Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
87
devotion (the sword). The model is, however, more complex than this: hierarchical societies
need a strong degree of legitimacy to be enduring, and such legitimacy is achieved by
introducing a set of tied and highly psychologically rewarding experiences with fellow
people; those who constitute, according to Chie, the group and its place (
ba
). These relational
experiences have been described in several ways, as sticky, as grounded on a peculiar
combination of public (good and rewarding) and private (to be avoided) shame or as based on
the idea of
amae
. According to Doi,
amae
is a particular emotional state to be found among
Japanese people; a state that Benedict attributed to the development of the tight emotional
dependence of children on their mothers, which helps to make people feel as part of a group
by introducing a sophisticated, and to foreigners mostly invisible, emotional link through
gestures, pauses of silence, blinks or simple body positioning. Hence, the extremely rich
anthropological production on Japanese personality, culture and social structures have borne
out all the main paradigms of the Made in Japan argument developed in the executive
summary: the idea that final responsibility would lie in the cultural arrangements of the
group, and the ideas of the verticalism of social structures and of the devotion to common
conventions (Kuwayama 1999).
More evidence comes from the following words by Kurokawa: ‘At the time when
Japan’s self confidence was soaring, a tightly-knit elite with enormous financial resources
had diminished regard for anything “not invented here”’ (p.9). Rather than looking at the
meaning of these words, it is worth considering its phrasing style: ‘tightly knit elite’, ‘self-
confidence’ and ‘not invented here’ are extremely common cultural images that can be found
in several works by anthropologists on Japan. They, again, tell us about a society in which
confidence and satisfaction are build endogenously in small enclaves, and in which the
relationship with the external world is, as the Shinto philosophy indicates, untrustworthy.
However, this message is emphasized only in the Japanese text of the report. On page 16 the
Commission concludes that ‘The accident was clearly “manmade”. We believe that the root
causes were the organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty rationales for
decision and action, rather than issues relating to the competency of any specific individual’.
It goes on to says that ‘the underlying issue is the social structure that results in “regulatory
capture”, and the organizational, institutional and legal framework that allows individuals to
justify their own actions, hide them when inconvenient, and leave no record in order to avoid
responsibility’ (p. 21).
