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Review focus: Modern Japan, etiquette, virtue, manners, japanese society, feudal, harmony
Asian Business Code Words Index NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company Asian Business Strategy & Street Intelligence Ezine
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It is difficult for the Western mind to grasp just how important these manners were to the early Japanese. Westerners are generally conditioned to conduct their lives according to a certain abstract principles, with manners playing only a minor role. In Japan, the emphasis was reversed and a social system was forged in which the ultimate virtue was a prescribed conduct. Morality, as it is known in the West, was an aspect of manners. From around the sixth century A.D. to the beginning of the modern era in 1868, the Japanese were more concerned with form than sincerity or accomplishment The people were required to walk a certain way, to move their hands a certain way, to open doors a certain way, to sleep with their head pointing in a certain direction and to arrange their legs a certain way. The style and manner of their dress was prescribed by law for several generations before the beginning of the modern era. Their manner of eating was severely prescribed; they could enter a house only a certain way and greet each other only a certain way. Even physical movements necessary to perform many types of work were definitively established and no deviation was allowed. So rigid and so severe were these prescribed manners that they long ago became a part of the Japanese personality, permeating and shaping every phase and facet of their lives, and were passed on from one generation to the next. Today most foreigners doing business in Japan quickly learn that there is still a Japanese way to do everything as a result of this meticulous conditioning over the centuries. Japan's Feudal Age was full of amazing and sometimes shocking incidents of what happened to people who behaved differently. One of these incidents involves a farmer named Sogo who went over the head of his local lord to complain about starvation taxes to the Shogun, Japan's military dictator. For having broken a rule of conduct, Sogo was forced to watch his three small sons beheaded. Then he and his wife were crucified, although his complaint proved justified, and the local lord was later removed from office. Japanese society was therefore utterly cruel in that a man's morals were visible for all to see. For many centuries, a serious breach of etiquette in Japan was just as much a crime as murder or robbery was in the West. And the broken rule of conduct that made the death penalty inevitable did not have to be very important from the Western point of view. Until well after the middle of the nineteenth century, it was legal for a samurai - the sword-carrying, privileged ruling class of Japan - to immediately kill any common individual who failed to show him proper respect. As a result, a disproportionate number of the samurai were among the most arrogant and status-conscious men that ever lived. Perhaps worse than this was the fact that whenever the Japanese failed to live up to their obligations or were remiss in their manners toward anyone of importance, they lost their place in life. This, still today, is an important consideration in the lives of most Japanese. Class, sex, age, family ties, and previous dealings determined the behavior of the Japanese in every area of their lives. Form and manner, the outward expressions of the system, were sanctified as virtues. The extent to which this stratified and categorized society developed in Japan would be unbelievable if it were not for the fact that it still flourishes today, especially in the professional and business world, in only a slightly diluted form. Business, as well as other relations, in Japan have traditionally been conducted within the web of this etiquette system, based on personal obligations owed to others. All dealings were and still are conducted within a set of rules that were designed to prevent trouble and to prevent or control change. Japan's Golden Rule was seen as perfect hierarchical harmony at any human cost. It was the law for many generations that, in case of quarrels or fights among the people, both sides would be equally punished without inquiry into the cause of the fight regardless of whether one party was completely innocent. This discouraged public squabbles of any kind among the people, and deeply embedded the habit of public harmony in the Japanese. Until about 1950, one could actually live in Japan for many years without ever seeing or hearing a public row. Is someone stepped on another's toes or had an accident, the persons involved bowed to each other, mumbled a series of polite expressions, and went on their way. They might also quietly exchange name cards if the accident was serious. Even taxi drivers adhered to this rigid principle of formal politeness until as late as the mid-1950s. People seldom raised their voices in anger, and it was even rarer for one person to strike another in public. In order to guarantee conformity to such strict rules, it was necessary for Japan's feudal government to use a system of control and punishment. Like the inhabitants of George Orwell's 1984, but predating it to several centuries, the Japanese of feudal Japan were supposed to watch their families, friends, and neighbours and report all infractions of the rules to the proper authorities - often with disastrous results for those reported. The control system in Japan was in fact more encompassing and more cruelly enforced than Orwell's futuristic nightmare. At least in Orwell's world it was kept on an individual basis, but in Japan the feudal authorities held a person's family, neighbours, or even whole village responsible for an individual's actions. If one person broke a regulation, he whole group is liable for punishment. Instances in which an entire family was destroyed or a clan broken up for the transgressions of one person are a compelling part of Japanese history. Today, the business person in Japan reflects centuries of conditioning in harmony in many ways: dread of personal responsibility; preference for mutual cooperation and group effort; tendency to follow the mass and to imitate success; reluctance to oppose anyone openly; and desire to submerge individualism into larger surroundings. As a result of the conditioning, the Japanese is and has been more than a thousand years, nearly perfectly suited to corporation. A further result of the enforcement of Japan's Golden Rule of Wa and a factor that makes it impossible to generalize about Japanese business people with an astonishing degree of accuracy is their mental homogeneity. As early as the tenth century, Japanese society had already developed into a highly specialized, intense, and uniform civilization in which the people dressed alike within their class, ate the same food, were subjected to the same experiences, and had the same stock of knowledge and prejudices. This sameness was so pervasive that, according to cultural historians, ordinary means of communication was unnecessary. The Japanese were so attuned to one another's attitudes and manners that the slightest hint or gesture was sufficient to convey their meaning with an almost magical facility. It is not hard to understand the reasons for this extraordinary similarity of the Japanese. First, there was nearly complete isolation from the rest of the world for the first several hundred of years on the country's human history. Second, the small land area of the islands resulted in all the various influences that shaped the culture being felt at about the same time and more or less evenly by all the people. Jesse F. Steiner, describing Japan before the Pacific War in his book Behind the Japanese Mask, was more matter of fact in his analysis of the homogeneity of the Japanese. He pointed out that the Japanese should be easy to understand because their lives for centuries had been governed by stereotyped conventions and a rigid social code. There was, he noted, an appropriate behavior for every situation and a prescribed form to follow for every public and private action of life.
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Boye Lafayette de Mente is one of our regular monthly columnists at the 
| This month's column is excerpted from Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, by Boye Lafayette De Mente available from NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company |
© Boye Lafayette De Mente & the Asia Pacific Management Forum 1999
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