Japanese Uniqueness continued

FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

The family has been an area of considerable change as societies have moved from predominantly rural and small-town environments to industrial and metropolitan ones. There has been a shift everywhere from single-household, multi-generational, stem families to nuclear ones; fertility rates have declined greatly; and the role of parents in
arranging marriages has been replaced by an emphasis on love. The United States has been in the forefront of such developments; Japan has been a laggard among industrialized nations, although it too has moved considerably.”

Familial relations seemingly reflect the continuity of traditional elements in Japan. In spite of the strains of adjusting to the rapid social change encompassed by the pace of industrialization and urbanization in postwar Japan, the family is more secure there than in the United States. As Nathan Glazer emphasizes, “The Japanese
family is undoubtedly changing; but for a developed country it still maintains a remarkable stability, which underlies the stability of the value patterns. . . . ” Divorce rates, as noted earlier, are much lower in Japan. Aged parents are more likely to live with or near their off­ spring and to receive deference and assistance from them. A 1980 international study of “human values” found 89 percent of a national cross-section of Japanese in favor of adult children living with their parents and older parents residing with a married son or daughter, a position taken by only 25 percent of a comparable sample of Americans. Surveys of the elderly, 65 and older, taken in 1981, 1986, and 1991, found that the majority of the Japanese in each year (59, 58, and 54%) said they wished to always “live together” with their children and grandchildren, compared to very few Americans (6.5, 2.7, and 3.4%).“’ Cross-sections of mothers of teenagers in the two socities, then interviewed in 1983, also varied in their responses to a question concerning their desired relationship with their children in old age. The overwhelming majority of Americans, 87 percent, said they would like to dwell apart from their offspring; 56 percent of the
Japanese preferred to be with them. These attitudes correspond to behavior. In the 1980s, three fifths of Japanese 65 years or older were living with relatives, compared to one seventh of similarly aged Americans. The 1981, 1986, and 1991 studies of people aged 65 or over found that in the United States, about four fifths of the elderly were either living alone or were living alone as couples. In Japan, about 50 percent of the elderly interviewed were living with children. . . .” Even more strikingly, the data showed that “roughly 35 percent of the Japanese are living in three [adult] generation households against [almost] no Arnericans.”’’Conversely, during the 8Os, 30.4 percent of Americans 65 years of age or older were living themselves, as contrasted to 8.6 percent of elderly Japanese. Comparative research finds that “except in lapan, the one-person household has shown the most rapid growth of all household types since 1960.”

These findings reinforce the conclusion put forth in 1992 by Junko Matsubara that Japanese society basically “recognizes families as basic social units and disregards individualists who desire to live alone.” A married freelance writer in her mid-forties, Matsubara was told by landlords she was unqualified to rent an apartment by herself.’” Grownchilren among the Japanese are more disposed to remain with their parents in the (physically small) family households than Americans, generally live in much larger dwelling units. Surveys of 18-to 24­ -old Japanese youth report that from 79 percent in 1977 to 83 percent in 1988 were residing with parents, compared to 59 percent to 62 percent of the same age group of Arnericans.” The differences are particularly strong for women, in spite of the great changes in Japanese marital patterns.’”

THE PERPETUATION OF TRADITION

The argument has frequently been made that to develop economically, less developed countries must become modern, individualistic, and meritocratic. In other words, they must come to resemble America. Even Marxists, writing in a period when the United States was perceived as the great capitalist success (not yet the great capitalist villain), saw America as the equivalent of modernity.

The Japanese elites were able to employ the country’s traditions in ways that made industrialization possible. They were able to use religion, since pre-n‘leiji beliefs contained elements that encouraged rationally oriented work and economic behavior. Robert Bellah concludes that Japanese economic development was causally linked to its Buddhist and Confucian heritages. Shinto, one of the country’s two major faiths, is older than most Western religions and helped to legitimate the Nleiji transformation. Traveling around Japan, one can see business people enter Shinto shrines and clap to get the attention of the local god, the god of a river, of aviation, of a district. They are practicing a form of the same animist or shamanist religion that existed in the pagan Western past and persists oday in tribal societies.’

