Yasuhiro Atsumi | What I want you to know about Japan

This year is the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Japan and Jamaica. I am delighted to be a part of that celebration as ambassador of Japan to Jamaica. As one of the events to celebrate the anniversary, recently I gave a lecture at The University of the West Indies, Mona, on Japanese culture and society. This article captures the essence of what I spoke there.

I personally believe that Japanese people are really unique in the world. Even a famous international political scholar, Professor Samuel Huntington, asserted in the book The Clash of Civilizations of 1993 that there are eight civilizations in the world, namely, Western civilization, Slavic and Greek Orthodox civilization, Latin American civilization, Islamic civilization, Hindu civilization, African civilization, Confucian civilization, Japanese civilization. He indicated that Japan is the only country in the world to form one civilization by just one country. Amazing!

Before I move on to what are unique about Japan, let me tell you an interesting story about who the Japanese people are. You may think that Japan is a mono-ethnic nation. But it is not! The Japanese are a mixture of two peoples, namely, the Jomon people and the Yayoi people. The Jomon people are an indigenous people, who lived in Japan since at least 50,000 years ago.

The Yayoi people first came to Japan around the third century BC from the Chinese continent. They brought rice cultivation technology to Japan. They were a little bit different in appearances. They were slightly taller and had a flatter face than the Jomon people. This mixture has progressed almost 100 per cent to the point where we can now almost say that Japan is a single ethnic people. The Jomon people had a hunter-gathering culture. They had an equal society. They lived in harmony with forests. In Jamaica, you always tell me that “out of many, one nation”. I should say that in Japan, “out of two peoples, one nation”!

CHARACTERISTICS

The characteristics of Japanese society have been described in several ways, such as collectivism, a vertical society, and a society of shame. But in short, the essence of Japanese society can be summed up in one phrase: “a human-relationship society”. which was claimed by sociologist Professor Gregory Clark.

The term, “the human-relationship society”, may sound unclear and ambiguous, but it is a society in which groups and communities are formed based on the direct and raw contacts between human beings. This type of relationship has become the most important thing in each person’s life, and the most solid bond is the relationship of direct raw contacts between individuals.

The raw relationship is those using the five senses, such as seeing each other’s faces, hearing each other’s voices, speaking to each other and skin-to-skin contacts. However, you would argue that all societies are human-relationship societies because human relationships are always present in any society, as long as it is called a society. But in fact, there are societies in the world where the other type of relationship is more important than the raw contacts between human-beings.

That is “the principle-relationship society”, where human relationship is based on some objective principles. One of the examples of the principles is ideology. A group is formed when adherents of the same ideology come together. Religion is another principle. People of the same religion come together.

Then, there are groups based on laws and contracts, Also, there are groups of people who share the same blood, meaning families and relatives. Blood is really another objective principle. Such a society based on principles is called “the principle-relationship society”. It seeks its identity in abstract and objective principles. It is a society where you are anxious and insecure unless you are connected to someone by these principles. There, you do not really care whether you are next to someone with whom you can see each other and speak to each other.

In fact, according to Professor Clark, most countries other than Japan are classified as the principle-relationship society. All Western countries are such societies. So are China, Korea, and India. How about Jamaica? I should dare to say that Jamaica is a principle-relationship society due to its past history of Western influences, such as Spanish, British and American.

Delivering from this two-type model of society classification, namely, the human-relationship society, and the principle-relationship society, we can differentiate other types of society classification as well. The human-relationship society, such as Japan, is the society based on “groups by place”, while the principle-relationship society, such as Western countries, is the society based on “groups by qualification”. A qualification is the same as a principle, such as an ideology, a religion, a profession, and a hobby.

ANOTHER CONTRAST

Another contrast between the human-relationship society and the principle-relationship society is that Japan is a “shame society”, whereas the West is a “sin society”. In a society of shame, people judge you whether you do something good or bad in the eyes of others. If you do something bad for the eyes of others, it is a source of shame. If nobody is watching you, you do not feel shame at all! The West is a sin society. There, the people judge whether something is right or wrong before God. Breaking a principle or a contract is wrong before God, and that is a sin. It does not matter whether other people are watching you or not. God is always above you and watching you always.

The society of shame is, to put it differently, a “moral society”. Morality means that you do this because everyone else does so, and you should not do that because others say to you that you should not do that. In this sense, morality is not an absolute standard, but it is a relative standard. If the values of the society changes, the standard of right and wrong will also change accordingly.

A moral society is a society where individuals are easily influenced by the overall mood of the society, and people can learn from the examples of others. In contrast, a sin society is a “religious society”. Religious teachings are unique, inviolable, and unchanging. No matter how much the society changes, the principles of religion remain absolutely unchanged. People act according to absolute standards. An indication that Japanese people do not adhere to the principles of religion is the fact that Japan has a considerable number of religions, including Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and “eight million Gods.” A Japanese person can be involved in more than one religion at the same time, and he/she does not even realise it.

