Finished viewing A Wall of Silence, we discussed it. The costs of Nationalism, a new kind of tribalism.

JAPAN AS A NATION STATE

Japan was actually historically a traditional empire, but very easily became a nation-state and subject to nationalism in the late 19th Century after the Meiji Restoration.

1. BIRTH OR NATION
   1. Japanese all claim common descent from the same ancestors. There is one indigenous, pre-Japanese people in the north, the Ainu, who are physically distinct. There is also a large Korean minority who are looked down upon. The Japanese are highly ethnocentric, and the more extreme nationalists among them hold racist attitudes about their presumed superiority.
      
      
2. SOME KEY SYMBOLS IN JAPANESE CULTURE THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THEIR NATIONAL IDENTITY:
   
   
   1. FATHERS, TEACHERS, BOSSES AS BENEFACTO
      
      According to Confucian values these authority figures must be benevolent and just. Note that parents never physically punish children; teachers never flunk pupils, and bosses never fire permanent workers
      
      Grandfather figures are esp. revered in popular media (gangster movies, etc.). The emperor is esp. highly revered. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who had spent the Second World War years interviewing Japanese prisoners of war, and looking at other sources to study Japanese culture, advised the US government before the Japanese surrender in 1945. We officially insisted on unconditional surrender. That means, in effect, conquest. Benedict said that our tasks would be greatly easier if we kept the emperor and did not abolish the monarchy. The US secretly let the Japanese government know beforehand that the monarchy would be preserved, so in effect the surrender was not unconditional after all. The occupation authorities ruled through the emperor and in fact the transformation of Japan on democratic lines was made much easier. The emperor was and is the supreme symbol of the Japanese nation.
      
      
   2. THE IE. OR JAPANESE STEM FAMILY
      
      See the definition of the stem family household on p. 427. See the diagram of the Irish open peasant case on p. 408, Fig. 16.3. In the Japanese countryside this is THE form of household. Families keep the name and the ancestral home intact for centuries. One heir, usually the eldest son, inherits, and brings in a woman to marry and help him procreate the household name. If there is no son, then the parents adopt a son-in-law and in effect a daughter continues the line. If there are NO children, then the parents adopt a man and make him the heir to the family name. The name is more important than kinship or lineage.
      
      The main difference from the Irish and general European case is that where there is enough land or other resources, the household head or grandfather figure sets up his other sons on the land in junior households. This pattern continues in the corporate industrial world with the creation of subsidiary or junior firms staffed by managers not promoted to the very top ranks in the home company. They all become groups or families of firms.
      
      
3. MYTHS OF JAPANESE NATIONALISM
   
   
   1. First is the imperial dynasty itself, the longest lived dynasty ever recorded. This is so because during the thousands of years the emperors have supposed to represent the one imperial family name, most of the time they have not ruled themselves, but have been figureheads for military figures and petty dynasties that rule in the imperial name. This is the world's climax form of the stem family.
      
      
   2. Second is the transposition of nationalist competition from open warfare and conquest (during and before World War II) to the postwar emphasis on economic expansion and the development of superior industrial firms. Industrial growth as "struggle" and the perfection of better products, rather than simply profit-making enterprises is certainly one myth that holds Japan together.
      
      

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Thursday, Dec. 2, 1999

Note: Required Reading Is Hamada, Entire (But Not Necessarily The Appendix)

Introduction: Modernity In Japan

• Japanese Factory Industrialism
• Price-Regulated Market
• Japanese Corporate Legal-Rational Bureaucracy
• Japanese Modern Metropolis

Questions:

• How Are The Same Patterns Repeated From One Japanese Institution To Another?
• How Can A Society Have Such Patterns And Still Function?
• How Do These Patterns Relate To Values? See Meiji Imperial Prescript On Education (P.509);

Values, The Ie Or Stem Family, And Exam System

• Diagram of Educational System (P. 500)
• The Ie (Corporate Stem-Family Household And/Or Family Firm) And Modernity
• Fig. 16.3 (P. 408)

How do friendship cliques and formal associations act as institutional shock absorbers and substitute Rites Of Passage in Japan? And how do these relate to Protest Movements?