Religion everywhere tends to institutionalize values and practices from previous eras. As Weber emphasized, traditionalism in the form of religion helped to modernize America and facilitated the development of a competitive capitalist society. The same Protestant sects which fostered individualism and rational market behavior also sustained many values and beliefs derived from the preindustrial history of Western societies. Americans form the most devout population in the West, as we saw in chapter Two.

The Japanese, of course, not being Christians, cannot be expected to accept biblical teachings, but in any case they are much less religious than Americans. The three youth surveys report that, over an eleven-year period, more than 90 percent of Americans said they believe religion should be important in their life (41-47% “very important,” 45-46 “somewhat”),contrasted to around two fifths of Japanese (6-10 percent “very,” 31-35 somewhat”). The 1990 World Values Survey found 79 percent of Americans and only 17 percent of Japanese
reporting religion as an important value. It is interesting to note tha similar differences showed up when the responses of a national cross- section of Japanese were compared with those of a sample of Japanese Americans in Hawaii, both taken at the beginning of the 1970s. For example, only 31 percent of the Japanese said they had a personal religious faith, compared to 71 percent of the Hawaiian Japanese.

The lesser religiosity of the Japanese may explain the poll findings that they are more permissive or liberal with respect to sexuality-related issues. Americans are more likely than Japanese to say that married people should never have an affair, by 79 to 57 percent. They are 10 percent less likely than Americans to believe that “pre-marital sexual intercourse is immoral,” and 14 percent more disposed to agree that ”legal abortions should be available to women who choose to have Even more strikingly and logically, the Japanese are more likely to believe that “what is good and evil depends entirely on the circumstances of our time” than European and American Christians (see chapter Two, Table 2-2), who give more emphasis to guidelines, with Americans showing the greatest differences.

Various students of American values cited in chapter One have conluded that, as in Japan, there has been little change over time in the characteristics of American culture. For the most part, this judgment is premised on the assumption that the United States was “born modern”; that values like universalism, egalitarianism, individualism,
nd an emphasis on meritocracy were present from the beginning of the republic. However, the European postfeudal societies, with their earlier stress on hierarchy, particularism, and ascription (hereditary status), while remaining different from America, changed greatly to meet what some believe are the functional requirements of industrial society. But Japan, as we have seen, has modernized economically while retraining many traditional ways which have declined in most of post­ feudal Europe.

The United States, like Japan, contradicts the assumption that the emergence of a developed urban economy necessarily undermines tradition. Most Americans still adhere to pre-modern religious beliefs. In some ways, therefore, as Alan Wolfe has emphasized, America is a more traditional society than Western Europe, or even Japan. Public opinion studies conducted since World War I1 in the United States test to the strength of ancient sacred traditions, which are much longer in America than in almost all other Christian countries.

The supposedly greater commitment of the Japanese to traditional ways of life, such as choosing to live in small towns, also did not appear in samples in both countries \\ere asked in the late 1970s by Gallup International about preferences for community of residence. The Americans turned out to be more wedded to older models. Close to
three fifths (56%)of those interviewed in the United States stated they would like to live in rural areas or in a small town of up to ten thousand persons, as compared to only a quarter (27%) of the Japanese. Although the Japanese are closer in time (generations) to residence in small communities and although many now have to live in highly congested urban conditions, 36 percent said they would prefer to live in a large city, while only 13 percent of the Americans expressed the same choice.

Antagonism to big cities in America has been linked for many decades to an image of these communities as centers of moral corruption, sin, and irreligion, an image held by fundamentalists and evangelical Protestants. As Earl Raab and I documented, such vielvs have given rise to anti-modernist and anti-urban mo\rements from the Anti- Masonic Party of the 1820s and 1830s through the Know-Nothing American Party movement of the 1850s, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and the more recent right-wing religious linked groups, of whom the most publicized have been the Moral Majority of the 1970s and 1980s and the Christian Coalition of the 1990s.

