The Enigma of Japanese Power (45 page)

To appreciate fully the importance of ritual in Japanese life, we must again consider what the socio-political world looks like to a conventional Japanese in the absence of a tradition of appealing to universal values. The world through Japanese eyes does not, in most cases, contain the certainties that come with a belief in a moral order based on immutable principles, which means that most Japanese have ultimately no intellectual handrail. They cannot appeal to any principle or ideal with which to justify their behaviour in the eyes of their neighbours, fellow workers or superiors. To understand this moral world one must imagine a situation in which good behaviour is constantly determined by individuals’ views of how others expect them to behave; in which they can never think To hell with them’; and in which conformity to social expectations is not an unfortunate compromise but the only possible way to live.

Daily life, in practice, provides some pragmatic guides to concrete action, embodied in maxims, proverbs and traditional sayings, but they are not enough to justify going against the grain of social expectation. The ideals of good behaviour that we have looked at earlier – ‘purity of spirit’, ‘loyalty’ and ‘sincerity’ – seek to preserve the social order of the moment; they are certainly not weapons with which the individual can tackle the political system. Resistance to whatever is portrayed as beneficial to the community is, as we have seen, decried as springing from purely ‘private’ – synonymous with egoistic – motives and not conceived of as a possibly valid personal political opinion.

Japanese are not expected to take their cues from an inner voice that reminds them of moral absolutes they came to embrace while growing up. Moral authority is not thought to reside in them as an internalised guide to life. They have no historical models encouraging them to stand up for their beliefs. They cannot repeat after Socrates, and a multitude of thinkers and political activists since, that to follow one’s conscience is better than to follow convention. They could, of course, do all these things. But they would risk disapproval and would rarely be rewarded.

The personal sense of
noblesse oblige
harboured by some Japanese, together with the prevailing comity of manners, has a soothing and reassuring effect on social experiences in Japan. Some Japanese devote themselves out of idealism to moral causes. Yet in none of these cases can the individual appeal to personal ideals of conduct in order to justify acts that go against the grain of communal expectations. The Japanese wishing to function in a purely Japanese context must give up logic, moral values and philosophical or scientific ‘truths’ as ultimate means of defence or attack. It is tempting to label the Japanese pragmatists, but one would have difficulty finding Japanese so consistent in their pragmatism that it could be considered a principle.

One could say that, rather than being guided by inner computations on the basis of universally applicable rules and abstractions, the Japanese are radar-guided. It is, especially, the surface of things and people that counts. A serious and astute observer of the Japanese scene speaks of the existence of

a set of extraordinarily sensitive conversational and supra-conversational ‘feelers’ which work constantly to note others’ reactions and make the necessary adjustments. These adjustments, though minute, are in aggregate essentially what supports society: ideas and principles are secondary, not supportive in the primary sense. And the universal concepts of kindness, gentleness, humanity and so on are experienced within this context.
²⁰

In their language and demeanour, Japanese must always help restrain, to a certain extent, their fellow Japanese. Just as individuals cannot appeal to an invisible sanctioning agent to justify individual action, so they cannot, ultimately, point to such laws to keep others from disturbing their private order. They must be alert and suspicious. With respect to their superiors, their greatest concern will be whether the superiors have the best for them in mind. Because there are no ultimate restraining sanctions from within, the restraining must come from outside, and at higher levels of the System all those with a degree of power are constantly busy with containing the powers of others.

The ritual nature of so much in daily life and communication provides constant reassurance that order prevails; this is necessary because the fear of its possible absence is more acute than in the West. The absence of a tradition of explaining the world in terms of universal and immutable truths makes future events less predictable, gives one less protection – no intellectual protection at all – and exposes one to the caprices of forces not understood. The full implications of this situation, in which the only reassurance lies in a strictly controlled social order, are difficult to imagine for those who, throughout their upbringing, have been imbued with a sense of underlying laws and principles.

