READING: THE ROLE OF TRADITIONAL ATTITUDES IN MODERN JAPAN

The Japanese have always prided themselves in their uniqueness. Certainly, feelings of pride in one's country and in the accomplishments of one's people are not peculiar to Japan. And the feeling of strong identification with and devotion to one's nation and its ideals is a common one. Yet that feeling seems to be more intense in Japan than elsewhere. "The line between the 'we' of the Japanese as a national group and the 'they' of the rest of mankind seems to be sharper for them," comments scholar and former U.S. ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer. "They appear to have a greater feeling of group solidarity and a correspondingly stronger sense of their difference from others."

This feeling of group solidarity is deeply rooted in the political and cultural events of "traditional" Japan, as represented by the country's history from ancient times until 1868. In that year, Japan, an economically and militarily backward country, began a rapid modernization program that allowed it to compete with other nations. But while Japan entered the twentieth century with a modern economy and military, its people retained many of the ideas and attitudes of the traditional period. The strong feeling of group solidarity was one such surviving aspect of the ancient Japanese mentality. This feeling was clearly illustrated in Japanese attitudes toward foreigners who visited Japan. For hundreds of years, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, foreigners were looked upon with suspicion and were unwelcome in the country.

Even today, a touch of the old Japanese distaste for foreigners lingers. The Japanese treat foreign visitors politely but take it for granted that sooner or later they will go home. To most Japanese, foreigners are permanent outsiders. By contrast, Americans tend to think of foreigners as potential U.S. citizens. The United States is a nation built by immigrants, people from other lands, who desperately wanted a piece of the American dream of freedom and economic opportunity. So, Americans often assume that most foreigners, whether they admit it or not, would like to become Americans. The Japanese, on the other hand, have never expected or wanted outsiders to become Japanese.

Another traditional attitude that survives in the modern Japanese national character is a strong feeling of separateness from other peoples. No doubt this is partly because throughout most of the traditional period, Japan, an island nation, was geographically isolated form most of the world's major cultural centers. Today, Japan is no longer isolated. But it remains the one major industrialized country that is not from a Western cultural background or of the white race. In relations with other industrialized countries, such as the United States, Japan's separateness emphasizes its cultural uniqueness, both in its own eyes and in those of others.

A third attitude derived from traditional Japan that still sets the Japanese apart is a strong identification with, even a deep seated obligation to, the mother country.

In past ages, most Japanese felt that their own desires and needs were secondary to those of the emperor and other leaders. Today, many Japanese still feel that the individual's duty as a representative of the nation outweighs any sense of personal achievement. As Edwin Reischauer puts it,

A Japanese who distinguishes himself in the world is much less likely to think of himself or be thought of by his friends and acquaintances as little Taro Yamamoto who made good, but as a Japanese who became famous.

The importance to the Japanese of maintaining the uniqueness of their native culture can be observed in the way they utilize other people's ideas. In the traditional period, the Japanese periodically borrowed useful aspects of foreign cultures-China's, for instance. But they never simply replaced a Japanese idea or institution with a foreign one. Typically, they retained their original concept and then superimposed elements of the foreign one, creating a new but decidedly Japanese version. According to historian W. Scott Morton:

One of the most intriguing features of the Japanese people is their capacity to borrow and adapt and yet to retain their own individuality and their own style. Thus though they are heavily indebted to China for the shape of their culture, what emerges is distinctly Japanese. They have always shown great powers of converting borrowed material to their special purposes, purposes conceived deep within their own national consciousness, and so of molding a culture that no one could think was anything but Japanese.

This process of borrowing, adapting, and molding, while all the while remaining uniquely Japanese, has been going on for nearly two thousand years. The Japanese, then, are a product of a history driven by two opposing forces-the relentless march of cultural change and the steadfast desire to maintain tradition. The nearly ceaseless and often violent conflict between these forces has made the story of Japan's traditional past a pageant unrivaled in the sweep of its human drama.