On a completely secular level, the American refusal, discussed in chapter Three, to give up the ancient systems of measurement in favor of the metric system is another illustration of an American attachment to established ways. By the criterion of measurement units, America (and Britain) are more traditional than Japan. But the latter, as noted earlier, insists on retaining an equally dysfunctional approach to street names and numbers.

Another major pattern in the United States which inirolves the perpetuation, even the extension, of traditional behavior is ethnicity. Until recently, most scholars of this topic agreed that ethnicity reflected the conditions of traditional society, in which people lived in small communities isolated from one another and mass communications and transportation were limited or nonexistent. They expected that industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of education would reduce ethnic consciousness, that universalism would replace particularism.

But as \ve have seen in chapter Four, this generalization is still problematic in the United States, not to speak of various European countries. However, the image of the universalistic American “melting pot” would appear to be validated by intermarriage statistics, which indicate that majorities of Catholics, Jews, Italians, Irish, and Japanese Americans marry out of their ancestral groups. But the rise of minority ethnic and racial consciousness has resulted in a deprecation of the melting pot as the image of the future of American ethnicity, particularly by intellectuals and the ideological left, in favor of the goal of an ethnically pluralist society that seeks to preserve various national origin groups-blacks, Asian Americans, Hispanics, Jews, and so the emphasis on universalism has declined in political discourse, while particularism-described by some as multiculturalism-has become more important. But these discussions and proposals have little impact on mass behavior. The “melting pot” remains as appropriate an image as ever. Japan clearly is much more particularistic and race-conscious.

MODERNITY AND CONSERVATISM

The belief that Japan is a peculiar exception to the assumption that economic development necessitates a shift from tradition to modernity, because it retains major aspects of the value systems associated with feudalism, is clearly invalid. Every industrial country is a combination of tradition and modernity. As Weber, Reischauer, and Bellah have suggested, development in the Western sense is an outgrowth of certain traditions that fostered rational economic behavior, elements prevalent more strongly in Northern Europe, North America, Japan, and Confucian East Asia than in other parts of the world. The new is introduced as an outgrowth of the right combination of the old. The strains of social change, of adjusting to new forms of behavior, of rejecting the old can only be reduced if societies are able to link the new with the world if they maintain considerable elements from previous stages of
development. Not all cultures, however, have equally usable cultural elements.

Tatsuzo Suzuki draws conclusions from examining the responses to Japanese National Character surveys conducted over a quarter of a century wich apply to some degree to the United States and other developed countries.

First, the processes of social change did not bring about a total disappearance of a “traditional” outlook, to be replaced by a “modern” outlook. Despite all the changes in the postcs‘ar era, the systems of values in Japan
lave continued to provide culturally legitimate and meaningful outlets for different ideas.

Second, large-scale institutional changes may occur without drastic shifts in the systems of attitudes. In fact, in view of the Japanese experience, we are inclined to argue that it is precisely the relative stability in the systems of beliefs which allows institutional changes to take place, for example in the areas of economics and politics, without major social dislocations.

The Japanese differ from Americans and most Western Europeans in having done much more to plan their economic development. One of the reasons they were able to do this was that they were latecomers on the industrial scene and were pushed into modernizing by the desire to prevent being colonized. The Meiji elite sought to maintain what was truly Japanese, to restore the status of the emperor, and at the same time to become an industrial power. The United States was fortunate in having the right combination of a different set of traditional values to make efficient use of its economic resources. It is important to note that the great Japanese postwar reforms (e.g., land reform, democratization, demilitarization, the elimination of the peerage) were
legitimated by the same mechanism as in the Meiji Restoration, the emperor‘s approval. Those most upset by the changes were the most bound to the emperor. General hlacArthur played out the classic role of a controlling shogun standing behind the emperor, but by doing so he helped preserve much of the older traditions. hlore than a quarter of a century earlier Winston Churchill had urged a similar role for the German Kaiser, arguing that by retaining him the Allies would avoid the alienation of the right wing and the military from the new German
democracy.

