Bane to Foreigners : In Japan, Unique Is a State of Mind

TOKYO — Shunpei Kumon, 53, a noted Tokyo University economics professor, confessed recently that he had learned only two years ago that Japanese do not have intestines longer than those of Westerners.

Kumon’s lifelong belief was shattered only because of a U.S.-Japan dispute over beef import quotas, which Japan agreed in June to eliminate in three years.

An American scholar had asked him if Japanese really believed they had unusually long intestines that made it difficult for them to digest beef, an argument that Japanese politicians and agricultural leaders had used to justify the quotas.

When he replied yes, the American looked at him askance. Kumon then questioned Japanese doctors, he wrote in a Sankei Newspaper column.

Disbelief by Doctors

“They looked at me in disbelief,” he related.

Doctors told him, Kumon wrote, that government propagandists concocted the myth in World War II to forestall complaints about a lack of meat caused by wartime deprivations.

But the fact that such an argument won unresisting acceptance, and continues to be accepted today, underscores a deeper Japanese trait that many foreigners, including businessmen and government officials, are finding increasingly irritating.

That trait is the widespread belief--often reaching the level of an article of faith--that Japanese culture, language and the Japanese people themselves are unique in more ways than all other cultures and peoples of the world.

The conviction, a growing number of foreign experts say, has caused trade conflicts, troubles foreign business people working in Japan and, in many instances, stands as an emotional wall against personal relationships with foreigners.

‘A Tribal Pride’

Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., a former Commerce Department official, wrote in his book, “Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead,” that the Japanese possess a “near obsession with their uniqueness” that “gives rise to a certain tribal pride.”

Former Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer devotes an entire chapter of his book, “The Japanese,” to what he calls “the Japanese sense of being somehow a separate people--of being unique.” It is stronger than for any other people, Reischauer wrote.

Tait Ratcliffe, president of International Business Information Inc., complained that Japan’s “exaggerated sense of cultural uniqueness . . . plagues companies trying to establish a business foothold in Japan.” Foreign business people find they must tailor every aspect of their approach to the finest details of Japanese sensitivities. “A good product at a good price” by itself won’t sell, he said.

Difficulty for Foreigners

In a survey, the Nihon Keizai newspaper recently asked foreigners living in Japan to check off “sources of difficulty in business dealings with Japanese.” One of the listed items was: “The uniqueness of Japan is constantly being emphasized to me.”

“I speak to the Japanese on every occasion I get about the theory they have of their uniqueness,” said an American diplomat involved in trade negotiations, who asked not to be identified. “They are not unique and should stop thinking they are.”

Few scholars would put it that flatly. There certainly are aspects of Japan and its culture that are unique, they would say. But they usually insist that Japan is not unique in significantly more ways than any other culture.

The Japanese conviction, however, runs so deep that it lends support to and encourages all kinds of claims that go far beyond long intestines.

Brainy Theory Suggested

Dr. Tadanobu Tsunoda, a professor of auditory disorders at the Medical Research Institute of Tokyo Medical and Dental University, has come up with perhaps the ultimate theory on uniqueness. He holds that, because of a unique influence of the many vowels in the Japanese language, the left and right hemispheres of the Japanese brain handle different functions than Western and other Oriental brains. Only Polynesians are similar, he says.

In his book, “The Japanese Brain: Uniqueness and Universality,” which last year was translated into English, Tsunoda claims that Japanese show a left-brain dominance when listening to Beethoven played on Japanese musical instruments but a right-brain dominance when hearing Beethoven played on any non-Japanese, including Chinese, instrument.

Yet Tsunoda’s theory has won acceptance among even leading business executives, if not among scholars.

In recent years, American negotiators have been confronted with claims that Japanese soil is unique, an argument against allowing American contractors to do construction work on such projects as a new Osaka airport.

Even Snow Is Unique

Also, Japanese snow is supposedly unique, so Japan imposed safety standards for imported skis with no parallel anywhere in the world, although it later bowed to protests from European countries and rescinded them.

Only after years of negotiations did Japanese desist from arguing that a rubberized ball used by high school baseball teams was unique, precluding imports of baseball bats.

Earlier this year, the governmental National Language Research Institute launched a three-year study on methods to teach foreigners a simplified version of the Japanese language. Kikuo Nomoto, head of the institute, said he was trying to find a way to teach busy foreign businessmen the fundamentals of the language within 150 hours.

But foreign linguists charged that the real inspiration was a conviction that Japanese is such a uniquely difficult language that foreigners cannot comprehend it.

Produced Literary Genre

A consistent flow of books that now number in the hundreds has become a literary genre of its own as Nihonjin-ron --theories about the Japanese people. Reischauer, some of whose own works fall into the genre, views the books as a Japanese search for identity. But nearly all of them do so by examining what makes Japanese different from other peoples.

