The Enigma of Japanese Power by Karel van Wolferen

Author:Karel van Wolferen [Wolferen, Karel van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political culture—Japan
ISBN: 0679728023
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 1989-04-10T18:30:00+00:00

Avoiding distinctions

Some post-war Japanese intellectuals such as political theorist Maruyama Masao and his followers seem to be bothered by the continued refusal to apply universal principles by which the political process and individual purposes can be judged; they refer to the lack of such principles as the cause of many shortcomings in Japanese life. More nationalistically inclined Japanese may, however, consider the ‘flexibility’of Japanese thought a virtue. Prime Minister Nakasone appeared proud of it when, in an interview on national television in August 1984, he implied that it has given the Japanese a great advantage over Westerners. He used the occasion to explain that Japanese are polytheistic, since, as individuals, they can accept Buddhism simultaneously with Shinto and Christianity, which makes Japanese thinking more tolerant than that of ’monotheistic Westerners’. It clearly did not occur to him that simultaneous acceptance of beliefs that are ultimately incompatible is for all practical purposes the same as believing in none of them.

Such examples do not encourage an understanding among the public that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too. Edward Seidensticker remarks that

student thought, when elucidation is requested . . . tends to show an eclecticism that really cancels it out as thought. One enquirer asked a selected group of students what ideologies they thought themselves under the influence of. She offered this choice: ‘Marxism . . . non-Marxist socialism . . . liberalism . . . humanism . . . pragmatism . . . anarchism . . . nihilism . . . Existentialism . . . nationalism . . . idealism . . . hedonism . . . ideology-free . . . others.’ About half of the 47 students who described themselves as activists were content with Marxism alone. Three opted for liberalism and one for humanism, and all the rest professed adherence to multiple and frequently conflicting ideologies. Two of the subjects checked ten different items, and one checked every item on the list except ‘others’. Perhaps in other political cultures this would have an element of humour about it, but not in Japan. Nowhere do disparate ideologies rest more comfortably side by side than in the head of a Japanese, and the total effect, of course, is of a raging anti-intellectualism.10

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