[...]... 132 The Educational System 146 Sports 158 Changing Japanese Culture and Everyday Life 168 Chapter 5: Visions of a New Japan in the Future 179 The Cultural Challenge for Corporate Japan 181 The Cultural Challenge for the Japanese Educational System 186 The Cultural Challenge for Japanese Sports 190 Transforming Japanese Culture in the Future... of the literature is beyond the scope of this book, I will review below what many believe to be some of the classics in the study of Japanese culture, highlighting the considerable similarities in their portrayals of Japan A pivotal episode in the history of Japan that had a great influence on the study of the country and its culture is the Meiji Restoration Prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1862, Japanese... closed off from the rest of the world by the government established by the Tokugawa Shogunate The Meiji Restoration refers to the events in Japanese history that led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the restoration of governmental power by the emperor, who took the name of the Meiji (enlightenment) Emperor.1 With the Meiji Restoration came open trade, exchange of peoples, and the flow of... consistency between Japanese and nonJapanese writers in their understanding of the essential nature of the Japanese culture and individual The popularity of Nitobe’s book in Japan among Japanese laypersons even today also speaks to this World War II stimulated another push to understand Japanese culture, bringing forth Ruth Benedict’s 1946 classic in cultural anthropology, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword Benedict’s... unselfish nature of the Japanese people toward groups 14 Various societies differ greatly in the relative emphasis placed on the individual and the group Certainly no difference is more significant between Japanese and Americans, or Westerners in general, than the greater Japanese tendency to emphasize the group at the expense of the individual… The key Japanese value is harmony, which they seek to achieve... specialists rather than generalists in the business world, the younger generation is moving away from loyalty toward companies and moving toward self-satisfaction and fulfillment in their jobs The same can be said for their concept of marriage; they marry for love, not for the family The older generation lament the deterioration of morality among the young, calling them shin-jinrui (new humans), and... Japanese; they were the ideals that they strove to achieve, and did, and that set them apart from Westerners Another noted Japan scholar, Ivan Morris, wrote a seminal book entitled The Nobility of Failure in which he demonstrated that the Japanese view failure, not success, as heroic, and that this is peculiar to the Japanese Morris understood the tragic side of Japanese culture and used the concept of... which to base their education of the young Thus, education of the young was largely left to mothers in the homes and young new teachers in the public schools Fathers’ absence from home and community greatly contributed to decay in social morals of the young, though it brought about miraculous economic growth to Japan Moral decay in affluent society-Japanese style is what we have now In Japan there is a... on the other hand, others feel safer in total-group consciousness There seems little doubt that the latter group is in the majority Their sphere of 12 living is usually concentrated solely within the village community or place of work (1970, 10) Nakane characterized Japanese social groups as family-like, based on the concept of Japanese ie (house), and pervasive within the private lives of their members... ethical code of the Japanese military class—in bushido—over time they were idealized, ritualized, and institutionalized to become part and parcel of the Japanese cultural landscape As such, a fairly homogeneous picture of Japanese culture and society emerged, and many Japanese cultural practices in religion, art, music and dance, and other cultural rituals and artifacts were exported around the world as . Visions of a New Japan in the Future 179 The Cultural Challenge for Corporate Japan 181 The Cultural Challenge for the Japanese Educational System 186 The Cultural Challenge for Japanese Sports. dm@sfsu.edu for further information about his research and the contents of this book. NEW J A P A N THE D A VID M A TSUMOTO Debunking Seven Cultural Stereotypes First published by Intercultural Press Japan in the twenty-first century, the harmonic creation of what Matsumoto calls “individualistic collectivism.” This is a ground-break- The New Japan: Debunking Praise for Seven Cultural Stereotypes ing