The cliche is that the Japanese are more cooperative than Westerners
but I don’t quite believe that as stated. For instance early twentieth
century Japanese labor history is rife with conflict and the Japanese
Communist Party considered starting trouble as late as the 1960s. Today in new or surprising situations many Japanese will simply giggle
or get nervous or do nothing rather than helping to solve the problem.
When cooperation breaks down it seems to break down altogether.
In my alternative mental model the Japanese have specialized in
the use of explicit focal points. They reaffirm these focal points repeatedly, to
an extreme, by the use of rituals, particular forms of relational address, and
almost absurd degrees of politeness and apology. When the
focal point is explicit the cooperation works very very well.
But precisely because the Japanese are so good at using explicit
focal points, the culture seems ill-suited to improvising or dealing with
implicit or shifting or ambiguous focal points. When the focal point becomes unclear or is placed in danger, they are not very good at finding a new
one on the spot. That is why the Japanese are either extremely ordered and
cooperative in their behavior or extremely ineffective and chaotic. Of course since a new or unexpected situation creates a dilemma, there are social pressures to avoid such states of affairs. That dynamic strengthens the explicit focal points further, but makes it even harder to change focal points in the longer run.
The idea of a society investing in a particular "technique of cooperation" I find to be a powerful one.
Addendum: This hypothesis may also help explain why the Japanese travel abroad so often in groups. It’s not just a lack of language skills but the group leader also supplies codes of conduct for unfamiliar situations.
This is an interesting idea. But what coordination games are being solved by the rituals accompanying apologies, for example.
Another point: Although there was significant rivalry between the several branches of the US armed services in WWII, it was nothing compared with that between the Japanese army and navy, whose inability to cooperate made US victory much easier than it might have been.
The degree to which the formation of cliques and factions form about charismatic leaders is much greater than in the US. It may seem paradoxical, but I think the reason one sees so few statues of “great men” in Japan is that the factionalism is so divisive, and the status of their leaders so dependent on their direct personal relationships with their faction members, that leaders able to marshal broad-based support — especially through statement of abstract principles to which large numbers of people can subscribe (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) — have been very rare.
Many years ago I had dinner with a music ed prof who had been a high school band director. He had just returned from a trip to Japan to see how their high school band programs worked. He raved about the clean schools, polite students, cases of empty beer bottles outside the teacher’s lounge after lunch, etc.
He also raved about the musical ability of the students. Japanese teaching techniques clearly resulted in superior high school bands.
But there was one curiousity. Part of most competitive band evaluations is “sight reading” where the band and director are given a piece unknown to them, with 5 minutes to review it before playing. When the prof did this with one of the top high school bands in Japan, he said “In each instrument section, every student made exactly the same mistake. In an American band, the mistakes would be distributed randomly.”
On music students, Radiolab had a piece on speakers of tonal languages and found that they had substantially larger numbers of children with perfect pitch, which they concluded was either much more environemental or self selected by speakers.
Michael:
But what coordination games are being solved by the rituals accompanying apologies, for example.
Perhaps it is merely signalling. “I am willing to play expensive games to show you how much like you I am. You can therefore expect that I have a lot invested in this culture, and understand it very well. Be at ease about the predictability of my behavior, even though I just screwed up.”
You could say that learning these elaborate rituals signals my ability to participate in the “real” coordination game, which is the tendency, in a given situation, to act just as any other Japanese person would act.
It is a shame that a young, untrained, non-expert layman linke me is going to be (probably) the first Japanese gentleman (who was born, raised and have been living in Japan for more than 30 years) to leave a comment on this article written by such a terrific writer / honourable economit like Mr. Cohen, and I would deeply apologize to anybody who is even slightly offended by the comment I am going to leave, but, yeah, I like what this guy said: part of me as a Japanese finds it extremely difficult to react when focal points like elder-younger or guest-servant relations are unclear. I’ll start a conversation with a stranger using the most ‘deferential’ honorifics , and tone it down (or cheer it up?) as I know about his/her status relative to me.
But I would not call it ‘explicit’ focal points. Everyone is not so verbal about focal points, and we guess it from the situation around us and adjust ourselves to it. If I understand what is meant by ‘explicit’ and ‘focal points.’
This article reminds me a book written by a Japanese sociologist, Toshio Yamagishi, which compares the cooperational behavior of Japanese groups and American groups and concludes that the former is more ‘individualistic.’ One of his article, in English, can be downloaded from his web site (the page itself was in Japanese, but you can find the link.)