From a perspective of the diverse indicators of “traditionalism” discussed here, Japan and America appear more traditional than most West European and Australasian cultures, despite being as or more modern or developed technologically. If the ability to maintain traditionalism is linked to or identified with consenratism, then both are
also conservative cultures.

“Conservatism ”tends to be a political term, and from a political perspective both are consenrative. As we have seen, America is exceptional in its lack of an important labor or socialist party. Japan does have a viable socialist party, which as of 1995 is part of a governing coalition with the much larger Liberal Democrats. The prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama, is a Socialist. In 1985, the Socialists explicitly gave up adherence to Marxism and the doctrine of class struggle, a change typical of many of the world’s left parties, a position they have enlarged in the mid-nineties. Class solidarity, as reflected in trade union strength as of 1995, is also weaker in both countries than else­ where, albeit with a much smaller percentage of the non-agricultural labor force organized in the United States, 16, than in Japan, 25.l9 Membership is declining in both. In recent years, commentators have been wont to emphasize the fact that 90 percent of the Japanese identify themselves as “middle class,” rather than “upper” or “lower,” as evidence that the country has become uniquely classless. The interpretation is wrong. Americans and Europeans distribute themselves similarly when responding to this question. All these answers mean is that few people will choose to say they are sufficiently privileged to be in the upper class, or that they belong to the invidiously labeled “lower class.” When faced with further choices which include “working class,’’ 53 percent select this option in Japan, compared to 45 percent in the United States; only 29 percent of the former put themselves in the “middle,” again less than the 38 percent of Americans who do the same.

The meaning of “conservatism,” of course, is quite different in the two societies. In America, it involves support of laissez-faire, anti-statist doctrines, which correspond to bourgeois-linked classical liberalism. In Jefferson’s words, “that government governs best which governs least.” In Japan, as in postfeudal Europe, conservatives have been associated with the defense of the alliance between state and religion (i.e., throne and altar), the maintenance of elitist values, and extensive alliance on government to further economic and social purposes. Arisocratic monarchical conservatives (Tories) have favored a strong state. From Meiji onwards, this meant a powerful state bureaucracy and politicians who consciously planned the use of national resources to enhance growth and, in prewar times, military power. The business community, insofar as it took independent stances, was more classically liberal, more supportive of laissez-faire, and less militaristic than the aristocracy, but it was weak politically.

In Europe, aristocratic, agrarian-based conservatism, which favored strong state, fostered the noblesse oblige communitarian values of the nobility, disliked the competitive, materialistic values and behavior of the capitalists, and introduced the welfare state into Germany and Britain. The socialists, when they emerged, also favored a powerful elite and extensive welfare programs, as well as democratization of the polity. In Japan, the conservative postfeudal impulse led, as we have seen, to state guidance of the economy; but, unlike Europe, the emphasis on noblesse oblige and communitarianism has been expressed are within the confines of private institutions, in the obligations of firms for their employees (lifetime employment, company-provided annuity payments), what Ronald Dore calls “welfare corporatism,” than in state institutions. Hence, direct state payments for welfare have
been lower in Japan than anywhere else in the developed world. America and Japan have made important moves in the extension of the welfare benefits, but they remain at the bottom on the international list of Organization for Economic Development (OECD) nations for levels of taxation generally and spending for welfare purposes particularly. In 1992, Japan and the United States ranbed last in a six-nation comparison of ratios of social security benefits (medical care, pensions, other) to national income: Japan (1 5%), United States (1 6.6%),United
Kingdom (21.9%), West Germany (27.5%), France (34.1%),and Sweden (46.5%). It should be noted that Japan uses the private sector in ways that do not occur in the United States, for example, to provide universal health insurance or benefit packages. Hence, there is much more private communitarianism in Japan than in America, even though a comparison of public welfare supports would suggest othenvise. Still, when presented in 1990 by the World Values Survey with a choice between the classical liberal or Tory-socialist positions in the form of a ten-point scale, running from “Individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves” to “The state should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is provided for,” the two countries were outliers among the developed countries. Over half, 55 percent, of the Japanese placed themselves on the Tory-statist side of the scale, while only 17 percent chose individual responsibility. Conversely, fully 70 percent of the Americans, inheritors of an anti-statist, individualistic value system, favored individualism, while 14 percent answered that the state should be responsible. Although both countries have private insurance rather than state coverage for health care, their employee benefit systems differ greatly, reflecting these differences in national values. As Tomoni Kodama of the Japanese Ministry of Health notes:

The U.S. structure of employee benefits seems to be based on diversity and individualism. Companies have a real choice in selecting and planning their employee benefit system. . . . [T]he structure of Japanese employee benefits is equity and uniformity for everyone. The Japanese priority has been to assure equal access to benefits for everyone. . . . [I]n order to provide equal access to all employees, health insurance is strictly regulated across the board by Japanese government. In other words, employees of a small company on the verge of bankruptcy are provided basically the same coverage as employees of well- known big company such as Honda or Toyota. . . . The same type of equity and uniformity is more or less a common feature among other Japanese employee benefits such as pension plans and health care.
As a result . . . it is not the companies but the central government that has consistently taken the key role in planning and implementing the employee benefit system.”

Until 1993, Japan had a conservative government throughout its postwar decades of economic growth and prosperity, one, however, whose business-related Liberal Democratic administration responded quite differently to the recession of the early nineties than the American Republican one under George Bush. The former tried
to improve the economy by Keynesian pump-priming policies, including “more public investments to boost the economy , . . public works and housing. . . . [A]n additional fl. 12 trillion will be allocated to public funds for investment in stocks. This is separated from the Y10.7 trillion stimulus . . . [most of which] will be spent on public works and housing. . . . Economic Planning Agency officials [announced] . . . ‘the package wi11 fill the gap between demand and supply in the economy. . . The Republican regimes of the 1980s and early 1990s, and even the subsequent Democratic Clinton administration, would oppose comparable policies for the United States as too leftist. As of 1995, the Japanese government remains centralized; its bureaucracy and politicians continue, as under Meiji, to strongly influence general economic policies, although its new socialist-led but predominantly LDP coalition government has announced it will relax controls a bit. The American rejects proposals for a state-coordinated “industrial policy,” although the Clinton Democrats use the term in suggesting a much more moderate version than the Japanese one. In Japan, the big business sector is still trying adhere to a noblesse oblige sense of obligation to employees, but the recession of the early nineties forced companies to press employees to take early retirement. Feudal or postfeudal values continue to penetrate Japanese life and economy in ways that are largely absent from the American.

Japan has a relatively strong Socialist Party, a much weaker, more moderate (social democratic) Democratic Socialist Party, and a fairly small Communist Party. Their combined vote has ranged up down between 36 percent in 1958 and 32 percent in 1990, while the tendencies have almost no electoral support in the United States.
Further evidence that the variations in political orientation and social policies between Japan and America are linked to basic differences in orientation toward individualism and equality, which occur even when class position is held constant, may be found in the first 1981-82 World Values Survey, which asked respondents to choose between two statements:

Q-Here are two opinions about conditions existing in our country. Which one do you happen to agree with:

A-There is too much emphasis upon the principle of equality. People should be given the opportunity to choose their own economic and social life according to their individual abilities.

B-Too much liberalism has been producing increasingly wide differences in people’s economic and social life. People should live more equally.

The Japanese have been very much more disposed to favor equality than individual competition, as reiterated by the data reported in Table 7-4. Commitment to meritocracy presumes a competitive race for position and great reward for the successful.

The second World Values Survey did not include the individualism- equality question, but it repeated one requesting respondents to choose between statements emphasizing freedom or equality. As might be expected, in both years Americans were more likely than Japanese to opt for freedom over equality.’”

TABLE 7-4. ATTITUDES TOtVARD INDIVIDUALISM AND EQUALITY IN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES (PERCENT)

Source: Adapted from Elizabeth H. Hastings and Philip K. Hastings, eds., Index to International Public Opinion, 1980-1 981 (Westport. CT Greenwood Press, 1982, p. 5 19; “Survey in Thirteen Countries of Hman Values,” Leisure Development Center, Tokyo, October I-5, 1980.

