Urbanities,
Vol. 3
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No 1
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May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
89
is manifested ad hoc) dichotomies, often quoted as features of Japanese society (Hendry
2012). These ideas have informed the so-called ‘vertical model’ of Japanese society in an
often uncritical fashion (see for instance the critiques by Befu 1980, Kondo 1993, Shimizu
and Levine 2001) that looks at the basic distinction between an inner and an outer sphere, one
of familiarity versus one of estrangement, one of true feelings versus one of performance.
However, also these categories have often been over-emphasized without paying adequate
attention to power strategies and different forms of checks and balances. In the village that I
have studied, the emotionally overloaded emphasis on group harmony was contrasted on a
daily basis with real differences among families who owned and farmed the land and families
who, in the course of the tough history of the community, had abandoned agriculture. In most
cases, community-level decision making was in the hands of the former group, which
attempted to justify its privileged position pointing out the frequent absence from the village
of many non-farmers who were away on seasonal migration labor. In this case, it became
evident to me that the ‘group’ and everything which was inner to it compared to the outer
(local villages) community, had itself an outer sphere within; a sphere grounded on
differences that were constructed on land property and on the pride of having endured
farming throughout the hardships of decades of poverty.
The differences between the English and the Japanese versions of the report/summary
are few but intriguing. First, the ‘Made in Japan’ argument is absent in the Japanese version.
Second, in the Japanese version the ‘regulatory trap’ has a less ambiguous explanation; its
origin is traced in the ‘complex intertwining between politics, bureaucracy and finance that
has developed by following a common project of government’. Moreover, it is suggested that
the consolidation of the ‘mindset’ which support Japanese conforming to the regulatory trap
is to be searched in the ‘50 years of mono-party rule, the employment-for-life system, the
age-based career upgrading and the recruitment system before university graduation’. The
most accurate cultural explanation in the Japanese text is that ‘following rapid economic
growth, confidence has gradually turned into pride and self-conceit […] in the mission of the
élite that linked the economic and political world, the primary objective has become the
protection of the interests of the system’ rather than maintaining the safety of citizens or
following international standards (p.5, my translation).