You may wonder why only Japan is a society of human-relationships rather than a society of principles. The first thing to consider is that any human society always starts out as a society of human-relationships. Primitive societies everywhere began as human-relationship societies. They had only skin-to-skin raw contact relationships without any religions, ideologies, nor any other principles, whatsoever. However, Professor Clark explains that all countries except Japan have since shifted to a society of principle relationships.

One of the main reasons why Japan has remained unchanged as a society of human-relationship is, he claims, until recently Japan had never experienced a large-scale longterm war or threat from a foreign power. When it comes to waging a war, it is necessary for the leaders to explain to the people that there is justice on our side to mobilise the whole nation. But in order to make such an explanation, you need some universal values, such as an ideology or a religion. We can witness these examples in the Holy War by the Muslims or the US-Soviet Cold War. The more foreign wars and threats we experience, the more we need religions and ideologies, thus that society turns into a society of principle relationships.

HUMAN-RELATIONSHIP SOCIETY

Until recently, Japan had never experienced a real threat or a war, and Japan has been lucky enough to remain to be a human-relationship society. However, there were two exceptions. The first one was the so-called Genko, when the Mongolian invaders attacked Japan from China twice at the 13th century. Thanks to a typhoon on both occasions, the invasions ended without success. The second one was during the time of the Meiji Restoration. An American admiral Perry came to Japan with a black ship in 1853 and forced Japan to open ports. The leaders at that time felt that they must quickly make Japan a modern state on par with the West. The need to unite the country against these threats with a strong military and industrialization suddenly arose, and Japan actually took such actions. And then, Japan experienced the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. During this time, Japan shifted toward a society of principle relationships. But, with the defeat of the Second World War in 1945, the Japanese people suffered a terrible shock, and they instinctively returned again toward the human-relationship society of the pre-Meiji period. The 90 years between 1853 and 1945 were too short a period for principles, such as an ideology, to take root in Japan. In Europe, it takes about 500-1,000 years for an ideology to take root.

By the way, Professor Clark could not find another example of the human-relationship society other than Japan. But he believes that the Minoan civilization of Crete in Greece was another old example. So rare is a human-relationship society!

What are the advantages of the Japanese people because of the fact that they have a human-relationship society and how can they contribute to the world? The Japanese are good at managing human relations well. So, they are naturally good at “harmonising” and “tuning” human relations rather than making them confrontational. Therefore, to put it simply, I believe that Japan can contribute to the world with the spirit of “harmony.” The spirit of harmony has been the core of Japanese culture and society since Prince Shotoku-Taishi, a famous leading politician in the 5th～6th centuries, declared his philosophy of harmony, saying “Cherish the harmony among people!”

Japan is a country of harmony, no matter how you look at it! Harmony is called wa in Japanese. The word wa refers to the country of Japan itself in Japanese, while yo refers to the West. For example, Japanese cuisines are called wa-shoku, while the Western cuisines are called yo-shoku. As you may know, Japan’s national flag is called hino-maru in Japanese, meaning the disk of the sun. Maru means a circle, which symbolises harmony. Furthermore, Japan’s currency is the yen, which means a circle in Japanese, again symbolising harmony.

There are at least three types of contributions that Japan can make as a country of harmony. The first one is harmony between countries, namely, pacifism. The present Japanese Constitution, which was declared just after the Second World War, is truly a unique pacifism constitution. It stipulates abandonment of wars. Japanese people are obsessed with this principle of pacifism, due to the fact that Japan is the only country in the world to have experienced atomic bombings. It is important for Japan to hold this flag high and contribute to peace in the world.

HARMONY

Then, the second one is the harmony between individuals. I mentioned earlier that the Japanese people have been created through a mixture of the Jomon people and the Yayoi people. When the Yayoi people came to Japan, there naturally must have been fierce conflicts between the two different peoples. But the lesson they leant with Shotoku-Taishi’s teachings, was that harmony was the most important thing for the two peoples to coexist in the small Japanese archipelago. The Japanese people have been working in harmony ever since, and I dare to say that Japanese people are truly the best in the world at harmony! The Japanese are good at the art of working out complex and delicate human relationships. I am wondering if Japan could appeal to the world by exporting such a unique culture of harmony of the human-relationships society, which is almost exclusively found in Japan.

The third type of harmony is the harmony between humans and natures. In other words, global environmental issues. Japan should lead the world in this climate change issues. One reason for this is that the blood of the Jomon people, who lived in forests and lives in harmony with forests for thousands of years, runs in the Japanese people’s veins right up to the present day. If you look at Japanese cultures, such as Japanese gardens and haikus, humans are a part of the nature, and you cannot separate humans from the nature at all. I believe that this comes from the memory of the Jomon people, who lived in harmony with forests for thousands of years. Japan should have a particularly important role to play in the climate change issues.

You may think that Japan’s economic power has been relatively declining for the past 30 years. However, besides economy, Japan has so many other powers to contribute to the world culturally, socially, and politically. Some of those powers come from the spirit of harmony of the human-relationship society.

Yasuhiro Atsumi is Japanese ambassador to Jamaica. The views expressed on this column do not represent the views of the Government of Japan.