TABLE 7-5. ATTITUDES TOWARD FREEDOM AND EQUALITY IN JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES (PERCENT)

Source: Adapted from Ronald Inglehart, 1991 World Values Survey (Ann Arbor, MI. Institute for Social Resarrch, 1991).

The data in Table 7-5 point LIP the greater emphasis in American culture than in Japanese on individual freedom. Seemingly there was little change in Japan over the decade of the eighties, while the very high commitment in the United States for the “freedom” choice may have moved down slightly, though it remained the opinion of the large majority.

CONCLUSION

The United States and Japan follow different organizing principles. National traditions continue to inform the cultures, economies, and the politics of both countries in very dissimilar ways. One, the United States, follows the individualistic essence of bourgeois liberalism and evangelical sectarian Christianity; the other, Japan, reflects the group­ oriented norms of the postfeudal, aristocratic Meiji era. The former till stresses equal respect across stratification lines; the latter still emphasizes hierarchy in interpersonal relations. The United States continues to suspect the state; Japan places heavy reliance on its directing role. They are both among the world’s most successful societies as measured by levels of productivity. Clearly, nations which have reached the same high point of technological development and economic success can still be very different culturally and can continue to
be anomalies, outliers, among the developed countries, exceptional or unique compared to most others.

But while American economic patterns have been exceptional, Japanese patterns resemble those in Europe, particularly Northern Europe. Japanese and European corporations have shown a propensity to cooperate with each other and with the government. Americans rank with respect to both orientations. Efforts to introduce quality circles and worker involvement in industrial production have succeeded in Japan, Sweden, and other Northern European countries. They have failed in the United States.’

There is a body of literature which concludes that Japan will do better than the United States in the future, considerations of industrial policy apart, because its group-oriented culture is better suited to the economic structure of a postindustrial society. The argument is that engineering innovations, the key to economic growth, are more successfully fostered by groups, while scientific discoveries, yet-to-be­ applied basic research, are more likely to occur in societies that stress individual initiative. The latter lead to Nobel prizes, but the contention
is that they are less likely to have a direct impact in the postindustrial marketplace. This hypothesis is far from the only one presented to account for Japanese economic success. Others stress the impact of group-solidarity values on the willingness of Japanese, including corporate business executives, stockholders, and employees, to earn less
than comparably placed Americans or Europeans, While the gap between those who run companies and ordinary workers is also much smaller in Japan. Sony Corporation chairman Akio Morita has “described in detail the corporate management style of Japan-thin profit margins, low dividends to stockholders, overwork [by and low pay to] . . . employees, seizing market share above all. . . .’

The comparative evidence indicates that while employees of the Japanese company share more equally in the cash
benefits available from the company than is the case in other countries [particularly the United States]. . . . Surveys of executive attitudes indicate that Japanese executive pay levels are set with a conscious awareness of the need to stay within reasonable ranges with regard to other levels of compensation. . . . Organizational pressures work to limit executive pay at least as much as do self-sacrificingimpulses by the executives themselves.

Survey data bear out the generalization that Japanese executives place the goal of increasing market shares, one which benefits workers, ahead of profits and short-term gains for stockholders. A 1980 cross- national poll of 291 Japanese and 227 American top corporate executives found the Americans giving first and second place to return on investment and increasing the value of company shares, while the Japanese put enlarging market shares first, and placed enhancing the worth of shares at the bottom, ninth.”’ The Hampden-Turner and
Trompenaars worldwide study of managers conducted in the late eighties and early nineties asked them to choose between two statements:

(a) “The only real goal of a company is making profit,” and (b) “A company, besides rnalung profit, has a goal of attaining the well-being of various stakeholders, such as employees, customers, etc.” Only 8 percent of the Japanese executives replied, “profit only,” compared to 40 percent of the Americans.