Comparisons of Australians and Japanese on group-based cooperation. Asian Journal of Social Psychology , 8(2), 173-190.
http://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/members/yamagishi/articles/index.cgi?ctg=0
The cliche of a Japanese cooperation culture is overrated. It was glorified by the work of Nakane, Johnson, Wolferen and others who prided themselves on understanding this “mysterious culture,” and picked up by lots of journalists trying to titilate their American audiences.
For a good response, take a look at John Haley’s work on how the lack of lawsuits that culturalists cite as evidence of cooperation is actually a function of Japan’s legal institutions, not any cultural proclivity. Or look at Kohno or Ramseyer’s work on how politics in Japan (and differences between that in America or Europe) is the result of politicians acting on the same basis politicians elsewhere do but under different institutions, not on any cultural procilivity. Or for fun look at http://westfearneon.com/ where the author loves to mock this sort of thing.
And in response to Mr. Ono, the same process of linguistic adjustment during conversation happens in English too, it just seems more obvious in Japanese because words can be formally categorized into politeness/formality level. Ironically, I’ve noted that this process is something that native Japanese (and Koreans) have trouble with in English, missing subtle forms of politeness that native English speakers use.
The point in general is quite true. Japanese cooperation is very impressive when social groups are well-defined, but OTOH Japanese people are arguably less cooperative than Americans in situations where groups are ill-defined. (And in particular in-group vs. out-group situation.)
At the same time, it’s true that American society, like others, have the same sorts of group dynamics, use of different forms of address and other politeness markers, and so on. People’s superiors get treated differently, people use different language and behave differently at work or away. The “rules” just tend to be more informal or less spelled out in the US, in addition to various generalized shifting of rules over the years. Japanese tends to use words for the concepts more often and to explicitly spell out the “correct” behavior, which means that it’s easier to explicitly think about how one behaves.
And yes, New Yorkers and Californians are each in their own ways quite different from Southerners and Midwesterners. Being Southern, my mother automatically knows when to make an offer that you know someone won’t take you up on, and understands the ritual of how both people are supposed to offer to pay for a meal, with the person who really should be paying insisting more strenuously and winning out in the end. Those sorts of things are common in Japanese society as well, but less so in New York. (It made it easier for me to understand certain things in Japanese than my classmates when I was studying the language at Cornell.)
Anecdote from Japanese literature: in the final confrontation from the “Treasury of Loyal Retainers”, when the ronin invade the enemy’s house, the neighbors are roused by the sound of fighting in the night and ask what is going on. After one of the ronin yells back that they’re avenging their master and they promise to take extra care not to kick over any lamps (fire being a big issue in houses built mostly of wood), the neighbors are like, “O.K., then,” and go back to bed, leaving the ronin to slaughter everyone in the house next door.
A friend who has lived in Japan for decades says that meetings in Japan always start with everybody making vague statements as they try to locate the “focal point” of the group. He believes that the Japanese are much more sensitive and made uncomfortable by other people’s emotional discomfort than Americans are, thus the tremendous cultural emphasis on achieving “harmony.”
It would be interesting to identify the polar opposite culture of Japan, a culture of argumentation — perhaps New York City, or possibly Tel Aviv.
To Mr. Cowen and Mr. Rosser: a thousand times of my harakiri would still have a long way to compensate for the deadly mistake I have committed. I apologize.
Hi Dan, I can imagine how embarassing the non-response of the student was to you. There’s more to it: we somehow hate ‘role-playing’ and do now allow someone around us to do that. Putting myself to the mind of students who are told to “ask the girls sitting next to them what colors they like,” it makes perfect sense to remain silent and do nothing, because otherwise I would be teased later by my peers for being “pretentious” (in need of better words to put this feeling in). The lack of a focal point is not between the girl and me; it is rather between the classmates and me.
To Mr. Ono,
Please accept my deep apology for my
inappropriate and defocalizing remarks
(picture deep, improperly executed, bow from me).
George writes that Wolferen and others glorify a “cliche of a Japanese cooperation culture”. I strongly disagree. Karel van Wolferen in his book “The Enigma of Japanese Power” hardly glorifies any aspect of Japanese culture. I believe Wolferen’s analysis/critique of Japanese culture has stood the test of time. I make no defense of Nakane and Johnson.
Sorry for a remote comment because I wonder why nobody referred to the natural theory about Japanese culture.
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