Nihonjinron

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

The term nihonjinron (日本人論) literally means "theories/discussions about the Japanese" and refers to a large number of texts, ranging over such varied fields as sociology, psychology, history, linguistics, philosophy,and even science, published predominantly in Japan by Japanese, though noted examples of the genre have also been penned by foreign scholars, journalists and residents. The term came into vogue in the post-war period to describe books and articles that aim to analyze, explain or divagate on the putative peculiarities of Japanese culture and mentality, above all by comparison with foreign countries, especially Europe and the United States, though Asian countries increasingly figure in recent works. Such texts share a general vision of Japan (outlined below), and the term nihonjinron can be employed to refer to this outlook. One may also speak of books written by non-Japanese authors as nihonjinron in so far as they share, contribute to or reflect the vision, premises and perspectives characteristic of the Japanese genre.

Nihonjinron is the most frequently used term, being generic. A variety of topical terms are also current that classify the many sub-genres of nihonjinron according to specific theme or subject-matter. For example;

  • shinfūdoron (新風土論): "new theories on climate" (implying the influence of climate on peoples)
  • nihonbunkaron (日本文化論): "theories of Japanese culture"
  • nihonshakairon (日本社会論): "theories on Japanese society"
  • nihonron (日本論): "theories about Japan"
  • nihonkeizairon (日本経済論) "theories about the Japanese economy"

Contents

[edit] Types of Nihonjinron

According to a survey conducted by Nomura Research Institute (野村総合研究所), 698 books on nihonjinron had been published in Japan between 1946 and 1978. Their breakdown of the major themes of nihonjinron is as follows:

  • General books:
    • Nihonjinron written by philosophers -- 5.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by literary/dramatic authors -- 4.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by social/cultural anthropologists -- 4.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by historians and minzokugaku (folklore, 民俗学) scholars -- 4.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by economists, political scientists, and legal scholars -- 4.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by natural scientists -- 4.0%
    • Nihonjinron written by linguists and literary scholars -- 3.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by diplomats, social critics, and journalists -- 3.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by psychologists -- 3.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by foreign scholars -- 4.0%
    • Nihonjinron written by foreign journalists -- 5.5%
    • Nihonjinron written by other foreigners -- 7.0%
    • Others -- 5.5%
  • Investigative reports:
    • General theories on national characters -- 7.0%
    • Surveys on desire and satisfaction -- 3.5%
    • Attitude surveys on work ethics -- 4.0%
    • Attitude surveys on saving -- 4.0%
    • Other generic attitude surveys -- 6.5%
    • Time-budget surveys -- 3.5%
    • Survey on foreigners' view on Japanese economic activities -- 6.5%
    • Overseas opinion researches on Japan -- 4.5%

[edit] History

Japanese society experienced constant, rapid and massive changes throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, from the closed society of the Edo period to Meiji era Westernization and colonialism, to the slightly more 'liberal' society of the Taisho period, a return to militarism, defeat, renewed Westernization during the years, and then the great leap forward to global industrial and economic powerhouse until the crisis of the 1990s. The frequency of transitional upheaval engendered a remarkable intensity of debate about national directions, whose complexity over time renders a synthetic judgement or bird's-eye view of the literature in question rather difficult. A major controversy surrounds the question regarding the affiliation of the post-war nihonjinron theories with the prewar conceptualisation of Japanese cultural uniqueness. To what degree, that is, are these meditations under democracy on Japanese uniqueness innocent reflections of a popular search for identity, and in what measure, if any, do they pick up from the instrumental ideology of Japaneseness developed by government and nationalists in the prewar period to harnass the energies of the nation towards industrialisation and global imperium?

Some scholars cite the destruction of many Japanese national symbols and the psychological blow of defeat at the end of World War II as one source of nihonjinron's enduring popularity, although it is not a uniquely 20th century phenomenon. In fact the genre is simply the Japanese reflex of cultural nationalism, which is a property of all modern nations. The trend of the tone of nihonjinron argument is often reflective of the Japanese society at the time. Peter Dale, covering the period analysed by the Nomura survey, distinguished three major phrases in the development of post-war nihonjinron discourse:

  • First phase (1945-1960): Dominance of the Western model with a concomitant repudiation of Japanese specificity.
  • Second phase (1960-1970): Recognition of historical relativity, of certain defects in Western industrial society, and certain merits in Japanese traditions, as they are re-engineered in Japanese modernization.
  • Third phase (1970-?): Recognition of Japanese specificity as a positive model for a uniquely Japanese road towards modernity and its global outreach.(Dale 1986:213)