Yukio Matsuyama, chief editorial writer of the Asahi newspaper, said few Japanese pay any attention to the stories about long intestines and different brain functions. All sorts of aberrations that appear in sensationalist weekly magazines and offbeat books are read mostly out of curiosity and are seldom taken seriously, he said.

Because of their government’s decision to isolate the Japanese from the rest of the world for almost 250 years until the mid-19th Century, and their islands’ separation from neighboring countries, Japanese “naturally” have “curiosity” about foreigners and feel a need for “precaution” in dealing with them, Matsuyama said.

Tokyo University Prof. Emeritus Chie Nakane called it a sense of “uneasiness” in dealing with foreigners.

Contrasting Belief Exists

Japanese do not want or try to be unique and separate, she said. Indeed, a strong contrasting belief, at least on a conceptual level, that “all humans are the same” coexists with the feeling of uniqueness.

But a sense of separateness, Nakane said, has been firmed up over the years in group associations at home and in geographical separation from other nations.

“It’s a tragedy of Japanese history and geography that Japanese have had no (foreign) companions. . . . Japanese have not had a mirror in which to look at themselves,” she said.

For many Japanese unaccustomed to dealing with foreigners, the belief in uniqueness--that the “foreigner cannot understand Japan” syndrome--serves as a convenient defense against criticism, Nakane added in an interview.

No Clear Code of Conduct

Japanese uniqueness, however, is quite real, she says. Writing in the Japan Foundation newsletter, Nakane noted that Japan differs greatly not only from the West but from its Asian neighbors in lacking a clear code of social conduct. Unlike China, with “a clearly enunciated set of ethical principles,” and India, with “a social code made explicit through logical explanation sustained by the Hindu religion and philosophy,” Japan shares only with Southeast Asia a failure to have developed systematic or explicit principles, she wrote.

“Regulations that determine Japanese behavior,” she wrote, are learned only “through the long process of socialization” and are difficult for foreigners to understand.

“Indeed, even Japanese do not easily grasp them,” she added in an interview.

A collection of essays entitled “Inside the Japanese System,” edited by Daniel Okimoto and Thomas Rohlen, shows how Japan’s economic structure is set apart from other advanced industrialized nations.

Long-Term Ties

“Japan’s distinctiveness,” the editors write, “appears to lie in the . . . pervasiveness . . . of long-term ties binding groups.” The value of relationships, not the price of goods in a transaction, makes Japan a country of “relational capitalism” as opposed to “transactional capitalism” seen in Western countries, Okimoto and Rohlen argue.

Prestowitz agreed that Japan, indeed, is unique in its “extreme emphasis placed on the group, rather than the individual. . . . In Japan, there is virtually no life outside groups, which define a person’s existence.”

The only example that Prestowitz could find of a similar belief of uniqueness that encourages exclusion of outsiders as a threat to group values was the Amish of southeastern Pennsylvania, who, like the Japanese, “have identified themselves as a people apart.”

“Among the Amish, the ultimate punishment is the practice of shunning,” akin to Japan’s mura-hachibu, or exclusion from village life, he wrote.

Major Obstacle for Japan

Japan’s sense of separateness, Reischauer wrote, is the major obstacle to its becoming an active participant in solving problems of world trade and international tensions.

The Japanese “must overcome their sense of separateness and, to put it bluntly, show a greater readiness to join the human race. They must really identify themselves with the rest of the world and feel a part of it,” Reischauer wrote.

That process may now be occurring.

Although Kumon’s article about intestines precipitated letters to the editor from some doctors who insisted that Japanese intestines are, indeed, extra long, all of them pointed out that long intestines have nothing to do with the ability to digest meat or beef.

Restrictions Finally Lifted

For all of the trouble that trade negotiators have had with intestines, snow, soil and rubberized baseballs, the restrictions that had been justified with such arguments were, in the end, lifted.

And a new promise by Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita to double foreign aid by 1992 ensures that Japan will be very much involved with the rest of the world as its largest aid donor, replacing the United States.

Editorial writer Matsuyama discounted the extreme positions to which the belief in uniqueness contribute as irrelevant in mainstream Japanese society. The spate of attention being paid to them, he said, represents an “overreaction” by foreigners, Americans in particular.

When Japan’s economy was small, the nation’s uniqueness “didn’t matter,” he said.

Although Japan ought to adopt more international practices because of its new economic power, Matsuyama said, “there’s nothing wrong with being unique. There’s no need to adopt all American customs and become just like Americans. To the contrary, Americans should adopt some of Japan’s customs . . . and become aware of their own peculiarities.”