The answers to various other questions posed in this survey reiterated the differences presented in the qualitative and case study literature. The Japanese reported close relationships with “distributors, customers, suppliers, and subcontractors,” and “somewhat cooperative relationships with competitors,” while the Americans noted “remote
relationships” and “rivalry” with the two groups. The Americans followed a pattern of “head-on competition stressing cost efficiency,” while the Japanese emphasized “coexistence with competitors stressing ‘niche’and differentiation.” The Japanese sought “information-oriented leadership” and generalists; the American preference was for “task-oriented leadership” and specialists. The American executives were inclined “toward innovation and risk-taking,” the Japanese toward ‘interpersonal skills.”The responses indicated that American managers were disposed to handle “conflict resolution by confrontation . . . [and] decision-making [by] stressing individual initiative,” while the Japanese engaged in “group-oriented consensual decision-making.”’

The Japanese postwar success, when contrasted to the much slower growth rate and the loss or decline in markets in major industries by American business, led various analysts prior to the recession of the nineties to argue that the United States should adopt comparable poli­ce‘s to those followed across the Pacific. Assuming that various specific Japanese ways were responsible for higher productivity increases, the fact remains that these developed in a very different context. “The literture on Japanese development is generally pessimistic regarding the transfer of Japanese organization. It suggests that Japanese organizations derive from cultural factors such as homogeneity, familism, and group loyalty. . . Yet a comprehensive study by Richard Florida and Martin Kenney of Japanese “transplants”in the automobile industry in America indicates both that they have done well economically and that
they “have been successful in implanting the Japanese system of work organization in the U.S. environment. The basic form of Japanese work organization has been transferred with little if any modifications. These do not involve major practices like lifetime employment or the emphasis on seniority, but include a very much lower number of job modifications, more job rotation, greater emphasis on worker initiative, including quality circles. Seemingly, Japanese management can secure an acceptance of practices that failed when sponsored by Americans. (Quality circles, as noted earlier, were originally an American idea, which ironically did not take hold in their native land.)

The Japanese are bound together by a common history, by a longtime desire to remain distinct from foreign culture. From the start of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth, they maintained barriers against contact with other societies and economies. They had to be forced by Commodore Perry and the American Navy to recognize the greater power of the West and to open the door to outside influences.

But even though open to intellectual, commercial, and physical contact with the rest of the ivorld, they have insisted on preserving their separateness. As a nation, Japan emphasizes ancestral purity. As James Fallows notes: “Rather than talking about race . . . the Japanese talk about ‘purity.’Their society is different from others in being pure. . . .” The system is closed, unlike the United States where “in theory anyone can become an American. A place in Japanese society is given only to those who are born Japanese.”’ Legal immigration is close to impossible. The more than a half million Koreans, left over from the period when Korea was ruled by Japan, do not have citizenship even though most of them were born in Japan. For a long time, the Japanese government refused to accept a quota of Vietnamese boat people on the grounds that the Japanese people would not treat them well. It finally reluctantly agreed to take in ten thousand. The traditional concern for “purity” has not declined. If anything. the discrimination against the Korean, Chinese, and other minority people who permnently reside in Japan has been increasing rather than decreasing since the seventies.”’ The protectionist zeal of the country, the barriers to the import of foreign goods. is a related form of behavior.

The United States, on the other hand, has welcomed foreigners to enter and join up. It is an immigrant, multicultural, multi-racial society. From a comparative, particularly Japanese, perspective, the United States has been an open society to imports as wel1 as people. The 1980s witnessed more netvcomers to the United States than during any past decade. And the immigrants now are overwhelmingly from the Third World, not from Europe. As during other downturns, the recession of the 1990s has produced xenophobic immigration-restriction
reactions. Still, it may be reiterated that as of 1990, the World Values Survey data indicate that only 12 percent of Japanese disagreed with the statement: “When jobs are scarce, employers should give priority to Japanese.” A much larger percentage of Americans, 42 percent, rejected the statement as applied to their society.

The American emphasis on individualism and competition has, as noted in chapter Two, resulted in a “star” system in all areas of American life with enormous rewards to those on top-business executives, scholars, professionals, entertainers, athletes. The income spread from the top to the bottom is much higher in the United States than elsewhere in the developed world, particularly Japan.