Tamotsu Aoki subsequently finessed the pattern by distinguishing four major phases in the post war identity discourse (Aoki 1990 p.29) In Dale's proposal, this drift from negative uniqueness to positive evaluation of uniqueness is a cyclical trend, since he believes the same pattern can be detected in the literature on identity for the period from 1867 to 1945, from early Meiji times down to the end of World War Two. Nihonjinron, in Dale's view, recycle prewar Japanese nationalist rhetoric, and betray similar ends. For Aoki, contrariwise, they are natural movements in a national temper which seeks, as has been the case with other nations, its own distinctive path of cultural autonomy and social organisation as Japan adapts itself to the global world order forged by the West.

During the early post-war period, most of nihonjinron discourses discussed the uniqueness of the Japanese in a rather negative, critical light. The elements of feudalism reminiscent of the Imperial Japan were all castigated as major obstacles to Japan's reestablishment as a new democratic nation. Scholars such as Hisao Otsuka (大塚久男), a Weberian sociologist, judged Japan with the measure of rational individualism and liberal democracy that were considered ideals in the U.S. and western European nations back then (Sugimoto & Mouer, pp. 70-71). Nihonjinron books written during the period of high economic growth up to the bubble burst in the early 1990s, in contrast, argued various unique features of the Japanese as more positive features.

[edit] Nihonjinron as cultural nationalism

Scholars such as Peter N. Dale (1986), Harumi Befu (1987), and Kosaku Yoshino (1992) view nihonjinron more critically, identifying it as a tool for enforcing social and political conformity. Dale, for example, characterizes nihonjinron as follows:

"First, they implicitly assume that the Japanese constitute a culturally and socially homogeneous racial entity, whose essence is virtually unchanged from prehistoric times down to the present day. Secondly, they presuppose that the Japanese differ radically from all other known peoples. Thirdly, they are conspicuously nationalistic, displaying a conceptual and procedural hostility to any mode of analysis which might be seen to derive from external, non-Japanese sources. In a general sense then, nihonjinron may be defined as works of cultural nationalism concerned with ostensible 'uniqueness' of Japan in any aspect, and which are hostile to both individual experience and the notion of internal socio-historical diversity." [1]

The emphasis on in-group unity in nihonjinron writings, and its popularization during Japan's period of military expansion at the turn of the 20th century, has led many Western critics to brand it a form of ethnocentric nationalism. Karel van Wolferen echoes this assessment, noting that:

In the nihonjinron perspective, Japanese limit their actions, do not claim 'rights' and always obey those placed above them, not because they have no other choice, but because it comes naturally to them. Japanese are portrayed as if born with a special quality of brain that makes them want to suppress their individual selves. [2]

As Japan is often deemed to be "almost as unique as its people like to think" (Pearl Buck, qtd. In Dale 1986:26) so too the Japanese people are considered not just unique but, in the words of Sugimoto and Mouer, "more unique than other societies." [3]

[edit] Nihonjinron as pseudoscience

This section does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
This article has been tagged since March 2007.

Racialist modes of thinking predominate in many types of nihonjinron writings, with some writers citing dubious "scientific" findings as justification for a variety of social practices or political policies that are identified as being "inherently Japanese". [4] Examples include:

  • Japanese people have different brains from Westerners and hence cannot pronounce "r" and "l" correctly.[citation needed] Consistent with depictions of the Japanese race and Japanese nation as indistinguishable, this suggestion ignores the example of Japanese youth growing up outside of Japan speaking another language, who display no discernible difficulty.
  • Because of the unique properties of their language, the Japanese people have brain patterns that differ from those of most other people in the world. Whereas vowels and consonants are processed respectively in the right and left hemispheres of 'Western' brains, for example, it is argued that the 'Japanese' brain processes both sounds in the left hemisphere. [1]
  • Japan is the only country with four distinct seasons, and Japanese people thus have a unique connection with nature. Technically Japanese climate can be viewed as marked rather by two seasons.[citation needed] The four seasons celebrated in the nihonjinron reflect a division inherited from canonical distinctions in Chinese poetry.
  • Only the Japanese language has words for various subtle emotions and shades of colors. These cannot be expressed in Western languages.[citation needed] This suggestion ignores the fact that the Japanese language itself has an adjective, aoi, that covers the whole length of the spectrum that would be divided into "green" and "blue" according to a native speaker of English. A lexical gap (lacuna) is a common phenomenon when comparing languages and is not unique to the Japanese language.
  • Only the Japanese consider the spectrum of visible light (and hence, a rainbow) to be divisible into seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Many Japanese people hold an inexplicable belief that the English language does not have words to distinguish either blue and indigo or indigo and violet, and that native speakers of English divide the rainbow into only six colors.

