Anthropological accounts of Japanese society until the early 1980s were fo- ... Japan's ability to be successful economically while retaining social cohesion.
Japan aktuell 3/2006
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Debatte New Research Trends in the Anthropology and Sociology of Japan Roger Goodman
Anthropology and sociology share common intellectual antecedents in much the same way as do Judaism and Christianity. Both are essentially about the relationship between individuals and society, depending on how each of these is defined at any particular place or time. Anthropological accounts of Japanese society until the early 1980s were focussed on community studies; sociological ones on examining the reasons for Japan’s ability to be successful economically while retaining social cohesion. Themes that dominated were ideas of harmony, consensus, the group, loyalty, duty, the ‘kin-tract’, dependency, homogeneity and contextual ethical systems. The assumption was generally that these ideas had existed in Japan since time immemorial and that they were particularly suited to the development of a Japanese form of economic capitalism. Classic works of this genre on the anthropological side were produced by Ruth Benedict, Nakane Chie, Doi Takeo, and on the sociological side by Robert Bellah, Robert Cole and James Abegglen. The work that most effectively combined the two disciplines, however, was Ezra Vogel’s, Japan as Number One, first published in 1979. In classical social scientific terms, these works were essentialist, functionalist and ahistorical and followed in the tradition of Emile Durkheim in that they focussed on the way that society – defined in terms of ‘culture’ or ‘history’ – determined and constrained human action. The early 1980s saw a serious questioning of this dominant model of Japanese society by sociologists such as Sugimoto Yoshio and Yoshino Kosaku and anthropologists such as Befu Harumi and Aoki Tamotsu as well as intellectual historians like Peter Dale. Rather than accepting the ideas of Japanese society described above as somehow ‘natural’, they suggested that they constituted an ideological construction which has been developed and were manipulated by those who controlled economic and political power in Japanese society. They labelled this
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ideology ‘Nihonjinron’ and in a series of critiques tried to show where these ideas had come from and how they had been used. While their works were strong on the production of Nihonjinron accounts – and particularly thought-provoking in the idea that works such as those produced by Nakane and Doi did more to construct Japanese culture than to explain it – they rarely addressed the issue of the consumption of these images. Or, to put it another way: why did the members of the most educated population in the world, many of whom were sociologically literate, accept as given the accounts of Japanese society created for them by the Nihonjinron ideologues? While it is doubtful whether any of the authors who ‘exposed’ the Nihonjinron producers would accept the label, there was clearly a great deal of overlap between their perspective of the relationship between society and the individual and that of neo-Marxist scholars working on other areas of the world. The late 1980s and the early 1990s saw a distinctively post-modern turn in the sociology and anthropology of Japan. To some extent this post-modern turn was, as it was in other disciplines, linked with the collapse of Marxism. In sociology in particular, many former Marxist scholars turned to post-modernism virtually as a way of saying that if their certainties about the way that the world worked had been proven to be incorrect, then there was no reason to suppose that those of anyone else were any better. Absolute relativity replaced positivism as the goal of these social scientists as could be seen in the work of Miyoshi Masao, Anthony Woodiwiss, Bryan Turner and Johann Arnason. In anthropology, the development of post-modernism was also linked to the discipline moving away from its scientific roots towards the humanities and becoming increasingly influenced by theories from literary criticism. Anthropologists became more interested in themselves as observers than they were in the people they studied; indeed in some ‘classic’ ethnographies of the 1980s, such as those by Matthews Masayuki Hamabata, Dorinne Kondo and Brian Moeran, the focus was as much on what the anthropologist discovered about themselves in the course of fieldwork as what they discovered about ‘the Japanese’. The bursting of the economic bubble at the end of the 1990s led to some dramatic shifts in Japanese society which have been reflected in equally dramatic shifts in the focus of those anthropologists and sociologists who study Japan. Perhaps most important has been a trend which has generally been captured in Japanese under the general title of ‘shimin shakai’ or civil society. In practical terms, this has involved the emergence of a whole raft of volunteer groups, NGOs
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and NPOs and grassroots organisations. More symbolically, it appears to have heralded a dramatic change in the relationship between individuals and the State. It is no longer assumed that those in position of authority are there by right; rather they are increasingly seen as servants of tax payers who must be accountable for their actions in a newly transparent society. In studying these civil society groups, sociologists, anthropologists and indeed also political scientists, have begun to focus on how individuals in Japan at all levels play an important role in constructing what constitutes ‘Japaneseness’ and ‘Japanese society’. At the same time, the focus of scholars has shifted from that minority who were part of the Japanese Nihonjinron folk model of society to those who never were. The study of youth culture (eg. NEETs; girls who engage in enjo kosai), women’s lives (eg. so-called Parasite Singles), the socially excluded (eg. elderly, hikikomori), the foreign workers and Japanese-Korean populations, regional cultures (eg. the U-turn phenomenon or the development of local dialects), new sexual cultures and so on have all come to the fore. The focus of scholars has shifted from how society constrains individuals to how individuals construct society, a emphasis that can be traced back in modern social science to the work of Max Weber, though in anthropology normally this influence is linked to the work of Clifford Geertz. The movement outlined above of a shift from Durkheimian to Marxist to Weberian approaches