Indeed, wage and income distribution in the United States is not as equitable as found in other nations; the difference between high and low wage earners is larger. Comparisons of male workers show that those whose earnings fall into the lowest decile of earnings distribution earn only 38 percent of the median in the United States, 61 percent in Japan, 68 percent in Europe; at the top of the earnings range, in the highest decile, workers in the United States -earn 214 percent of the median, while in Japan it is 173 percent, and in Europe it is 178 percent.”” This is true in spite of the fact that formal hierarchical distinctions and family background are of greater importance in Japan and to a lesser extent in other postfeudal nations as well. In Japan, the emphasis is on the group winning, on the individual, whether athlete, executive, or worker, subordinating hisher concerns to those of the larger unit. Such behavior even occurs at the summit of politics. Prime ministers tend to be prosaic figures who hold office for two years, eryv occasionally a year or two This pattern stands in sharp contrast to the American system, where elections focus on the individual rather than the party, and emphasize the role of the president, even though he must rely on influence, not authority, when dealing with Congress. Eamonn Fingleton suggests the key to Japan’s economic future lies with the Ministry of Finance, a low-profile agency that centrally controls fiscal policy and growth-with power that extends far beyond that of elected officials and is analogous to the combined powers of all U.S. taxing, spending, and defense agencies.”’

My stress here on the continued distinctions between the two most economically powerful Pacific Rim societies is not intended to deny that both have changed greatly. Obviously, as they moved from being primarily agrarian societies to industrial giants, with the bull; of their populations living in cities, they changed greatly in norms and behavors. Their family systems are now nuclear, their birth rates are low, they are more meritocratic than in their nineteenth-century formats. Both have become more postindustrial or postmaterialist, to use Daniel Bell’s or Ronald Inglehart‘s terms (they do not mean the same). Reflecting worldwide changes in the developed nations, their young people are more permissive with respect to traditional morality. They are more concerned about protecting the environment, they are more interested in the “quality” of life. But their organizing principles remain
different. They vary from each other in much the same way as they did a century ago. The value and behavioral differences reported here are much greater than have been found in any other comparison of industrialized nations. Each maintains much of its unique or exceptional character. To adapt an analogy I first used in discussing Canada and the United States: the two are like ships that have sailed thousands of miles along parallel routes. They are far from where they started, but they are still separated.

American individualism won the major international competitions in the twentieth century. Will it continue to be number one in the twenty-first? The American economy is still the more productive of the two, as documented in chapter Two. “Japan’s per capita income was still only 83 percent of the United States” as of 1992.”’ Prior to the
recession of the nineties, the Japanese had moved ahead, to become seemingly more efficient than the United States in industrial organization in major areas such as automobile and electronics production. As a result, some observers contended that their systems-which are leaner in the scope of management, more egalitarian in economic reward, and place more emphasis on worker participation in quality control-are more “modern than the American, that the United States should modernize, learn from a more efficient system, much as the Japanese did
for a century. But much of American industry responded to Japanese competition and the recession by becoming “leaner” and “meaner.” And faced with evidence that the United States is doing better, the Japanese have taken to reading books about American business. Reengineering Capitalism (1991) by Michael Hammer and James
Champy has been a best-seller in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe.

Cross-national analyses now place American economic efficiency as equal to or ahead of Japan’s. In October 1991, The Economist noted. A new survey: of 594 manufacturing companies in Europe, the United States and Japan . . . [c]onductcd jointly by Insead. a European business school, Boston University and Waseda University . . . shows that Europeans and Americans have closed or eliminated the managerial gap in areas once seen as quintessentially “Japanese.” The companies to emerge best from the survey are American. They excel at the act of mixing production with services. . . , Surprisingly, perhaps, they were also found to think further ahead than most of their competitors on matters such as investing in human capital...[and] focusing on quality, service and reliability...[The Japanese conversely] are concentrating on forcing down costs.

The competition for most productive country will continue.

If you have read this article, send me an email: bmori@calpoly.edu

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