Cultural critics note[citation needed] that supposed aspects of Japanese culture, such as the widely-reported used-panty vending machines, function as a sort of meme in the West, repeated over and over long after the phenomenon has disappeared. Perhaps the best final word on this topic was stated more than a hundred years ago, by Oscar Wilde: "The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them."[citation needed]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Shepherd, Gregory. Music of Japan Today: Tradition and Innovation. Retrieved on March 25, 2006.
  2. ^ Caron, Bruce. 17 Nihonjinron. Retrieved on March 25, 2006.
  3. ^ Tominaga, Masatoshi. Globalization and Japanese animation: Ethnography of American college students. Retrieved on March 25, 2006.
  4. ^ Caron, Bruce. 17 Nihonjinron. Retrieved on March 25, 2006.

[edit] Major Nihonjinron literature

  • Kuki, Shûzô (九鬼周造). 1930. 「いき」の構造 English tr. An Essay on Japanese Taste: The Structure of 'Iki'. John Clark; Sydney, Power Publications, 1996.
  • Watsuji, Tetsurô (和辻哲郞). 1935. Fûdo (風土). Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten. trans. Geoffrey Bownas, as Climate. Unesco 1962.
  • Japanese Ministry of Education (文部省). 1937. 國體の本義 (Kokutai no hongi). tr. as Kokutai no hongi. Cardinal principles of the national entity of Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1949.
  • Nishida, Kitarô (西田幾多郞). 1940. 日本文化の問題 (Nihon Bunka no mondai). Tokyo.
  • Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Houghton Mifflin, Boston
  • Herrigel, Eugen. 1948. Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens, = 1953 Zen in the Art of Archery. New York, NY. Pantheon Books.
  • Nakane, Chie (中根千枝). 1967. タテ社会の人間関係 (Human relations in a vertical society) English tr Japanese Society, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,London, UK, 1970.
  • Mishima, Yukio (三島由紀夫). 1969. Bunka Bôeiron (文化防衛論, A Defense of Culture). Tokyo, Japan: Shinchôsha.
  • Doi, Takeo. 1971. 「甘え」の構造 (The Structure of 'Amae'). Tokyo, Japan: Kôdansha. trans.The Anatomy of Dependence Kodansha, Tokyo 1974
  • Singer, Kurt. 1973 Mirror, Sword and Jewel. Croom Helm, London
  • Izaya Ben-Dasan, (‘translated’ by Yamamoto Shichihei:山本七平) 1972 Nihonkyô ni tsuite (日本教について), Tokyo, Bungei Shunjû
  • Vogel, Ezra F. 1978. Japan As Number One: Lessons for America.. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
  • Reischauer, Edwin O. 1978. The Japanese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
  • Tsunoda, Tadanobu (角田忠信). 1978. Nihonjin no Nô (日本人の脳―脳の働きと東西の文化, The Japanese brain). Tokyo, Japan: Taishûkan Shoten (大修館書店) ISBN 4-469-21068-4.
  • Murakami, Yasusuke (村上泰亮), Kumon Shunpei (公文俊平), Satô Seizaburô (佐藤誠三郎). 1979. The 'Ie' Society as a Civilization (文明としてのイエ社会) Tokyo, Japan: Chûô Kôronsha.
  • Berque, Augustin 1986. Le sauvage et l'artifice: Les Japonais devant la nature. Gallimard, Paris.
  • Takie Sugiyama Lebra 2004 The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic, University of Hawai’I Press, Honolulu