to Japan is of course idealised and best considered as heuristic. Few authors operate purely in one or other of these traditions, though it is a curious fact that while authors will often invest considerable time in their books presenting their personal biographies and outlining their methodologies, they very rarely, if ever, are explicit about their underlying assumptions of the relationship between society and the individual which will influence not only the way they collect data but also they way they analyse that data. Where does European scholarship figure in the above account? Firstly, there is no doubt that there is a different perspective on Japan from Europe than from the US or indeed from within Japan itself. The Princeton Modernisation project in the 1960s which compared Japan with Turkey, or the work of Ronald Dore throughout the 1980s which compared Japanese capitalism with the German model, or Gosta Esping-Andersen’s attempt to capture the nature of welfare regimes that placed Japan in the same category as Southern European welfare regimes, or my Oxford colleague, Jenny Corbett’s, recent work on governance patterns which compared Japan with Europe rather than the US are all good
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Table 1: Ten Major Japan-West Dyads Developed in the Nihonjinron Literature ‘Western’ values
‘Japanese’ values
RACIAL HETEROGENEITY
RACIAL HOMOGENEITY
(jinshû no konketsu)
(tan’itsu minzoku)
COMPETITIVE CONFLICT
HARMONY
(meiwaku)
(wa)
INDIVIDUALISM
GROUPISM
(kojinshugi)
(shûdanshugi)
EGALITARIANISM
HIERARCHY
(byôdô-shugi)
(kaikyûsei)
UNIVERSALISTIC ETHICS
PARTICULARISTIC ETHICS
(kochokuteki genri)
(jôkyô ronri)
SENSE OF RIGHTS
SENSE OF DUTY
(kenri)
(gimu)
HORIZONTAL TIES
VERTICAL TIES
(yoko)
(tate)
LOGICAL/RATIONAL
AMBIVALENT/EMOTIONAL
(goriteki)
(kanjôteki)
INDEPENDENCE
DEPENDENCE
(jiritsu, dokuritsu)
(taritsu, amae)
CONTRACTUALISM
‘KINTRACTUALISM’
(keiyaku)
(en’yaku)
examples of how the comparative lens through which Japan is viewed dramatically effects the conclusions one draws. This is important since the Nihonjinron literature is implicitly based on a straight US-Japan comparison and the extension of the US model to the rest of an amorphous and apparently homogenous ‘West’ as can be seen if one considers some of its basis tenets as laid out in Table 1. In many ways, indeed, it is the US – for example in its insistence on individualism and egalitarianism – and not Japan which is the outlier when one does direct comparisons of Japan with other western societies.
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As Japanese society becomes more diverse and as economic rewards are increasingly inequitably distributed, it may well be that European anthropologists and sociologists will have a distinct advantage in their study of Japan over scholars from both US and Japan. The study of class has been at the core of European social sciences for 150 years. It has hardly figured in the United States where race and more recently gender have been seen as the key social variables to be examined. Moreover, as the Nihonjinron-derived belief in Japan that it is a classless society has taken root, serious class analysis has all but disappeared as a tool in Japan too. There can be no doubt that class and class consciousness will become increasingly defining elements of Japanese society over the next decade in a society that supports 100 yen shops and Ginza Department Stores alongside each other – and that European scholars are currently in the best position to analyse it. Let me end with a couple of further generic points from a European perspective. The first is that the sociology of Japan is far less developed within Europe than the anthropology of Japan. Moreover, sociologists in Europe seem to be far more focussed on trends and ideas in the United States; there is not, as far as I know, any organisation of sociologists of Japan that brings together scholars from across the continent. Anthropologists of Japan within Europe, however, have become used over the past twenty years to working closely together and to a large extent have developed a common identity qua European anthropologists of Japan in opposition to their American colleagues. Much of the credit for this, I believe, lies in the formation of the Japan Anthropology Workshop, commonly known as JAWS, which meets at least every 18 months. While this organisation is a global one, the core of it has always lain in Europe: its founding members were from the UK, Scandinavia, Holland, France and Austria. Its publications have a definite European flavour to them. Reading lists of European members of JAWS have very different authors on them from those of US scholars, if one compares them, as one can, through the web. My own reading lists, for example, include the work of German-speaking scholars such as Sepp Linhart, Josef Kreiner, Brigitte Steger, Wolfram Manzenreiter, Ingrid Getreuer-Kargl, Sabine Frühstück. Peter Ackermann, Christoph Brumann, Klaus-Peter Kopping, Ulrich Moehwald, Andreas Riessland (to name only those who come to mind) as well as scholars from France, Holland, Italy and Scandinavia. Of these, very few, I am afraid to say, appear on US lists and perhaps significantly only Frühstück (who moved from Vienna to California) is among the authors of (or indeed as far as I can see
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even cited in) the recently-published US-edited 500-page Blackwell’s Companion to the Anthropology of Japan. The division between European and US anthropological scholarship on Japan (with the UK playing an intermediary role) relates in part, no doubt, to American academic imperialism, but it also reflects that I believe are some general differences between European and American anthropological approaches to Japan. At the risk of over-generalisation (and one can think of many counter-examples in both camps), European scholarship is more language-based, more historically-embedded, more respectful of Japanese indigenous scholarship and more skeptical of current theoretical fashions than is US scholarship. Or to put this the other way around, US scholarship is more comparative, more theoretically-informed and more focused on the contemporary. (UK work on Japan sits somewhat uneasily between the two traditions, but probably errs more to the US side than the continental European one.) One of the most interesting trends to watch over the next decade will be whether the gap between European and American scholarship on Japan – which can still be characterized to some extent as one between European Japanology and US Japanese Studies – widens or narrows.
