In 1983, Nissan Motor Company published a book titled "The Dawns of Tradition." Framing Japan's destiny as one drawn by nature, it attempted to answer the questions “Who are the Japanese?” and “Why are they as they are?”
Even more than most peoples, the Japanese have been shaped by their environment. From the dawn of their history, close communication and an often precarious coexistence with nature have dominated almost all aspects of Japan's national character and culture.
What follows is one of the book's Forewords, written by Gregory Clark, editorial co-supervisor.
There are many things you can do to try to understand Japan. You can gaze upon a Japanese garden, and see how a refined sensitivity can create its own kind of balance. You can visit the countryside and discover a people at one with nature. You can visit the cities and be appalled by the unplanned jumble. You can live with the Japanese and learn, or rather relearn, the importance of personal relations and group cooperation. You can delve into their religion and philosophy and discover a nation blessedly free of dogma and ideological bias. Or you can simply eat the food, and find not only that small is beautiful but so, too, is that which is simple.
But when you have discovered all these things, there will still be one more thing you want to know: why did the Japanese develop in this unusual way? Are all these things just accident, or are they part of some consistent pattern? Why didn't other people, in particular the nearby Chinese who gave Japan so much of its culture, develop the same way?
To date I doubt if anyone has come up with a convincing answer. And the reason could be quite simple: there is no need for an answer. Almost everything we see in Japan, from the refined sensitivity and the emotionality to the practicality, the jumble, the love of nature and even the complex rules of human relations, is in its essence something instinctive to us all. What the Japanese have done is simply to take this instinctive side of the human personality and refine it to provide the basis of their society. Meanwhile the rest of us for some reason—possibly related to our long histories of conflict with other peoples—have turned to a more intellectual and ideological—a more rationalistic—basis for our existence. We have refined that more rationalistic and non-instinctive side of the personality. The result is our brilliant philosophers, a skill in pure science and abstract theorizing, architecture that is monumental rather than sentimental, design that is studiously symmetrical rather than instinctively balanced, town planning, the ability to argue and debate issues, our strong individualism, and so on. These things too have their merits. But they are merits very different from those found in Japan.
It is like the right hander and the left-hander. Both are the same human being with the same two hands and the ability to use either hand. But some things the right-hander finds easier to do and some things the left-hander is better at. We all have our strong points; there are many things that the non-Japanese peoples do better than the Japanese. But at the more instinctive level—be it the tense sensitivity of the haiku or the delightful rhythm of the traditional house—the Japanese often do better than most.
In particular, when it comes to getting people working and making things, the Japanese talent has very real advantages. There is the natural emphasis on group cooperation; you do not work simply to better your own position and prospects. There is the simple pleasure in creating good products. In particular, there is the concept of the work unit as the unmei-kyodotal, or community with a shared destiny. The enterprise is the expanded family or village. More than anything else, it is this instinctive identification with one's place of work, and instinctive sense of responsibility to one's work that explains the remarkable productivity and inventiveness of the Japanese worker. We can learn a lot from it.
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