[edit] Critical Bibliography

  • Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword : Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
  • Amino, Yoshihiko (網野善彦). 1978 Muen, kugai, raku: Nihon chûsei no jiyû to heiwa (無縁・公界・楽. 日本中世の自由と平和:Muen, kugai, raku: Peace and freedom in medieval Japan), Tokyo, Heibonsha
  • Nomura Research Institute. 1979. Sengo Nihonjinron Nenpyô (戦後日本人論年表, Chronology of post-war Nihonjinron). Tokyo, Japan: Nomura Research Institute.
  • Minami Hiroshi(南博) 1980 Nihonjinron no keifu (日本人論の系譜) Tokyo, Kôdansha.
  • Sugimoto, Yoshio (杉本良夫) and Mouer, Ross.(eds.) 1982 Nihonjinron ni kansuru 12 shô (日本人論に関する12章) Tokyo, Gakuyô Shobô
  • Sugimoto, Yoshio and Mouer, Ross. 1982 Nihonjin wa 「Nihonteki」ka (日本人は「日本的」か) Tokyo, Tôyô Keizai Shinpôsha
  • Kawamura, Nozomu (河村望) 1982 Nihonbunkaron no Shûhen (日本文化論の周辺, The Ambiance of Japanese Culture Theory), Tokyo: Ningen no Kagakusha
  • Sugimoto, Yoshio (杉本良夫)1983 Chô-kanri rettô Nippon (超管理ニッボン, Nippon.The Hyper-Control Archipelago) Tokyo, Kôbunsha.
  • Gill, Robin 1984Omoshiro Hikaku-bunka-kô, (おもしろ比較文化考) Tokyo, Kirihara Shoten.
  • Gill, Robin 1985 Han-nihonjinron ((反日本人論)) Tokyo , Kôsakusha.
  • Gill, Robin 1985 Nihonjinron Tanken (日本人論探険) Tokyo, TBS Britannica.
  • Mouer, Ross & Sugimoto, Yoshio, Images of Japanese Society, London: Routledge, 1986
  • Dale, Peter N. 1986. The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness Oxford, London. Nissan Institute, Croom Helm.
  • Berque, Augustin. 1986 Le sauvage et l'artifice: Les Japonais devant la nature. Paris, Gallimard.
  • Befu, Harumi 1987 Ideorogî toshite no nihonbunkaron (イデオロギーとしての日本人論, Nihonjinron as an ideology). Tokyo, Japan: Shisô no Kagakusha.
  • Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela 1988 Das Ende der Exotik Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp
  • Aoki Tamotsu(青木保) Bunka no hiteisei 1988 (文化の否定性) Tokyo, Chûô Kôronsha
  • Van Wolferen, Karel. 1989. The Enigma of Japanese power. Westminster, MD: Knopf.
  • Sugimoto, Yoshio & Ross Mouer (eds.) 1989 Constructs for Understanding Japan, Kegan Paul International, London and New York.
  • Amino Yoshihiko, Nihonron no shiza (日本論の視座) Tokyo, Shôgakkan
  • Aoki, Tamotsu (青木保) 1990. 'Nihonbunkaron' no Hen'yô (「日本文化論」の変容, Phases of Theories of Japanese Culture in transition). Tokyo, Japan: Chûô Kôron Shinsha.
  • Yoshino, Kosaku. 1992. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry. London, UK: Routledge.
  • Sugimoto Yoshio (杉本良夫) 1993 Nihonjin o yameru hôhô, Tokyo, Chikuma Bunko.
  • Dale, Peter N. 1994 'Nipponologies (Nihon-ron.Nihon-shugi' in Augustin Berque (ed.) Dictionnaire de la civilisation japonaise. Hazan, Paris pp.355-6.
  • Sugimoto, Yoshio and Mouer, Ross. 1995. Nihonjinron no Hôteishiki (日本人論の方程式, the Equation of Nihonjinron). Tokyo, Japan: Chikuma Shobô
  • Mazzei, Franco, 1997. Japanese Particularism and the Crisis of Western Modernity, Università Ca' Foscari,Venice.
  • Burns, Susan L., 2003 Before the Nation - Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan, Duke University Press, Durham, London.
  • Gill, Robin 2004 Orientalism & Occidentalism Florida, Paraverse Press.

[edit] Internet

[edit] Examples of Nihonjinron thinking

  • Morimoto, Tetsurō (森本哲朗) Nihongo Omote to Ura (日本語表と裏) ("Japanese inside and outside") ISBN 4-10-107311-2. (An example of Nihonjinron-style beliefs, its author claims that, for example, of all the countries in the world, only Japan has four distinct seasons, and that the Japanese language is uniquely vague.)

[edit] See also

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../n/i/h/Nihonjinron.html"
In other languages