In Japan social life must be made as predictable as possible to ensure a degree of day-to-day certainty. Hence, Japanese communication tends to be very stereotyped, and Japanese grow up with a fairly strong awareness of how things ought to be and how people ought to behave. There are both ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ aspects to their human environment. These complement each other, but are not made to fit into a continuous logical scheme. On the softer side, there is the flexibility that governs the closer personal relationships; here the world is ‘wet’, emotional and tolerant of idiosyncrasies. But in the ‘harder’, less friendly mode, the tendency is to place things in ready-made, rigid, immutable categories. In the workaday world, Japanese judge each other by the schools and universities they attended and the companies or government organs they belong to. At an even further remove, foreigners are judged by the respective stereotypes for the countries they come from. The world in this perspective is a jigsaw puzzle where all is judged on the surface and placed accordingly. It is almost as though the great effort that goes into monitoring the shifts and changes in the soft, wet world of the immediate social environment calls for a greater simplicity in the more impersonal world beyond it.

Japanese can be extremely upset when the world and the people in it do not live up to expectations, and they tend simply to dismiss things that do not fit preconceived notions – a common human trait but, once again, with an overwhelming difference of degree. Foreigners are often struck by the apparent impermeability of the Japanese mind, even that of reasonably well-schooled and intelligent individuals, to things that do not fit expected patterns. The same anxiety about the unpredictable can make for extremely inflexible attitudes and behaviour.

Ritual and hierarchy substitute for an internalised set of abstractions in fostering predictability and reducing the likelihood of open conflict. If everybody has a proper place in the scheme of things and sticks to it, much disturbance and upheaval in society can be avoided, and the acceptance of hierarchical order in Japan appears to be the only alternative to festering conflict. Those conflicts that persist on a national scale, such as that concerning the reintroduction of ‘moral education’, are insoluble because the parties involved, the administrators and the detractors of the System – in this case the Ministry of Education and the teachers’ union – do not accept any hierarchical relationship to one another. Conflicts with the outside world similarly fester, because Japanese groups will not subordinate themselves voluntarily to foreign groups. The Agriculture Ministry and the
nokyo
, tor example, cannot accept liberalisation of their market for the sake of the national interest, just because foreign countries want to balance their imports from Japan with exports to Japan. The logical reasoning that foreigners bring to bear can never succeed in convincing. Such conflict with outsiders is insoluble – unless, of course, the other country adopts the means of the Japanese System and forces recognition of its own more powerful position.

In the Japanese socio-political order conflict is shunned, dismissed, disavowed, denied, exorcised by ritual, but rarely solved. With no tradition of appealing to universal principles and using legal procedures to keep order in society, individuals and groups accept their lot only because a stronger power holds them in place (though subtle acts of sabotage are expected and condoned). In intimate interpersonal relations, such as between mother and child, husband and wife, and boss and junior, psychological manipulation is often substituted for reasoning out one’s attitudes towards each other. Japanese have raised such psychological ‘games’ to a fine art, and it is largely through learning to play them well that the weak manage to assert themselves.

Thus mutual containment among the semi-autonomous components of the System, and order on the lower levels, are finally determined not by reason but by power. They require subordination. There can be no
wa
without hierarchy. Throughout their lives Japanese are constantly reminded of where they stand, ‘up’ or ‘down’, with regard to their relatives, schoolmates, fellow employees and indeed to practically everybody else with whom they come into contact. They are also expected to demonstrate awareness of the rankings of organisations, of whatever kind, through the way they treat their representatives. Social status is the one sphere where they are not conditioned to be comfortable with vagueness.

Hierarchy begins at home, although except in highly placed families the emphasis on ‘younger’ and ‘older’ is much less than it was before the war. But in schools children’s ranks can be recognised by the uniforms or tags they wear, and ranking in the classroom is plain and open. Hierarchy is very important in university sports clubs and cheer-leading societies. It persists even in more relaxed school clubs. Whereas one’s class year seldom matters in United States student clubs, the backbone of Japanese club ties is the hierarchical relationship between seniors and juniors.
²¹
Ranking is even clearer in the salaryman world. When listening to a Japanese talking on the telephone, it is almost always immediately apparent whether he is talking to someone higher or lower in rank. The common notion propagated abroad of egalitarianism within Japanese work groups (Japanese corporate directors eating their lunch in the same cafeteria as the humblest workers being the often cited evidence) is nonsense. Japanese employees must not only adjust their speech to the rank of the person addressed, but must know the appropriate degree to bow. The rank of everyone in an office is usually immediately apparent from the position of desks and the quality of chairs. As one participant observer has remarked: ‘Bosses issue summonses by bellowing across the office; subordinates do not walk to the beckoning, they run.’
²²
When Japanese come out in force to negotiate, one can tell the pecking order at first sight. Rankings are recognised across the borders of the many semi-autonomous groups. Daily life in Japan is rather like a diplomatic cocktail party at which most guests are military attaches.

