualism in Japan. In doing so, it reports on a variety of cross-cultural studies comparing Japan with the West. Although I have been involved in most of these studies, their approaches vary markedly. They span the range from broad historical comparisons covering centuries to analyses of variance of fine-grained time samples of parent and child behavior. The disciplines involved include not only sociology, but also psychology, anthropology and history. In the course of the paper, I will use all of these different cross-cultural comparative approaches to try to gain an understanding of the differences and similarities between Japan and the West in how the place of the individual in society is viewed.

There is a school of thought that takes a quite different approach - one which maintains that the Japanese are essentially different from other people - one of the most basic differences being their fundamental rejection of individualism in favor of psychological interdependency.(1) Known as Nihonjinron, those in this school tend to see Japan as essentially incomparable to other nations except in terms of the ways it is better than they are (for a critical review see Befu, 1993). This paper, on the other hand, focuses on the many historical and modem day similarities between Japan and the West. Where it finds differences it tries to explain them according to generally applicable sociological and psychological principles rather than postulating that the Japanese are somehow inherently different.

Substantively, I will try to show that:

I. From an historical perspective, the pattern of Japanese history is remarkably similar to that of the West. Furthermore, parallel historical periods in Japan and the West were characterized by similar levels of economic development and individualism. There are plausible reasons - involving causal interconnections among individualism, economic development and environmental complexity - for thinking that these similarities are not accidental.

II. From a sociological social psychology perspective, everyday socio-environmental conditions have analogous effects in Japan and the West. In particular, complex environments have quite similar psychological effects in both settings. In both, environmental complexity increases intellectual flexibility, self-directed orientations and the value placed on individualism and autonomy.

III. Japan has recently shown a rise in the level of individualistic values and an accompanying decrease in 'traditional' group-oriented ones. The evidence suggests that the Japanese have not remained impervious to factors such as rising levels of environmental complexity that increase individualistic values, orientations and behaviors.

IV. The increase in individualistic behavior among Japanese mothers and their children is especially noteworthy because it contrasts with the relative lack of such behavior found in the classic comparative study of Japanese and American infant and child rearing practices carried out by William Caudill in the 1960s. This study pioneered in revealing some of the behavioral mechanisms through which cultural norms are maintained from one generation to the next by being instantiated in infant and child-rearing practices.

V. In part because of behavioral modes of cultural reproduction such as Caudill described, cultural changes, such as those involving individualism in Japan, generally take place at a slower rate than socio-environmentally produced psychological changes in individuals.

VI. A more general basis for the slowness in change of cultural norms such as individualism is their institutionalization in the social structure of society.(2) Institutionalization furnishes us with at least part of the reason for the greater inertia of social and cultural, as compared to individual, level phenomena. This relative slowness of cultural change accounts, at least in part, for the remaining differences between Japan and the U.S. in cultural norms regarding individualism - differences that appear to persist despite striking resemblances between the two countries in technology and environmental complexity.

Similarities in the Pattern of Japanese and Western History

If a European had been able to come to Japan during the pre-Meiji Edo era (16031867), when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate, he would have found a society that, although containing a developed mercantile system, was socially and economically quite different from contemporaneous Europe.(3) In contrast to the expansionist Europeans, during this period Japan shunned any overseas military, political or commercial involvements and was relatively closed to foreign intellectual or cultural influences, particularly from the West. Whereas an ideology of equality and individual achievement had developed in several parts of the West, and social and economic mobility had come to be seen as a distinct possibility, Japanese society was rigidly stratified into a formal hierarchy of nobles, warriors, farmers, artisans, merchants, and impure untouchables. By the end of the Edo period Japan was also clearly lagging behind the West technologically. Psychologically, this world was characterized by a hierarchical set of loyalties - to family, to daimyo (lord) and to shogun (Bellah, 1957). This emphasis on diligent group loyalty and de-emphasis on the importance of the 'egoistic' goals and feelings of the individual has often come to be seen as inherent in the Japanese people or their culture (Doi, 1962; 1973; Caudill, 1973; Caudill and Schooler, 1973; Hamaguchi, 1985; A. Naoi and Schooler, 1985; Schooler and A. Naoi, 1988).

Given the cross-cultural differences readily visible to both Japanese and Westerners at the time of Japan's reopening to foreigners in 1854, a modem observer transported back to sixteenth-century Japan might be somewhat puzzled by the many psychological, sociological and economic similarities to the European Renaissance. The resemblance may not be fortuitous, but the result of a remarkable parallel in historical experience. Like their European visitors, the sixteenth-century Japanese belonged to a society that had previously (during the Heian Period, 794-1192) been unified under an imperial government (cf. Rome and the Carolingian Empire) that had developed under the influence of an intellectually dominant classical civilization (China). As in Europe, this imperium broke down into a feudal system (during the Kamakura Period, 1192-1336). When the Europeans arrived in 1543 during the later part of the Muromachi era (1336-1568), Japan was in a period that has been likened to the Renaissance (Grossberg, 1981) and that was marked by opposing tendencies that continued through the Momoyama era (1568-1601). On the one hand, the social controls that regulated the hierarchical social and political systems of the earlier imperial and feudal periods broke down in ways that emphasized the importance of individuals as opposed to that of the social groupings to which they belonged. On the other hand, military, political, and bureaucratic processes were set in motion that could serve as the basis for the development of a repressive central state whose goal was a strongly regulated, ideologically orthodox, and hierarchically defined society. All of these changes took place in an era of great commercial expansion and notable technological development fueled by dramatic increases in agricultural production and by regular and massive injections of gold and silver into the money supply (Atwell, 1986). Renaissance Europe was, of course, marked by a somewhat similar historical background and similar opposing trends towards individualistically oriented open societies and hierarchically-structured closed ones. The trend towards a hierarchically-structured closed society was successfully carried through by the Tokugawa Shogunate during the first half century of the Edo period. Thus, the Jesuits in Japan were the witnesses and victims of an absolutist counter reformation - different from the one they had in mind, but one that was more complete and long-lasting than any achieved in Europe.

The Japanese "Renaissance"

The relatively high level of technology and individualism of sixteenth-century Japan is revealed when it is compared to contemporaneous Renaissance Europe. Japan was militarily so …

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Publication information: Article title: History, Social Structure and Individualism: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Japan. Contributors: Schooler, Carmi - Author. Journal title: International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Volume: 39. Issue: 1 Publication date: February 1998. Page number: 32+. © 1999 E.J. Brill. COPYRIGHT 1998 Gale Group.

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