For many years closed in its own cocoon, making it easy for the world to tell stories about it, Japan is often a source of myths and misconception. After severing contacts with Portuguese merchants and reducing Dutch influence to the artificial island of Dejima, Japan went back to its own course, to its own way of living, amidst elite fears of a spreading Christianity (but not of colonization).
Japan’s own culture, however, survived in an ever increasingly globalized world. Until now. It is easy for a foreigner to feel thrilled and amazed at Japan. It is, after all, the high-tech country by definition, the proud land of the rising sun, the country with a unique sense of ethics. But the myths and misconceptions should be closely revised. It is true that, in Japan, people are as nice as it gets. Being courteous is not a way of behaving, but the only way of socializing. How customers are dealt with in a shop, for example, has no relation to the European attitude. In Japan, the customer receives a smile, is always right. He or she is king or queen in the high-profile shops as in the grocery shop around the corner.
Being corteous is, foremost, a way of social behaviour in the country. So important is it that the language comprises different levels of courtesy. And this courtesy is co-related to the social hierarchy. As a teacher, one should address one’s superiors with a specific vocabulary, different from the one to be used while addressing one’s students.
Many wonder if all these good manners are truly honest or not. It is often said about Japanese that one never knows their true emotions. And that much is true. While Japanese can be seen crying as any normal human being, in daily life and dealing with the normal everyday things, Japanese do not show their emotions as most Westerners would. Albeit absolutely frustrated with his job, the worker will perform to the best of its abilities (while in the West one falls into a clearly depressive state). It is abnegation versus fulfillment. It is the good for the whole versus the best for the individual.
Nowadays, Japan is out of its cocoon while remaining inside. It is out there. It is hip. If Japanese metropolises like Tokyo or Osaka may differ in many aspects from the rest of the country, it is still possible to see how fashionable men and women are outside these cities. Side by side in the streets walk fully decorated goths, office clerks wearing knee-high stockings, young teenagers in school uniforms, typical salary men with plucked eyebrows and ladies clad in traditional kimonos.
Many of them will reputedly be wearing high-end clothing labels from head to toe, in a show of near-obsession for the way of dressing common in Japan. It is the combination of a sense for fashion and what foreign trends have to offer with the importance of appearance and perfection in this culture.
In many ways, Japan became really American, after the occupation following the war. Or maybe not. While, metaphorically speaking, it is a fact that football is called soccer, Japan has embedded the international trends in its culture, creating something new out of it and, above all, making these trends extreme, turning them into features unique in the world.
As extreme and unique as Japan’s seeming ability to produce the biggest, most original high-technology items and item inventors. New technologies reach Japan first, and any shop around the city will always carry the latest in computer or home cinema technologies utilities. Any school will have an automatic pencil sharpener or a machine to wash clean blackboard erasers from chalk dust. Japan brings alien features in, expanding its cocoon to enclose them, making them Japanese. In a fiercely competitive world, however, is that enough?
Japan will surely survive as it is in the ever more globalized world we live in. And more foreign ideas or experts are all but needed. Japan needs not a change in its culture but the self-realization of how buried in red-tape it is and how easy it could be to get rid of it. But – and here is the million dollar question – how can it burn all the paperwork without endangering the premise of “a job for everyone”. Solutions are sought for as you read.
* Gaijokujin is the Japanese word for "a person from outside the country" - Ângelo is one.
<< Home