We have already come across one well-known basic ingredient of Japanese hierarchy: the
oyabun–kobun
(parent-role–child-role) relationship of work gangs in the earlier phase of Japan’s industrialisation that survives today among gangsters, politicians, traditional craftsmen and theatre artists. Similarly coupled roles are those of
sempai
and
kohai
, the senior and junior worker whose mutual relationship is closer than the normal one among colleagues.
²³
In many corporations and government agencies such
sempai–kohai
relationships may grow naturally, but they may also be assigned by superiors, especially in growing firms with a rapidly expanding workforce.

Japanese bureaucratic hierarchy is more hierarchical than the members of most bureaucracies elsewhere would think possible. A middle-ranking official once told me that he liked to smoke a pipe but could never do so at work, since this would give the impression that he thought himself superior to his cigarette-smoking boss. A former Ministry of Finance bureaucrat remembers how another official was transferred because the latter’s child had attained a higher ranking in school than the child of his superior who attended the same class.
²⁴
In apartment blocks for policemen’s families, the ranking of the policeman directly determines the ranking of his wife and children in that fairly self-contained world,
²⁵
reminiscent of military housing assignments in other countries.

The well-known ‘seniority system’ of Japanese companies exists to maintain an unambiguous hierarchy, and a few post-war companies that drew attention by promoting some of their staff in accordance with talent and achievements later had problems with superiors who were ‘too young’ to maintain the normal hierarchic relations with their subordinates.

Formal hierarchic order must be maintained under all circumstances, even when it is widely understood not to correspond to actual power relations. It frequently happens, for example, that the nominal boss of a group does not have the capacity to produce ideas and must rely on an imaginative subordinate to make the decisions. It is essential for good ‘human relations’ in such a case that the boss should know how to use the talents of the latter without making it too obvious. It is also crucial in most cases that talented members should not claim credit for their superior contribution. The members of a well-integrated group consider it normal that leadership should be in the hands of one of their theoretical equals. In some cases, and particularly outside the place of work, hardly any effort is made to maintain the pretence as to who makes decisions, and if no third parties are present talented subordinates may sometimes treat their boss with greater roughness than would ever be acceptable in the West. Yet in public the normal ritual deference to the superior is scrupulously adhered to. This approach enables the group to keep the seniority hierarchy intact. Whereas in most Western situations the gifted, with leadership ability, would rise faster, in Japan they stay longer at lower levels, resulting in the frequently noticed phenomenon of the relatively high degree of initiative taken by the rank and file.

Within established Japanese relationships those who rank high need not, as a general rule, give reasons for what they ask from those beneath them. Seniors must, however, demonstrate that they have the best in mind for juniors. Conversely juniors are not inclined to inquire into the whys and wherefores of instructions they receive, or the manner in which they are treated, but they accept commands so long as their superiors have not damaged their belief in the benevolence of the motives behind them.

Hierarchical order pervades every nook and cranny of Japanese society. The Bank of Japan zealously guards the pecking order among the large banks, to help maintain an easily controllable lending system.
²⁶
We saw in Chapter 5 that the ranking of LDP parliamentarians, mainly measured by the number of times they have been elected, determines which positions they can hold in committees and when they can be appointed minister, regardless of their talents and skills.

A sense of superiority or inferiority is also usually evident in Japanese attitudes towards other nations. Towards ‘models’, first China and later the West, the Japanese have always displayed emotional ambivalence. The notion of a strongly hierarchical world order has exacerbated such feelings. While feeling inferior to their models, the Japanese nevertheless have asserted the basic superiority of their own nation by postulating the familiar mythical notions of a ‘Japanese spirit’.